The Coalition and Labor enter the final hours of the election campaign locked at 50 per cent apiece but the overwhelming majority of voters are backing Malcolm Turnbull to win what could be a close contest.
The final Ipsos/Fairfax Poll shows that nationwide, the major parties will end the marathon campaign as they began – in a statistical dead heat. While Labor’s two-party-preferred vote has recovered from its 2013 thrashing, 50 per cent on election day would not give Labor the 19 seats it needs notionally to win power, even if the swing were uniform across the country, which swings never are.
It could, however, produce a hung Parliament if other seats were to fall to independents. With the poll showing almost a third of voters will not give either major party their primary vote, both sides are predicting a reasonably close result on Saturday. Labor leader Bill Shorten continues to insist he can win but, on Thursday night, former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke reportedly said the Coalition would win with a reduced majority.
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
