Federal election results 2025 as it happened: Liberal Wilson wins back Goldstein from teal Zoe Daniel; Adam Bandt at serious risk of losing seat

Tim Wilson has won back his former seat of Goldstein, after building an unassailable lead over Zoe Daniel through a postal vote surge.

The Liberal candidate is ahead of the incumbent teal independent by 734 votes following the latest count update in Goldstein.

It’s a dramatic change in fortunes after Daniel made a victory speech to her supporters on Saturday night when she thought she had won the seat with a lead of 1800 votes.

Wilson did not concede the seat and on election night was already pointing to the possibility that postal votes would swing the seat in his favour.

There were 24,299 postal votes issued in Goldstein, and of these, 13,982 ballot papers have been counted.

There are still 5986 ballot papers awaiting processing, but the postal votes have been going strongly in Wilson’s favour.

Liberal candidate for Goldstein Tim Wilson casts his vote with husband Ryan Bolger.Credit: Justin McManus

Both Wilson and Daniel declined interview requests this afternoon as other media outlets called Goldstein for the Liberal Party.

“The margin is tight, and a reminder that it could yet go backward and we just have to be patient,” Wilson said.

“Out of respect for my scrutineers and the democratic process, I will await further counting. With the margin in the hundreds and the remaining votes in the thousands, this seems sensible,” Daniel said when asked for comment.

“Again, I thank all of those who supported me in so many ways during my campaign and with their vote.”

Thanks for joining us on the federal election results blog for Tuesday. We had a flurry of calls towards the end of the day that gave us a bit more clarity on some important seats. We will have more for you in our next coverage.

A quick run-down of some of the action:

• Tim Wilson has made a successful comeback bid in the seat of Goldstein, defeating teal independent Zoe Daniel to become the sole elected Liberal in Melbourne (so far).
• Peter Khalil has retained Wills in Melbourne’s north for Labor, staving off a huge push from the Greens who saw it as a big chance to get Samantha Ratnam elected.
• Julie Collins has successfully defended the seat of Franklin in southern Tasmania, completing Labor’s domination of the state.
• Liberal Gisele Kapterian pulled ahead of teal independent Nicolette Boele in the northern Sydney seat of Bradfield, with the latest count putting her ahead by 178 votes after preferences.
• Greens leader Adam Bandt is in for a long wait to see if he will hold on to Melbourne, the seat he first won in 2010, with counting still in the early stages.
• In Kooyong, teal independent Monique Ryan has a lead of around 1000 votes over Liberal Amelia Hamer with another 10,000 ballots still to be processed.

If you want to see a rundown of the seats that are still too close to call, you can do so here.

Have a good night.

Labor’s Julie Collins has successfully defended the seat of Franklin in southern Tasmania, holding off a challenge from independent Peter George.

Collins won 39.3 per cent of the primary vote and so far is sitting on a two-party result of 57.2 per cent, as of 5.50pm. That is good enough for us to consider it an ALP retain.

That completes the domination of Tasmania by Labor, which now holds four out of the state’s five seats. The fifth is held by long-time independent Andrew Wilkie.

Tim Wilson has won back his former seat of Goldstein, after building an unassailable lead over Zoe Daniel through a postal vote surge.

The Liberal candidate is ahead of the incumbent teal independent by 734 votes following the latest count update in Goldstein.

It’s a dramatic change in fortunes after Daniel made a victory speech to her supporters on Saturday night when she thought she had won the seat with a lead of 1800 votes.

Wilson did not concede the seat and on election night was already pointing to the possibility that postal votes would swing the seat in his favour.

There were 24,299 postal votes issued in Goldstein, and of these, 13,982 ballot papers have been counted.

There are still 5986 ballot papers awaiting processing, but the postal votes have been going strongly in Wilson’s favour.

