I will not be providing live blogging for either of tonight’s by-elections, but here’s a space for you all to discuss the figures from Lyne as they come in.

I will not be providing live blogging for either of tonight’s by-elections, but here’s a space for you all to discuss the figures from Mayo as they come in.

I’ve been too preoccupied to offer commentary on Saturday’s Mayo by-election, but maybe interested readers can do the job for me in comments. Liberal candidate Jamie Briggs is a short-priced favourite to succeed Alexander Downer in the traditionally safe seat, but two other candidates in the field are of at least theoretical interest. One is Bob Day, the cashed-up Liberal candidate for Makin at the November 2007 election who is running with Family First after being knocked back for preselection. The other is independent Di Bell, described on her website as “writer and editor in residence at our very own Flinders University” and “Professor Emerita of Anthropology at The George Washington University in Washington DC”. Bell has the backing of Senator Nick Xenophon, which was seen as a decisive factor in independent Kris Hanna’s surprise re-election in Mitchell at the 2006 state election after parting company first with Labor and then the Greens.

The September 6 by-elections for Mayo and Lyne initially loomed as fizzers, with Labor showing no inclination post-Gippsland to test the waters in unwinnable seats. They have instead respectively emerged as mildly and enormously interesting, thanks to the entry of non-major party players. In Mayo, housing tycoon Bob Day will bring a cashed-up campaign to bear against the Liberals as the candidate of Family First, having failed to win Liberal preselection for Mayo after unsuccessfully contesting Makin last year. Day would nonetheless have to be considered a long shot against Liberal candidate Jamie Briggs, but it’s a very different story in Lyne where independent state MP Rob Oakeshott has been rated the “clear favourite” by Antony Green. Imre Salusinszky of The Australian reports that Nationals polling puts his approval rating in the electorate at over 70 per cent, and says the party is concerned Labor will “direct resources to Mr Oakeshott’s campaign”.

Lyne covers a 100 kilometre stretch of coastline up to 400 kilometres north of Sydney, the main population centres being Port Macquarie (home to 33 per cent of the electorate’s population) and Taree (14 per cent). Smaller centres include Old Bar, Lake Cathie and Harrington on the coast, and Wauchope and Wingham further inland. The National/Country Party has held the seat since its creation in 1949. The electorate covers the entirety of Oakeshott’s state seat of Port Macquarie, which provides Lyne with 55 per cent of its voters. Oakeshott won Port Macquarie as the Nationals candidate at a 1996 by-election ahead of independent John Barrett, who had come within 233 votes of defeating Mark Vaile as Liberal candidate for Lyne in 1993. He was promoted to the front bench after the 1999 election, taking the sport and recreation, fisheries and ports portfolios. In March 2002 he quit the party, claiming its local branches were controlled by property developers and questioning whether the party was still relevant to an electorate transformed by tourism and demographic change. The Nationals campaigned aggressively against him during the 2003 campaign, in particular over his support for drug law reform, but he was overwhelmingly re-elected with 69.7 per cent of the primary vote. This fell slightly to 67.1 per cent at the March 2007 election, his two-candidate preferred margin down from 32.8 per cent to a still formidable 28.2 per cent.

The Nationals candidate is Rob Drew, who was mayor of Port Macquarie until the council was sacked by the state government in February. The Macleay Argus reports he won a preselection vote ahead of Taree solicitor Quentin Schneider by 48 votes to 15. State party leader Andrew Stoner was reportedly urged by “senior colleagues” to throw his hat into the ring, but perhaps sensibly decided to stay put. The prospect of an Oakeshott candidacy was a cloud on the horizon from the time of Vaile’s departure, with Oakeshott earlier threatening to run against Vaile at the 2004 election. There has also been intermittent speculation over the years that he might be enlisted by the Liberals, although this might never have been more than wishful thinking by the party. Most recently, powerbrokers including Senator Bill Heffernan approached him to contest the by-election as the Liberal candidate, hoping that his success might push the Coalition further along the road to a merger. The party has instead opted to sit out the contest, aware that its presence would only increase the already high likelihood of an Oakeshott victory.

