On a Knife-Edge: Six other times Australia’s elections were down to the wire

For days it looked as if Australia would have its second hung parliament in six years, but eventually the Turnbull government was re-elected with a very small parliamentary majority.

Elections are usually decisive, and we know who’s won them on election night. But sometimes, it comes down to the wire and governments find themselves clinging to, or losing, power by the skin of their teeth.

Here are six examples of other times Australian election results were uncomfortably narrow.

1901

The first federal election for the new Commonwealth of Australia was far from decisive. At the time there weren’t really any formal parties. The Protectionist Party, really a group of lots of different organisations, won 31 seats out of 75, far short of the 38 needed for a majority. George Reid’s Free Trade Party, which was also different in different states, won 28 seats and the Labour parties (there was no united ALP yet) 14. Edmund Barton, the Protectionist leader and caretaker PM, did a deal with Labour to run a minority government.

Country Party leader, Earle Page, drove a hard bargain. Not only did he demand the Treasurer’s job, he also insisted Hughes resign as prime minister. Hughes did so very reluctantly, and was replaced by Page’s friend Stanley Bruce. Page’s scheme not only delivered power to the Country Party, but it established the conservative coalition that has continued almost uninterrupted for nearly a century.  

1961

Arthur Calwell, facing his first election as Labor leader, managed to secure a 4.6% swing and a majority of the two-party vote against Menzies and the Coalition. Labor picked up fifteen seats in the 124 seat House, which made the numbers equal – 62 each. Unfortunately for Calwell, two of the seats in his column didn’t count. The members for the ACT and the NT could only vote on matters affecting their electorate, and thus the numbers were 62-60.
Calwell always believed had his friend Eddie Ward been deputy leader of the party instead of his adversary Gough Whitlam, he would have won the election.

2010

The 2010 election produced the first hung parliament in 70 years. The campaign was dominated by the sudden change of prime minister, from Kevin Rudd to Julia Gillard. Rudd, just three years earlier, had led Labor to an historic victory after eleven years of John Howard’s Coalition government, but at the election a large swing away from them threatened to make them the first one-term government since 1931. Labor won 72 seats and the Coalition 73. The balance of power in the new House of Representatives fell to five crossbenchers. Four supported Labor, which governed in minority for the first time in living memory.