The shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, has written to Malcolm Turnbull asking that he stop George Brandis from participating in the scrutiny of votes in the crucial Herbert recount this week.

The Liberal National party is ahead by just one vote in the recount of the north Queensland seat of Herbert, with talk of a messy resolution ending up in the court of disputed returns.

Herbert is the last federal seat to be decided in the 2016 election.

If the Coalition retains the seat it will have 77 seats in the 150-seat parliament, allowing it to appoint a speaker while retaining an absolute majority.

With the Australian Electoral Commission saying the recount could take up weeks, the focus on the seat has become intense.

On Sunday Dreyfus sent a letter to the prime minister asking him to stop the attorney general from having any further involvement in the vote recount.

Brandis has been acting as a Liberal party scrutineer at the counting centre in Townsville, overseeing the sorting and counting of votes and checking for irregularities.

“The Australian Electoral Commission is now conducting a recount. Clearly this is a very sensitive process,” Dreyfus’s letter says.

“You are no doubt also aware that, quite extraordinarily, the attorney general, Senator Brandis has been participating in the scrutiny of votes in the seat of Herbert.

“Labor scrutineers advise that the attorney general took a very active personal role in the scrutiny. He personally objected to ballots and argued points of procedure with Australian Electoral Commission officials.

“A very sensitive recount is now taking place in Herbert. Any ongoing involvement by the attorney general in the scrutiny risks undermining public confidence.”

It appears likely Labor or the Liberal National party will end up taking the final result to the court of disputed returns, arguing for a fresh election.

It has been reported as many as 85 of the 628 army members who the Australian defence force says did not cast votes while they were on exercise in South Australia could have been personnel from Townsville.

There have also been accusations of absentee ballot papers not being made available to Herbert voters in other north Queensland seats.

On Sunday the attorney general, George Brandis, said regardless of the outcome of the recount, the Liberal National party should “rejoice in its own success” at the election.

“The government went backwards in a number of states but in Queensland, depending on what happens in the Herbert recount, either we will have kept the same number of seats in the House of Representatives or, on a worse-case scenario, have gone backwards by one,” he said.

“The federal election was a great success for the LNP.”

When the first count in Herbert finished last week, Labor’s Cathy O’Toole led the sitting Coalition MP Ewen Jones by just eight votes.



A margin of less than a hundred votes in any seat is cause for an automatic recount.

Australian Associated Press contributed to this report