The other thing to be noted is that win, lose or draw, Oakeshott’s candidacy will initiate a state by-election for Port Macquarie – though that is a subject for another post. While it would be open to Oakeshott to re-contest Port Macquarie, owing to what Imre Salusinszky calls “a quirk in NSW electoral law”, Oakeshott has declared that such a move would be “unfair to the community”.

This entry will shortly be expanded with a considered analysis of the result, the general thrust of which will be that the surprisingly large swing to the Nationals indeed sounds warning bells for the Rudd government, however keen Labor partisans might be to mark it down to local factors. Below is a localised breakdown of the two-party preferred result, grouped into the three municipalities covered by the electorate.

Episode one: Perspective. Labor has suffered a sobering 9.3 per cent slump on the primary vote and a two-party swing comparable to that of the September 1973 Parramatta by-election, which rebuffed the Whitlam government and brought Philip Ruddock to parliament. What’s more, Antony Green notes that Labor entered that campaign burdened by the Whitlam government’s proposed second airport at Galston. The Hawke government faced six by-elections in its truncated first term, picking up a 0.5 per cent swing in Richmond and suffering swings ranging from 1.2 per cent to 5.0 per cent in the other five. There are also state precedents such as Labor’s wins in Burwood and Benalla in the wake of the Kennett government’s defeat which suggest governments should be able to convert honeymoon opinion poll leads into votes at by-elections. As the above table demonstrates, most of the damage to Labor was done in the Latrobe Valley – hypotheses to follow shortly.

Episode two: Nationals versus Liberal. The by-election was the first time the Liberals contested the seat since 1987, so yardsticks for the Coalition parties’ relative performance are hard to come by. The best one available is the state upper house election in 2006, the only recent race involving the three parties competing separately without significant sitting member factors in play. In the equivalent booths, the Nationals and Liberals were evenly matched, with 25.4 per cent and 25.3 per cent respectively. The by-election by contrast has seen the Nationals almost double the Liberal vote, 40.4 per cent to 20.7 per cent. The combined Coalition vote is up a remarkable 12.2 per cent, giving merger opponents in the Victorian Nationals still more to work with. Labor scored 33.7 per cent for the 2006 state upper house, against 27.0 per cent at the by-election.

Episode three: West versus east. The corollary of Labor doing especially badly in the western part of the electorate is that they did less badly in the east, outside of localised outbreaks at Lakes Entrance (Chester’s home town) and Maffra. This is easy to explain: East Gippsland has a high concentration of older voters (21.0 per cent over 65 compared with a national 13.3 per cent), a sure predictor of low electoral volatility. By contrast, Latrobe’s age profile is almost perfectly consistent with the national average. It might nonetheless have been expected that discontent over the failure of the budget to increase the base level of the pension would have generated a backlash here, which may indeed have occurred to some degree.

Episode four: Climate change. In opposition, climate change worked for Labor as a symbol of Rudd’s modernity and Howard’s obsolescence. In government, it is becoming increasingly evident that Labor faces a stern political challenge in matching deeds to words against the backdrop of an eerily familiar oil shock. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Latrobe Valley, whose brown coal power stations provide Victoria with 85 per cent of its electricity. The 10 per cent swing here is a reminder that voters in low-income areas do not take kindly to bearing the sharp end of visionary government reform programs, as the Pauline Hanson phenomenon demonstrated last decade. Interestingly, the Liberals hit Labor hard on the issue in their television advertising, but the Nationals don’t seem to have mentioned it. It is likely the Liberals succeeded in driving Latrobe Valley voters away from Labor with this attack on Darren McCubbin, who had mused that local droughts might have been linked to coal-fired power, but that Darren Chester was as much the beneficiary as Rohan Fitzgerald.