Liberal candidate for Goldstein Tim Wilson casts his vote with husband Ryan Bolger.Credit: Justin McManus

Both Wilson and Daniel declined interview requests this afternoon as other media outlets called Goldstein for the Liberal Party.

“The margin is tight, and a reminder that it could yet go backward and we just have to be patient,” Wilson said.

“Out of respect for my scrutineers and the democratic process, I will await further counting. With the margin in the hundreds and the remaining votes in the thousands, this seems sensible,” Daniel said when asked for comment.

“Again, I thank all of those who supported me in so many ways during my campaign and with their vote.”

Liberal candidate for Kooyong Amelia Hamer thought about picking up the phone and calling incumbent MP Monique Ryan to concede on Saturday night, but was told by her team to hold on for postal votes.

“The first thing I [did was I] actually did speak to the team [and] said, ‘Look, should I call and concede?’,” she told 3AW’s Jacqui Felgate on Tuesday.

Independent Monique Ryan and the Liberals’ Amelia Hamer.Credit: The Age

“The team said to me, ‘no, actually, it does look like what’s coming out of pre poll is much more positive’. And, you know, I trust my team and so we hung on.”

And hung on they have. Hamer said she and her team were “cautiously optimistic” but that it was “too close to call anything right now”.

“But you know, if the postals do continue on the trajectory that we’ve seen so far, you know … there is a pathway,” she said.

As we’ve mentioned already, the postal votes in Kooyong are favouring Hamer on a two-candidate-preferred basis of 62 per cent.

As of 3.45pm, Ryan’s lead on Hamer was 50.5 per cent to 49.5 per cent – 1002 votes after preferences. That margin has decreased from around 1400 votes last night.

There are about 10,000 votes in the pile (8564 of which are postals – the rest declaration, absentees etc) yet to be counted – but remember that pile is still having postals and absentee votes added to it as they continue to arrive.

“It seems like a lot of our voters, or people who strongly wanted to vote Liberal, decided to do a postal vote,” Hamer explained.

“We will get another couple of boxes of postals counted today, which is about 4000 votes. Then we’ll get absentee votes that will come in towards the end of the week and be counted. Best-case scenario we will have a result in Kooyong by the end of the week,” according to Hamer.

“[But] maybe it’ll be so close that they’ll need to do a full recount.”

You can learn a lot by volunteering at polling booths during an election. The people who want to ban how-to-vote cards and the carnival-like atmosphere of polling booths are dead wrong – democracy thrives when people are allowed to express themselves, respectfully, in whatever way they choose.

Just by observing the interactions at the polling booth on election day this year, I knew that the Liberal Party was staring down the barrel of defeat.

Former minister Christopher Pyne is worried for the future of the Liberal Party.Credit: Oscar Colman

What I saw in my old electorate of Sturt in Adelaide was chilling. Those taking Liberal how-to-vote cards enthusiastically (as opposed to those taking them out of a sense of politeness) were typically old people and middle-aged men. The contrast with Labor and the Greens was stark: young people and women were bounding up to their volunteers, asking for their cards and ignoring us. We brushed it off, but the results speak for themselves. The Liberal Party’s base is disappearing. Unless the Liberal Party learns the lesson it has been handed by the voters, it will be a permanent party of opposition. That’s bad for democracy.

Politics in Australia is not very complicated. To win elections, a political party or would-be politician needs to tack to the centre. It might be centre-right or centre-left, but parties too far to the right or the left do not form government. They might win some seats (like the Greens or One Nation), but they are not parties of government.

Since the Liberal Party was formed in 1944, the Coalition has won 19 national elections, the Labor Party 11, and there was a draw in 2010. This election is the worst result for the Liberal Party in its 81-year history. It has never held such a low percentage of seats in the House of Representatives.

There are some Liberals questioning whether the party is still fit for purpose. Will it survive? Or will it, like the United Australia, Nationalists and Fusion parties before it, disappear?

