A dozen seats across the nation remained too close to call on Tuesday as the margins in some high-profile electoral battles narrowed to double digits.
Two contests between Liberal and teal independents – in Sydney’s Bradfield and Melbourne’s Kooyong – were on a knife’s edge and gave the Coalition faint hope of maintaining a presence in metropolitan areas.
In some seats, the progress of the count has been slowed because the two candidates receiving the most first-preference votes turned out to be different to what the Australian Electoral Commission expected before the election. These are called “two-candidate preferred exceptions”.
When this becomes apparent, the count is stopped and the two-candidate preferred tally starts afresh with the correct top two candidates in a seat. The mandatory secondary count, called “fresh scrutiny” by the AEC, kicked off on Tuesday.
We’ll keep updating here in real time as each seat is called – and let you know which seats changed hands across Australia.
Follow our live coverage of the 2025 federal election here.
Every seat still too close to call Bean This Canberra seat, created in 2019, has been held by Labor MP David Smith for the past two terms.
While he leads on first-preference votes, independent candidate and local midwife Jessie Price – backed by Climate 200 – has been closing in on his lead as Liberal preferences are redistributed and the count continues in what has been a relatively safe Labor electorate.
“I think partly people do fe
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