Episode five: State factors. Talk of a sharp anti-Labor swing in the Latrobe Valley should sound a familiar note for election watchers. This is because the area proved the sting in the tail of Labor’s state election night triumph in November 2006, which was marred by the surprise loss of Morwell to the Nationals and Narracan (mostly in the neighbouring federal seat of McMillan, which significantly failed to swing at last November’s election) to the Liberals after respective swings of 7.0 per cent and 9.5 per cent. Local discontent over water issues was seen to be to blame: defeated Narracan MP Ian Maxfield complained that “the Liberal and National parties ran an incredibly effective scare campaign by claiming that we were sending sewage to Gippsland and taking fresh water into Melbourne”. Sure enough, the Liberals returned to the theme during the by-election campaign with television ads that prominently featured an image of John Brumby.

Episode six: Labor versus Labor. Another reason given for Labor’s poor state election performance in Morwell was dissent in the local party, leading many prominent members to quit in protest against an MP said by one to have surrounded himself with a “Left clique”. There was further talk of disunity ahead of the by-election, with 2007 Gippsland candidate Jane Rowe seen to have been elbowed aside in favour of Darren McCubbin. Given that neither appeared a match-winner in their own right, Labor would have done better to have stuck with Rowe who could at least have built upon her existing work in last year’s election campaign.

Episode seven: Night of the living Nationals. The big winners are unquestionably the state Nationals and especially their leader Peter Ryan, who holds the seat of Gippsland South and until recently employed Darren Chester as his chief-of-staff. So far on Ryan’s watch, the Nationals have held their own at the 2002 state election (while the Liberals lost 22 seats and 8.3 per cent of the primary vote), and defied predictions to retain party status in 2006 after winning two extra seats in the lower house (cancelling out losses caused by electoral reform in the upper house). Ryan was the only party leader at state or federal level who was anywhere to be seen in the parties’ television ads (UPDATE: Okay, not quite - there was one Kevin Rudd read-to-camera), where he presented a local face unencumbered by association with unpopular actions of current or recently deposed governments. The Liberals by contrast had Peter Costello campaigning in the electorate, which might not have been such a good idea.

Episode eight: Night of the dying Coalition merger. There was talk going into the by-election of the Nationals and Liberals running a joint candidate to push the Victorian parties down the same merger road being followed in Queensland. The result has surely vindicated the state party’s decision to follow its own course. There are now a number of reasons to suppose that what’s good for the Queensland goose might be less good for the Victorian gander. Firstly, the by-election result gives force to the idea that competing Nationals and Liberal candidates can maximise the total Coalition vote where there is compulsory preferential voting and thus little preference leakage – which is crucially the case at Victorian state level, but not in Queensland. Secondly, the near-parity of strength among the two Coalition parties in Queensland has rendered them unmarketable at state elections due to confusion as to who their candidate for premier is. As this doesn’t apply in Victoria, the Nationals can serve the broader Coalition cause by absorbing protest votes in rural and regional areas.

Episode nine: Local factors. Those of us watching at a safe distance were bemused by the focus on the parish pump issue of Traralgon’s post offices, but that town indeed swung savagely against Labor even by Latrobe Valley standards.

UPDATE: Reading back, I note that apart from one “oil shock” reference, I have spent little time here discussing the decisive issue of petrol prices – mostly because I can only offer statements of the obvious. It should also be noted that Peter McGauran might not have taken much of a personal vote into retirement, with complaints heard he was spending too much time in Melbourne. Meanwhile, Andrew Landeryou hears the Coalition ran an unsustainably expensive campaign, as suggested by the remarkable number of Nationals and Liberal television ads floating around.

8.38pm. Hooray! The AEC finally adds booth results.

8.14pm. The final booth has given the Nationals a big boost, pushing the swing to a headline-grabbing 7.25 per cent on the AEC figures. However, Antony Green’s booth-on-booth comparison (which I can’t do because the AEC doesn’t have booth-level figures on its website - the above is based on my earlier guess of how preferences would go) has it at 6.2 per cent.

7.49pm. All booths now in. My preference projection has the swing at 7.2 per cent, but the AEC notional count with three booths outstanding has it at 6.3 per cent.

