As primary vote drops from 54% in 2015 to 25%, independent Joe McGirr is set to benefit from rural shift away from major parties

The collapse of the Liberal party’s vote in Wagga Wagga is a worrying portent for Gladys Berejiklian’s government and suggests that the New South Wales state election in March will return a hung parliament.

It is also a concern for Scott Morrison’s federal government. The state election will likely take place about two months before the federal election, and a defeat for the NSW state government may end up setting the scene for a tough federal election for the Coalition.

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On current figures from Wagga, the Liberals’ primary vote has dropped by 28.5% from almost 54% in 2015 down to slightly more than 25% yesterday. Most of this swing has gone to the independent candidate, Dr Joe McGirr, who is sitting on 25.6% of the primary vote. Labor is in third place on 23.8%. The swing was harshest in the town of Wagga Wagga itself, which makes up about two thirds of the seat’s population.

It is not clear who has won, but it appears very likely that the Liberal party’s Julia Ham will miss out. We will need to wait for a full distribution of preferences to identify which candidates make the top two.

The three main candidates all polled roughly one quarter of the vote, with the remaining quarter going to the four other candidates. Those other candidates’ preferences strongly favour McGirr or Labor candidate Dan Hayes, which will make it harder for Julia Ham to stay in the top two.

There is no solid information about how preferences would flow if the race ends up being between McGirr and one of the major party candidates. If Labor drops out, you’d expect their preferences to favour McGirr. The Liberal party advised voters to “just vote 1”, but you’d expect them to favour McGirr as well. This suggests that the independent is best placed to win.

This is very worrying result for Berejiklian with six months to go until the next state election. The government is roughly even in the statewide polling, but we haven’t seen any for almost six months.

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This election result increases the size of the crossbench in the state lower house to seven: three Greens, three independents and one member of the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party.

A loss of six seats (which is within the range of current polling) would leave the government without a majority. It will be much harder for Labor to gain the 13 seats it would need to win a majority, so the prospect of a hung parliament is quite high.

The size of this swing would be shocking for the Liberal party, but it’s important to note that it went to a rural independent, not Labor. NSW was home to numerous rural independent MPs throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Most of these seats returned to the coalition by the time the Liberals and Nationals returned to power in 2011.

If the coalition is losing support now, we may see more rural seats shift their support away from the major parties. This trend was first noticed when the Shooters won the seat of Orange in 2016. The Nationals also suffered large swings to the Shooters at the by-elections in Cootamundra and Murray in 2017.

This rural backlash has mostly hurt the Nationals, but this byelection was different as the Coalition was represented by a Liberal candidate, despite a strong push within the Nationals to run a candidate. While there will surely be some suggestions that the Coalition could’ve held on to the seat if the Nationals had run, results in recent byelections in Nationals seats suggests they haven’t been able to do much better.