The 11 seat races still too close to call – and those that changed hands
By Millie Muroi, Matt Wade and Olivia Ireland
Credit: Matthew Absalom-Wong
Eleven seats across the nation remained too close to call on Tuesday as the margins in some high-profile electoral battles narrowed to double digits.
Two contests between Liberal and teal independents – in Sydney’s Bradfield and Melbourne’s Kooyong – were on a knife’s edge and gave the Coalition faint hope of maintaining a presence in metropolitan areas.
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.
We’ll keep updating here in real time as each seat is called – and let you know which seats changed hands across Australia.
Follow our live coverage of the 2025 federal election here.
Every seat still too close to call
Bean
This Canberra seat, created in 2019, has been held by Labor MP David Smith for the past two terms.
While he leads on first-preference votes, independent candidate and local midwife Jessie Price – backed by Climate 200 – has been closing in on his lead as Liberal preferences are redistributed and the count continues in what has been a relatively safe Labor electorate.
“I think partly people do feel very neglected here on the south side. We know that we are not getting the investment, the resourcing [that] the other parts of Canberra are getting,” Price told ABC Radio Canberra this week.
Bendigo
Labor MP Lisa Chesters is facing a nervous wait in the typically safe seat of Bendigo in Victoria after a stronger-than-expected result from the Nationals candidate Andrew Lethlean, a local publican.
The Victorian Nationals threw lots of resources at this seat and Lethlean has swept up a significant portion of the first-preference vote, forcing the Australian Electoral Commission to start its two-party preferred count again as a contest between Labor and the Nationals rather than Labor and the Liberals.
Bradfield
Following the retirement of long-serving Liberal MP Paul Fletcher this election, this blue-ribbon NSW seat is hotly contested by Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian and teal independent Nicolette Boele, who ran second to now-retired Liberal MP Paul Fletcher in 2022.
Kapterian, a former lawyer, Liberal staffer and now senior executive at a technology company, is up against Boele, a finance and clean energy executive who apologised during the campaign after she was banned from a Sydney hair salon for making sexual remarks.
Bullwinkel
Created this election after the redrawing of electoral boundaries, this new WA seat encompasses farming towns, the Perth hills and the urban fringe.
Labor candidate Trish Cook, a nurse and local councillor, is up against Liberal candidate Matt Moran, a former journalist with experience in the military and business, after Mia Davies – leader of the National Party and former leader of the state’s opposition – fell out of the contest earlier in the vote count.
Calwell
Held by now-retired Labor veteran Maria Vamvakinou for more than two decades, this working-class north suburban seat should have been safe.
Labor candidate Basem Abdo (his predecessor’s adviser) is battling Liberal candidate and cybersecurity expert Usman Ghani and a handful of independent candidates, with Ghani garnering nearly 16 per cent of the first-preference vote and the leading independent, disaffected former local Labor mayor Carly Moore, collecting 12 per cent.
Flinders
This Victorian seat, held by the Liberals for more than four decades (most recently by MP Zoe McKenzie), is facing a challenge from the Labor candidate Sarah Race and Climate 200-funded independent Ben Smith.
The close contest between Labor and the independent candidate has complicated the electoral commission’s ability to determine McKenzie’s true rival, as the primary votes are sorted into three piles rather than the usual two.
Kooyong
Teal independent Monique Ryan’s seat remains too close to call, as she battles it out against Liberal candidate Amelia Hamer, Oxford-educated grand-niece of a Victorian premier.
Seized from Morrison government treasurer Josh Frydenberg in the 2022 election, the once blue-ribbon seat held by Robert Menzies and Andrew Peacock set the scene for one of 2025’s fiercest political battles, as corflutes were vandalised, seized and even filmed being buried by supporters, and community halls were invaded by neo-Nazis.
Two days out from the election, the Liberals won an injunction to prevent the local council removing their corflutes.
Longman
Liberal Terry Young, a close ally of fallen opposition leader Peter Dutton, could also lose to a Queensland Labor candidate as Rhiannyn Douglas mounts a serious challenge in Longman.
Neighbouring Dickson to the north east, Longman covers key areas between Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast such as Caboolture and, has been won by Liberals in eight of the past 10 elections – losing only to Labor in 2007 and 2016 (when Wyatt Roy was displaced), as well as in the 2018 byelection.
On the final day of campaigning, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited Longman alongside Douglas, when they attended the Morayfield Medicare Urgent Care Clinic.
Menzies
First-term Liberal Keith Wolahan is clinging to faint hope of retaining Menzies after a controversy involving counting in the seat.
The moderate MP, who is well regarded and has been touted as a future Liberal leader, had said it was more likely than not he would lose his seat to Labor’s Gabriel Ng.
The seat is named for Robert Menzies, the former prime minister and founder of the Liberal Party, and has accordingly swung blue in every election since it was established in 1984. However a redistribution made it one Australia’s most marginal seats.
Monash
Russell Broadbent has held this seat for the Liberal Party since 2004, but is contesting it for the first time as an independent. This result will likely take days to become clear, as there is no preference count available and multiple candidates in the race.
Mary Aldred, Labor’s Tully Fletcher and Deb Leonard – another independent – all tallied more than Broadbent on first preference, while One Nation received nearly 8 per cent of the primary vote.
Ryan
Liberal National Party candidate Maggie Forrest has bowed out of the three-way battle for the suburban Brisbane seat, sending best wishes to the “next member for Ryan”, as the close count in the seat taking in the western suburbs of Brisbane continues.
The Greens member Elizabeth Watson-Brown, who won the seat in 2022, will be the only Green in the lower seat if she holds on, but it remains a tight contest with Labor candidate Rebecca Hack, a local teacher.