At this stage,10 Liberal seats have fallen to Labor,including four where the incumbent retired. These are John Alexander (Bennelong),Nicolle Flint (Boothby),Gladys Liu (Chisholm),Ken Wyatt (Hasluck),Katie Allen (Higgins),Christian Porter (Pearce),Fiona Martin (Reid),Lucy Wicks (Robertson),Steve Irons (Swan) and Ben Morton (Tangney).
A further six Liberal MPs lost their seats to independents:Celia Hammond (Curtin),Tim Wilson (Goldstein),Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong),Jason Falinski (Mackellar),Trent Zimmerman (North Sydney) and Dave Sharma (Wentworth).
First-term MP Julian Simmonds has lostRyan to the Greens.
On the Labor side,at this stage,it has lost only two seats it previously held. Kristina Keneally failed to retain Fowler,where incumbent Chris Hayes retired,and independent Dai Le will now represent the seat. And Terri Butler has conceded the loss of Brisbane-based Griffith to the Greens’ Max Chandler-Mather.
A net loss of at least 17 seats for the Liberals means the Coalition has lost 22 per cent of the seats it held in the previous parliament. This is similar to the size of the loss for Labor when Tony Abbott won government in 2013.
The difference this time is the huge expansion of the crossbench,rather than Labor picking up all the seats lost by Liberals. However,the combined count of Labor and progressive crossbenchers that will be in the new parliament will be between 86 and 90 seats,putting it in the realm of Abbott’s 90-seat victory.
The Coalition now holds its lowest proportion of seats as a share of parliament since the Liberal Party first ran at the 1946 election. It needs to get to 60 seats to better it,but that is no longer possible as the count stands.
When Labor’s Kevin Rudd defeated John Howard in 2007,the Coalition lost a quarter of its seats with 22 MPs cleaning out their offices.
And at the change of government when Howard became prime minister in 1996,Labor lost 39 per cent of its electorates,falling from 80 seats to 49.
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