Read the full story here

Liberal Dan Tehan looms as a potential kingmaker in the race between Angus Taylor and Sussan Ley to take on the leadership of the weakened opposition, as MPs lash the party’s pollster for giving Peter Dutton false confidence about the election result.

The leak of internal documents published in this masthead on Tuesday, which revealed that Dutton’s popularity numbers were dire and that strategists urged him to lighten up, triggered public criticism of the party’s contracted pollster, Mike Turner of Freshwater Strategy.

Liberal frontbencher Dan Tehan.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“We had bad pollsters giving us bad numbers,” Tasmanian senator Jonathon Duniam said on Sky News. “We were let down by pollsters and strategists which frankly gave us a bum steer of the worst order.”

Two Liberal sources said the party secretariat was threatening legal action against Turner. A spokesman for the Liberal Party federal secretariat declined to comment. Freshwater Strategy was contacted for comment.

As the party comes to terms with its worst loss since its founding in 1944, both Taylor, the shadow treasurer backed by the right faction, and Ley, the deputy leader backed by the moderates, have asked Tehan to run as their deputy, according to several MPs not authorised to speak publicly about the leadership contest.

Tehan secured a convincing victory against Climate 200-backed independent Alex Dyson in his Victorian seat of Wannon and has spent days phoning colleagues to test if he had support to run as leader himself.

But if he were to agree to be the deputy leader, he would be able to pick his preferred portfolio, allowing the Spanish-speaking former diplomat to pick foreign affairs.

Read the full story here

Labor’s Peter Khalil has fended off a strong Greens challenge in Wills, a seat north of Melbourne that takes in Brunswick, Coburg and Fawkner.

An update from the AEC published at 2.38pm Tuesday put Khalil in front of challenger Samantha Ratnam with 51.84 per cent of the two-candidate-preferred vote to 48.16 per cent (a lead of 3356 votes).

The Greens, having poured everything into winning Wills, saw Ratnam’s path to victory fade with the update, as Khalil extended his lead.

The minor party’s fading hopes are pinned on almost 10,000 absentee and declaration votes yet to be counted.

The Greens are confident these votes will swing their way, because many absentee voters are more transient and statistically more likely to vote Green.

Labor MP Peter Khalil has won re-election in Wills.Credit: Gus McCubbing

At the last poll, in 2022, Khalil was elected comfortably as the Greens received just 41 per cent of two-party-preferred votes.

But, the Greens had a win in the absentee votes column, where they scored 53 per cent of 2PP votes. Party insiders hope that trend will be amplified this time.

The maths though, goes like this: Ratnam trails Khalil by 3356 votes. There are 9787 absent and declaration votes to be counted.

If those votes break as they did in 2022, Ratnam will gain 587 votes on Khalil, which is not nearly enough.

However Khalil is not ready to claim victory, while the Greens aren’t conceding defeat.

“We’re certainly not conceding Wills, we are right in the contest, and feeling very strong. You’ll see that there are about 10,000 votes that are still likely to break for us,” Victorian senator Steph Hodgins-May said on ABC Melbourne radio.

“So the count certainly isn’t over yet, and we will be watching those and scrutinising those 10,000 votes incredibly closely.

“[We are] really hopeful that on the other side, we’ve got the wonderful Samantha Ratnam being elected as the representative for Wills.”

With neither side prepared to declare a win or a loss before absent and declaration votes are known, the result is unlikely to be declared today.

Adam Bandt is in a close fight in the seat of Melbourne, however the party is confident that the Greens leader will squeak home when counting is finished.

Re-elected Victorian Greens senator Steph Hodgins-May told ABC Radio Melbourne’s Ali Moore this afternoon that she wasn’t concerned about Bandt losing his seat.

The count is progressing slowly, however Bandt is behind in the early stages with Labor’s Sarah Witty currently sitting on 54 per cent of the vote after preferences.

But Hodgins-May said the early votes did not give a clear picture on what the final result would be.