7.35pm. Yet more good news for the Nationals with the addition of two Traralgon booths and Bairnsdale East - boosting the swing to 7.3 per cent on my figures. However, I’m still using my old preference guess, and these evidently flatter the Nationals a little. The ABC site, which is using the actual notional counts, has it at 6.6 per cent, although my figures are slightly more recent.

7.31pm. Bruthen and Glengarry added; the swing continues to bounce around in a narrow range around 6.5 per cent.

7.27pm. Devon North and Sale North added.

7.24pm. Six more booths added, including Lakes Entrance and Paynesville, adding a further 0.2 per cent to the swing.

7.17pm. Now 70 booths in and 45.7 per cent counted, 17 to come. The Nationals are obviously on the receiving end of a handsome swing, currently of 6.5 per cent.

7.11pm. Nine more booths, including Maffra and one each from Traralgon and Sale, have pushed the Nationals swing up to 6.8 per cent. 37.9 per cent counted.

7.05pm. Five more booths, including Traralgon East and Orbost, and the results are still better for the Nationals, with the swing sticking at 5.3 per cent. 24.5 per cent counted.

7.01pm. I’ve corrected an error that made the ALP primary vote swing come up as 0.0%. These primary booth swings, like the 2PP swing, are comparing like booths with like.

6.59pm. 50 booths now in, with two of the new ones from Morwell, bringing the swing back down a little.

6.55pm. Seven more booths in, all small rural ones, but they have boosted the Nationals swing still further.

6.50pm. 35 booths in, including Hazelwood North and Lakes Entrance East, adding up to 11.32 per cent counted, and the swing has increased further - now 5.7 per cent.

6.45pm. Antony Green has apparently called it for the Nationals.

6.44pm. By the way, the primary vote swing recorded above for the Nationals is really for the Coalition as a whole - i.e. I have added the Nationals and Liberal vote and compared it to the Nationals vote last time.

6.41pm. 23 booths now in, still a swing to the Nationals showing across the rural booths.

6.37pm. Fifteen booths now in in the above table, and the swing to the Nationals is still holding - though this is only 2.4 per cent of enrolled voters. All the booths are rural bar one - Morwell North. Love to give you a result there, but I don’t think the AEC is providing them.

6.30pm. The above table is based on the first eight booths; there are now 15 in. I usually have teething problems with my tables early on, so don’t quote me on the above quite yet.

6.21pm. Five small booths in. Do I have this right - the AEC isn’t going to let us see individual booth results, but just give a tick to indicate that the booth is in?

6.00pm. Polls close. I will be providing booth-adjusted results on a table soon to be added at the top of the post. I will be doing this manually and thus will not be quite as quick off the mark as those provided by Antony Green and the AEC. Antony will also be live blogging. You can also listen to two hours of live coverage at ABC Gippsland Radio.

June 26: With two days to go, I’ve promoted this post to the top of the website batting order (scroll to the May 5 entry at the bottom of the post for a general overview). Brendan Nelson today engaged in expectations management on a heroic scale when he predicted Labor would win the by-election, which nobody else other than John Black (see below) seems to expect. The Nationals are sounding rather more optimistic. In a boldly detailed prediction at Australian Policy Online, academic Brian Costar tips the Nationals to gain a 1 per cent swing. Courtesy of Andrew Landeryou comes printed campaign material from the Liberals, Nationals and Labor. The Herald-Sun reports that Liberal how-to-vote cards will not feature images of Brendan Nelson. Below are two late-campaign Liberal attack ads, with another hat-tip due to Landeryou.

June 24: John Black, former Labor senator and chief executive of Australian Development Strategies, sets out the case for his belief that Labor will win the by-election, contrary to the conventional wisdom that the Nationals will retain the seat. The future of Australia Post services in Traralgon continues to generate a surprising volume of column inches, with former Australian Railways Union official and current chamber of commerce president Harvey Pynt appearing in a television commercial to back Rohan Fitzgerald’s campaign on the issue.

