A Rosemary Follett-led Labor-Green “”allegiance” government is not out of the question for the ACT, as scrutineers suggested yesterday that Paul Osborne is not getting a significant flow of preferences.
Mr Osborne has said he would support as Chief Minister the leader of the party with the most votes, which would be Kate Carnell.
First preference counting was virtually finished yesterday, with only some postals, declaration and pre-polling votes to go. The small amount of counting yesterday did not change the overall position on first preferences. However, the Electoral Commission did a lot of rechecking of votes.
The odds are still in favour of Liberals 7, Labor 6, Greens 2, Moore 1 and Osborne 1. However, if the fifth Brindabella seat goes to the Greens instead of Mr Osborne it would give a Labor-Green “”allegiance” a majority of nine to eight in the Assembly.
If Mr Osborne gets it, Michael Moore would hold the balance. Informed sources suggest he would favour Mrs Carnell as Chief Minister, not wanting to be seen as allowing the Labor Party to continue in Government after the voters had rejected it. But he is on record as saying it would depend on the personal make up of both the parliamentary party and the potential ministry of each party.
Everything will depend on preferences, distribution of which is expected to begin on Saturday.
In Brindabella, it is still a tall order for the Greens to beat Mr Osborne. In summary: the quota is 8084. The Green-Democrat-Moore group have about 6743. Osborne can expect virtually no preferences to leak from this group to him. Some may go to Labor. On his own Osborne has 6481. The Liberal over-quota is about 2300. He needs 300 more of these preferences than the Greens to be equal to them, and then he needs to stay ahead of the Greens on the remaining 3000 preferences of the smokers and other (mainly rightist) independents.
Bearing in mind many ballots will not express preferences all the way down, it will be determined on only a handful of votes, but Mr Osborne should still squeak in. As for the Liberals, there is simply not enough over-quota from their two elected members for the remaining Liberals to stay in the race and get a third seat.
The last seat in the remaining electorates is clearer. In Molonglo, too many Liberal ballots either give Mr Moore preferences or give no preferences for Labor’s David Lamont to have any hope of overtaking him.
In Ginninderra, the Greens’ Louise Horodny should take the last seat. Too many Liberal preferences remain unexpressed for Helen Szuty to win. She would need more than half the Democrat preferences which is extremely unlikely given the preference deal they did with the Greens.
The Liberals would be unlikely to get the last seat because even if their third candidate survives until after Ms Szuty is excluded, he or she would have little chance of getting more Szuty preferences than the Greens.
Within the parties, preferences will decide between Labor’s Bill Wood and Annette Ellis and the Liberals’ Greg Cornwell and Gwen Wilcox or Lucinda Spier, with the first in each case easily the most likely. The preference race between the Liberals’ Cheryl Hill and Harold Hird in Ginninderra is neck and neck.