Turnout: 91.01%
About this election
The 2016 Australian federal election was held on Saturday 2 July 2016 to elect all 150 members of the House of Representatives and — unusually — all 76 senators, after Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull obtained a double dissolution of both houses of Parliament. Turnbull, who had replaced Tony Abbott as Liberal leader and prime minister in September 2015, called the early election to break a deadlock over industrial-relations legislation and to seek a personal mandate. The campaign ran for eight weeks, one of the longest in modern Australian history, and ended in a far closer result than the government had hoped: the Liberal–National Coalition was returned to office, but with its majority slashed to a single seat.
Members of the House of Representatives are elected from single-member electorates by full-preference instant-runoff voting (called "preferential voting" in Australia): voters number every candidate in order of preference, and if no one has a majority of first preferences the lowest candidate is excluded and their ballots redistributed until one candidate has more than half. Voting is compulsory for all enrolled citizens, which is why Australian turnout routinely sits above 90%, far higher than in most democracies. Because of the preferential system, the most-watched headline figure is the two-party-preferred (TPP) vote — the final share between Labor and the Coalition after all preferences are distributed — which is a better guide to who forms government than the first-preference (primary) vote.
Australian federal politics is dominated by two blocs: the centre-left Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the permanent Coalition of the centre-right Liberal Party and the rural-based National Party (which contest as the Liberal National Party in Queensland and the Country Liberal Party in the Northern Territory). Outside the majors, the Australian Greens draw progressive and inner-city votes, while a shifting cast of minor parties and independents occupies the crossbench. In 2016 Turnbull led the Coalition against Labor's Bill Shorten, who ran an energetic campaign built around health policy and the "Mediscare" claim that the government planned to privatise Medicare.
The Coalition won 76 of the 150 seats — exactly the number needed for a bare majority — to Labor's 69, with the Greens, the Nick Xenophon Team, Katter's Australian Party and two independents (Andrew Wilkie and Cathy McGowan) taking the remaining five. On first preferences the Coalition took 42.04% to Labor's 34.73% and the Greens' 10.23%, and the two-party-preferred result was a knife-edge 50.36% to 49.64% in the Coalition's favour — a swing of more than three points against the government. The count was so tight that the outcome was not clear for over a week, and Labor's recovery of much of the ground it had lost in its 2013 defeat left Turnbull badly weakened within his own party.
The election exposed Australia's sharp electoral geography. Labor won the most seats in New South Wales and Victoria — the first time since Federation that a party formed government without leading in the two most populous states — as well as in South Australia, Tasmania and both territories. The Coalition's majority was built on Queensland, where it won 21 of 30 seats, and on Western Australia. The interactive map above shows the party that won the most seats in each state and territory; click any state for its full seat breakdown.
Turnbull formed a majority government but governed from a position of chronic instability, his one-seat margin leaving him hostage to his party's conservative wing. Continued internal conflict over energy and climate policy culminated in a leadership coup in August 2018 that replaced him with Scott Morrison, setting the stage for the 2019 election. The 2016 double dissolution also produced a record 20-member Senate crossbench, making the upper house even harder to manage — covered on the companion Senate results page.
Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) — official tally room results at results.aec.gov.au.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.