June 16: A summary of events since I went quiet a few weeks ago:

• A surprisingly modest field of candidates has emerged. In ballot paper order, they are Malcolm McKelvie (Greens); Rohan Fitzgerald (Liberal); Ben Buckley (Liberty and Democracy Party); Darren McCubbin (Labor); Darren Chester (Nationals).

• Antony Green has published the definitive guide to next Saturday’s action.

• The Greens are refusing to direct preferences to Labor, candidate Malcolm McKelvie declaring there is “barely a skerrick of policy daylight between the Australian Labor Party and the Nationals” on “climate change and clean coal, forestry policy, genetically modified foods and social justice issues”.

• According to the Latrobe Valley Express, “concerns” that the two existing Australia Post operations in Traralgon will be rolled into one have “dominated the efforts” of the Nationals and Liberal candidates during the campaign.

• Peter Costello caused a stir last week when he hit the campaign trail in Gippsland, the Herald Sun talking of “fresh speculation of a political revival”.

• Independent Distillers of Australia, representing the makers of pre-mixed drinks, are running local television ads in a bid to turn the by-election into a referendum on the “alcopops” tax hike. Speaking on ABC Radio’s PM program, Brian Costar of Swinburne University said he “couldn’t think of a longer bow to draw to make an association between that ad and the outcome in the by-election”. I’m not so sure: if a flannel-shirted wood-chopping Bundy-and-cola pre-mix swiller isn’t the authentic voice of Gippsland, I’d like to know what is.

Here’s Labor’s ad:

The Nationals have adopted a more positive tone in their two YouTube ads, one of the meet-the-candidate variety and another conveying the endorsement of state Nationals leader Peter Ryan:

Liberal candidate Rohan Fitgerald’s ad focuses on climate change, though it’s not clear whether he’s for or against:

P.S.: Courtesy of Andrew Landeryou, another Nationals ad I missed. Landeryou notes it shows Darren Chester “doing what few candidates are willing to do normally, appear in their own attack ads”.

May 26: Glenn Milne (again) this morning launched a non-story about an “edgy” arts act which Labor candidate Darren McCubbin had OK’d in his capacity as a local festival director. Brendan Nelson joined in, but it then emerged the festival had received funding from the previous federal government. Andrew Landeryou offers a “script in development” based on the episode. Highlights:

Peter Ryan: “Hey young one, nice work leaking that review of the gay play put on at the arty farty festival run by that fairy McCubbin. Brilliant idea giving it to Milne too, he’s so needy these days with Cossie out of the picture.”

Later …

Ryan (incredulous): “You mean we gave these pervs money when we were in government? We gave taxpayer money to a sex show that was celebrating ‘c*ck-stroking’ and ‘neckophilia’ ?

Acting COS: “That’d be right. George Brandis was Arts Minister too. I think he got sucked in by all those arts wankers.”

Other news: Despite Labor’s prodigious efforts to dampen expectations, they are at least running television advertisements, which can be viewed on the ALP site. The negativity is notably directed entirely at the Nationals, rather than the Liberals. The Liberty and Democracy Party have announce a candidate, “well-known local councillor” Ben Buckley, who you can read about in comments.

May 12: Glenn Milne reports on the National Party’s by-election focus group research in The Australian:

Down in rural Victoria with an industrial back end that picks up the La Trobe Valley, the good burghers of Gippsland now apparently rank the cost of living as the No1 issue at the impending by-election, according to National Party research. Based on Utting’s work and the Nationals’ own focus groups the battle that is now looming in Gippsland is one about perception. Labor will seek to convince voters that inflation and the cost of living are things largely outside their influence, especially given the context of the US sub-prime mortgage meltdown. The Nationals for their part, will be seeking to drive home the message that the prices buck stops with Rudd. Expect to see ads that feature a laughing image of the Prime Minister with text along the lines of: “To get elected, Labor promised to ease the pressure on working families,” followed by a list of increased prices including petrol, milk, cheese, bread, poultry, fruit, vegetables along with rents, electricity and house prices. Increases in interest rates, and declining consumer and business confidence indices will rightly get a guernsey as well.