“We did expect that we would see some shifts, given the redistribution that happened,” she said.

“But we’re not concerned about Melbourne. We are quite sure that Adam will retain his seat of Melbourne and continue as the leader of the Greens.”

The results in 14 federal seats are still too close to call, according to this masthead’s election prediction analysis.

In some cases, this is because the contest is very tight; in the electorate of Bradfield on Sydney’s north shore, for instance, Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian pulled ahead of her rival Nicolette Boele on Tuesday afternoon and is ahead by just 44 votes.

In the Queensland electorate of Longman, Labor’s Rhiannyn Douglas leads the LNP’s Terry Young by only 305 votes.

But in some seats, the progress of the count has been slowed because the two candidates receiving the most first-preference votes turned out to be different to what the Australian Electoral Commission expected before the election. These are called “two-candidate preferred exceptions”.

When this becomes apparent, the count is stopped and the two-candidate preferred tally starts afresh with the correct top two candidates in a seat. The mandatory secondary count, called “fresh scrutiny” by the AEC, kicked off on Tuesday at counting venues across the nation.

This is what has happened in the seat of Melbourne held by Greens leader Adam Bandt. The AEC online tally room showed Bandt was trailing his Labor rival Sarah Witty in the fresh two-candidate count at 3pm on Tuesday, with about 16,000 votes counted.

In some close seat contests it could be many days before the final result is known.

We haven’t had an update from the count in Wills since Sunday night, but there are some interesting patterns emerging in this once rusted-on Labor seat in Melbourne’s northern suburbs.

As the election campaign got underway, ABC election analyst Antony Green noted that while media coverage concentrated on areas like Brunswick and Coburg, where the demographic shifts have been most pronounced, the electorate went a long way beyond “the quinoa curtain along Bell Street”.

The quinoa curtain is a term long used to describe the cultural and political divide between inner-city Greens’ strongholds south of Bell Street, and Labor’s working-class base north of it.

That appears to have lost some of its importance, with shifts in voting breaking down the once-reliable split.

The drift to the Greens, largely from Labor, in what were once its strongest booths in Fawkner and Glenroy in the north of the seat, was stark.

At John Fawkner Secondary College, Labor MP Peter Khalil lost 20 per cent of his primary vote compared with the 2022 result, while the Greens’ Samantha Ratnam saw her primary vote at the school go up 26 per cent.

At Glenroy College, Labor’s primary vote fell 16 per cent while the Greens picked up 22 per cent more primary votes than last election.

And at Belle Vue Park Primary School, also in Glenroy, Labor’s primary vote dropped by 11 per cent and the Greens’ jumped 15 per cent.

These were the areas where Muslim Votes Matter campaigned hardest against Labor. The group targeted Wills, neighbouring Calwell (including Broadmeadows, Roxburgh Park and Craigieburn), and Bruce in the south-east (which includes Dandenong, Narre Warren and Berwick).

While the impact in Bruce and Calwell remains difficult to read, in Wills the group was claiming a big influence on Monday.

A Muslim Votes Matter sign in front of Brunswick’s Davies Street pre-polling centre.Credit: Clay Lucas

Roughly 10 per cent of voters in Wills are Muslim, and their numbers congregate in the electorate’s north.

Ghaith Krayem is the national spokesman for Muslim Votes Matter. He said the results were “an indicator of our ability to mobilise the local community and their openness to respond differently to how they have voted historically” in these areas.

“We had an impact on the day,” Krayem said.

The group looks to tap into dissatisfaction in the Muslim community about how it perceived the Albanese government’s response to Israel’s actions in Gaza after the October 7 attacks and on rising Islamophobia in Australia.

The count is tight, but Khalil looks well-placed to retain the seat.

That’s because while Labor did worse in some parts of this electorate, which stretches from North Fitzroy and North Carlton in the south to Fawkner and Glenroy in the north, it did better at some of the booths further south in the seat.