Federal election 2016: Labor not swinging enough seats to win

The Coalition success in holding the line in marginals highlights Labor’s challenge wiping out the government’s majority.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten at a press conference while visiting Casey Hospital in Melbourne. Picture: Kym Smith

The Coalition’s success in holding the line in most of its marginal seats highlights Labor’s challenge in winning enough seats to remove the government’s majority.

Results from individual seat polls across the nation also mean that, failing a big shift in the last week of campaigning, Labor hopes of winning government in its own right are almost extinguished.

Newspoll and Galaxy polled 25 seats between them: 19 held by the Coalition, four by Labor and two by independents.

GRAPHIC — Pendulum

Of the 19 Coalition seats polled, Labor was on track to capture three — the ultra-marginal Petrie and Capricornia in Queensland, and the new West Australian seat Burt — while the Nick Xenophon Team was likely to win its first lower-house seat, Mayo in South Australia, from the Liberal Party.

Offsetting those losses, the ­Coalition is almost certain to regain the Queensland seat of Fairfax after Clive Palmer’s retire­ment, and has pulled ahead in Dobell, on the NSW central coast, a seat this year’s redistribution had rendered notionally Labor.

Of the remaining seats polled by Newspoll and Galaxy, two were 50-50 in two-party-preferred terms — Hindmarsh in South Australia and Macarthur on Sydney’s southwestern fringe. In the other 17 seats, incumbents led.

Going into Saturday’s election with a notional 88 seats, the ­Coalition can afford a net loss of 12 without losing majority government. The 25 marginal seat polls gave them a net loss of two only.

If the poll results are replicated on Saturday, the combined forces of Labor, Greens and independents would need to take another 11 seats from the Coalition (without losing any themselves) just to force the Coalition out of majority government. That would require capturing seats at least up to Forde in southeast Queensland, which is on a margin of 4.38 per cent, on the electoral seat tower.

The latest national Newspoll — published in The Australian yesterday and taken from last Thursday to Sunday — gave Labor a 2.5 per cent swing since the 2013 election, equivalent to only three more seats in the case of a uniform swing nationwide.

As far as winning government in its own right, Labor’s hopes look lost. The opposition goes into the election with a notional 57 seats, needing a net gain of 19 seats.

The seat polls have Labor capturing three and losing one for a net gain of two seats.

If the poll results are replicated on Saturday, Labor would require a uniform national swing of almost 7 per cent, almost three times the result suggested by last weekend’s Newspoll, to gain the 17 extra seats it needs.