May 6: The Nationals have filed a complaint with police after a photographer hired by Labor was caught taking pictures of Darren Chester from a parked car. Rick Wallace of The Australian reports the Nationals “believe the photographer was assigned in an attempt to catch out Mr Chester in an inadvertently unflattering pose – such as stumbling or scratching himself – with the images to be used to ridicule him in campaign ads or brochures” (in which case they would presumably have been in a position to file a complaint even if the photographer hadn’t been caught). Labor state secretary Stephen Newnham says the photographer was acting on his own initiative while in the area to take shots of Darren McCubbin, and that his actions were not condoned by the party. Peter Ryan is “expected to complain about the incident in state parliament this week”.

May 5: The Gippsland federal by-election has been officially set for June 28, the first of what is likely to be a series of unwelcome electoral tests for the opposition. This one follows the departure of the seat’s member since 1983, Howard government Science Minister and (later) Agriculture Minister Peter McGauran, who has quit to take a position as chief executive of Thoroughbred Breeders Australia. The by-election offers the exciting prospect of a three-way contest between the incumbent Nationals, Liberals who hope the seat might go the way of Farrer and Murray in shifting their way on the retirement of a long-serving Nationals member, and an ALP enjoying massive honeymoon leads in all published opinion polls.

The electorate of Gippsland has covered the far east of Victoria since federation, and has been in National/Country Party hands since the party was founded in 1922. Gippsland currently covers the Princes Highway towns of Morwell, Traralgon, Bairnsdale and Orbost, extending north to Maffra and Omeo. The Nationals’ hold appeared to be in serious jeopardy for the first time when the redistribution ahead of the 2004 election added Traralgon and strongly Labor-voting Morwell, a symptom of the region’s relative population decline. This cut the margin from 8.0 per cent to 2.6 per cent, but McGauran was returned in 2004 with a 5.1 per cent swing and suffered a correction of just 1.8 per cent last November.

McGauran’s retirement announcement gave impetus to scheming by Liberal operatives to impose a merger on reluctant state branches of both Coalition parties. This prompted NSW Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan to approach the state independent member for Gippsland East, Craig Ingram, to spur things along by running as a “joint Liberal-Nationals candidate”. It was concurrently suggested that a similar scheme might involve Rob Oakeshott, ex-Nationals independent member for Port Macquarie in the New South Wales parliament, if Mark Vaile called it a day in Lyne. Ingram admitted to being “interested” in Heffernan’s proposal, but the state Nationals argued Ingram had demonstrated his unsuitability by helping scuttle the Kennett government in 1999.

In any case, the Nationals were determined that the seat should go to Darren Chester (right), chief-of-staff to state party leader Peter Ryan, who was raised in Sale and lives in Lakes Entrance. Chester was opposed for preselection by 63-year-old former army officer Russell Smith, who reportedly had little support. The by-election marks Chester’s second run for parliament, his first being an unsuccessful run against Craig Ingram at the 2002 state election. He also contested Senate preselection against Peter McGauran’s brother Julian ahead of the 2004 election, but was defeated by 34 votes to 21. Senator McGauran went on to defect to the Liberal Party in January 2006.

Labor at first looked set to re-endorse their candidate from the 2007 election, East Gippsland councillor and two-time mayor Jane Rowe. However, shortly before the preselection was due to be decided by the party’s administrative committee (without reference to locals), Rowe stood aside in favour of Wellington Shire mayor Darren McCubbin (left), who had not previously been a party member. Rick Wallace of The Australian reported that some in the ALP had feared Rowe’s status as a single mother ”would prove a detriment in the deeply conservative Victorian electorate”, although Rowe insisted she had withdrawn so she could devote more time to her daughters. McCubbin’s caused friction with local branch members who backed alternative candidate David Wilson, deputy mayor of Latrobe City, with Duncan Hughes of the Financial Review writing of members being urged by dissidents not to contribute funds to the campaign. There had earlier been talk that Labor had been rebuffed in an approach to Christian Zahra, who held the neighbouring electorate of McMillan from 1998 until 2004 when he fell victim to an unfavourable redistribution and a statewide anti-Labor swing.

