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The race to call the election first…

Updated: 10's Peter Van Onselen redeems himself with an early call -but veteran Graham Richardson put his hand up earlier on SKY News.

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In 2019 10’s political editor Peter Van Onselen awkwardly called a Labor victory early in the night, when the tide turned and a  Coalition “miracle” swept Scott Morrison to victory.

This election he has redeemed himself by calling another Labor win early -and getting it right.

‘PVO’ went out on a limb and called a Labor win at 8:29pm for the small audience that was watching.

“….Labor will win this election, and we’re now going to have to get into the entrails of a minority government or a majority government,” he said.

He added, “Labor have won this election one way or the other.”

Was he first to get there?

On SKY News veteran Labor power broker Graham Richardson said at 6.59pm, “Virtually every early swing is to Labor. When you see that, what you see is Labor’s going to win. I know that people don’t like early calls this early but every booth is showing the same thing. When you get to that stage… I’m prepared to put my hand up and say ‘We’re home. Where’s the champagne?'”

He was laughed off by Peta Credlin who quipped, “You want to go home early, Richo?”

Richo was the only one on the SKY News panel to call the win, with SKY still claiming, ‘No big swings against the government’. It officially called a Labor win by 9:49pm.

Nine officially called a Labor win at 9:33pm but Nine’s Chris Uhlmann did state not long after 8pm, “We can say this, there is no way that Scott Morrison can form any kind of government tonight. It’ll be a matter of what kind of government does Anthony Albanese form? Does he get to 76 and beyond and have a majority government? Or do we have quite a large and unwieldy crossbench which will inevitably drag him to the left?”

By 8:40pm ABC’s Antony Green had also stated he couldn’t see the Coalition reaching 76 seats, unless postal votes are radically different to the current count. But Green maintained a cautious approach and seemingly never called an ALP victory, only observing that Scott Morrison could not win. Even Leigh Sales sought clarification on that…

Yet it was actually Seven which, in promos, had pledged it would call it first. Seven’s Mark Riley called a Labor win at 9:32pm after a network strap had oddly been predicting Coalition seats as high as 72. The strap disappeared for some 20 minutes before returning with Labor in the lead.

A Seven spokesperson later advised, “The new technology we were using had crunched some of the early figures, but to be cautious, we chose a commercial break to reset the program and confirm the tally.”

ABC also copped some criticism for not enough acknowledgment of Labor’s victory.

Former ABC presenter Barrie Cassify tweeted:

But in the end ABC emerged victor with up to 910,000 viewers on ABC, and 459,000 on ABC News -and that doesn’t count regional viewers with a whopping 44.3% network share.

Can’t argue with that.

Updated.

5 Responses

  2. The Coalition were clinging to a 1 seat majority going into the election and it was clear they were not going to retain that. Question was whether the ALP would get to 76 or have to form a minority government, which is still unknown. So far the AEC has offically declared 0 seats due to the high pre-poll, absentee and post votes.

  4. It wasn’t like last time where there were a lot of wrong predictions, and PVO got it wrong last time. It would have been easier to predict this time because of swings against incumbent governments. This time there were still a few wrong predictions, but a lot less than last time. Chris Bowen wrongly thought that Dutton would lose his seat but knowing that electorate, it was likely Dutton would win because he did a lot for his electorate and the Labor candidate was relatively unknown. As for Cassidy’s comments, it was more about the Liberal/LNP loss and Independent, and The Greens swings than the Labor win considering that Labor had a lower primary vote this time.

  5. All these commentators saying Labor are going to be dragged extreme left. Well we’ve had an extreme right wing Govt for the last 9 years so it will be a pleasant change to have a ‘left’ Govt for a change. I am very happy with the result.

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