The Liberal candidate is 36-year-old Central Gippsland Health Service bureaucrat Rohan Fitzgerald (right), who appears to have been preselected without opposition. There were earlier suggestions that Julian McGauran might seek the nod, but few took them seriously. The Greens have nominated Yarragon doctor Malcolm McKelvie.

Further reading: Possum Comitatus at Crikey charts historical trends in Gippsland and other Coalition seats likely to face by-elections soon, concluding it to be Labor’s best shot out of the bunch (although a poor performance locally at the 2006 state election and a relatively weak swing at the federal election might suggest otherwise). Nick Economou of Monash University concurs the seat is winnable for Labor in an extensive overview of the contest on the 7.30 Report. Malcolm Mackerras argues otherwise, observing that there is no historical support for the notion that federal governments can expect favourable by-election swings during their honeymoon periods (no link located). Peter Brent weighed in at Mumble on April 27. Gerard McManus of the Herald Sun reports Labor internal polling has them on 36 per cent to the Nationals’ 32 per cent and the Liberals’ 19 per cent, which after preferences would mean a comfortable win for the Nationals.

Labor’s easy win in the Werriwa by-election is unlikely to go down as a watershed in Australian political history, but it provides a nice fillip for Kim Beazley by offering a contrast to the Cunningham debacle under Simon Crean. It will also enhance the prestige of others associated with the campaign, specifically New South Wales ALP general secretary Mark Arbib, subject of this revealing article by Mark Steketee in Wednesday’s Australian. Bumping aside Brenton Banfield from preselection may or may not have been a stroke of genius, but it was clearly astute to install another local in his place however little known he may have been. Labor was able to trade off the fact with newspaper advertisements noting that 10 of Chris Hayes’ 15 rivals lived outside the electorate (one as far away as Double Bay), which succeeded in tarring the other five with the same brush. For large numbers of unengaged voters, the perception that Hayes faced a cast of opportunistic blow-ins provided the prompt that was needed to make up their minds.

At the close of the evening’s count Chris Hayes emerged with 55.3 per cent, 2.7 per cent more than Mark Latham managed (the "2.01%" swing recorded by the Australian Electoral Commission suggests pre-polls and absentee votes ran against Labor last time). The other 15 candidates all finished well short of 10 per cent, with unofficial Liberal candidate James Young leading the field on just 7.9 per cent. There were vaguely noteworthy performances from the Greens’ Ben Raue, up from 3.1 per cent to 5.7 per cent, and Janey Woodger of Australians Against Further Immigration, whose 4.8 per cent was assisted by the donkey vote but might also have been boosted by recent talk of importing workers to cover skills shortages.

The Christian parties scored an impressive 8.2 per cent between them, Family First outperforming Fred Nile’s Christian Democrats with 4.3 per cent of the vote. Despite the influence of the 2000-strong congregation of the Liverpool Christian Life Centre, the Family First vote comes as something of a surprise. Neither party contested Werriwa at the federal election, but as Bryan Palmer of Palmer’s Oz Politics notes, the "mainstream protestant" Christian Democratic Party performed far better in New South Wales than the "Pentecostal-aligned" Family First. In Werriwa, the Senate vote was 2.4 per cent for the CDP against a mere 0.6 per cent for Family First. The 5.2 per cent who came on board for the by-election would presumably have voted for a Liberal candidate had one been available.

Apparently Deborah Locke’s campaign attracted more attention outside the electorate than in, as she finished in ninth place with 3.2 per cent. The others who did better were independent Joe Bryant (3.9 per cent) and Charles Doggett of One Nation (3.5 per cent). The AEC guessed that James Young would finish in second place by partnering him with Hayes for the notional two-candidate preference count, and it is likely that they will be proved correct. The point is entirely academic because Hayes is credited with 70.0 per cent of the two-candidate vote and this is not likely to change much regardless of who gets the silver after preferences.