Northern Territory electorate of Solomon is a safe Labor seat held by MP Luke Gosling

ABC NEWS (Australia)

The ABC is at a polling station in Palmerston just outside of Darwin.

Transcript

00:00I'm here at Durak Primary School, which is in Palmerston, the satellite city outside

00:07of Darwin, and that's one of the areas where we saw a really strong trend towards the country

00:12Liberal Party at the territory election.

00:15And now we know that people don't always vote the same way in territory elections and state

00:20elections as they do in federal elections, but one of the key sentiments that we heard

00:25during the territory election was that people were sick of the same government being in

00:30power for a while and also wanted action on crime, and that's certainly something that

00:35the country Liberal Party candidate Lisa Bayless has been campaigning on.

00:39And here in Durak, she's got lots of signage up around.

00:43Of course, Labor's Luke Gosling also does.

00:46Now, he currently holds the seat, and he's done so for three terms so far.

00:50Now, he, as the incumbent, has a margin of, he won it on a margin of 9% last election,

00:56but since then, the boundaries have been redrawn, and that's dropped to about 8.4%.

01:01Still a wide margin, but it'll certainly be interesting to see how that sentiment from

01:05the territory election plays out going into today's counts.

01:10Here's a little bit of what Luke Gosling had to say.

01:14Could be close.

01:14So, we just hope that everyone thinks about the offerings that are out there.

01:19Obviously, I'm very proud to be part of Anthony Albanese and his team.

01:24I think we've got a great offering for the people of Australia and much better than the

01:29alternatives.

01:30We just want to see the territory continue to grow.

01:33And not far from you, Lillian, from the edge is the edge of the territory's other seat.

01:38That is, of course, Lingiari.

01:40It's been held by Labor for a long time.

01:42Can you take us through that seat?

01:43Yeah, so just beyond Palmerston's city limits, we get the start of the seat of Lingiari.

01:49And as you said, that encompasses basically everywhere else in the Northern Territory,

01:53except for Darwin and Palmerston, as well as a couple of islands.

01:56So, it's a really, really large electorate, one of the largest in the country.

02:00And it also encompasses all of the Northern Territory's remote communities.

02:03So, the Australian Electoral Commission has been out over the past week or so conducting

02:08remote polling with people living in remote areas and also pre-polls in the centres like

02:14Alice Springs and Catherine and Tennant Creek.

02:17Now, it's one of the electorates where we have a really historically low voter turnout.

02:22And apparently, the voter turnout this year so far in remote areas of the NT has been about

02:27the same as the previous voice referendum and prior to that, the 2022 federal election.

02:32But as you said, Lingiari has been a Labor seat for a very long time.

02:37Ever since it was founded in 2001, it has gone to the Labor incumbent, Warren Snowden,

02:43at the time until he retired in 2022.

02:46When he retired, Marion Scrimger from Labor challenged, went for the seat successfully

02:52to try and take over from Warren Snowden.

02:55But her margin that she won the seat on was paper thin, just 0.9%.

02:59Since that same redistribution that I talked about earlier, the margin that Marion Scrimger

03:05notionally holds the seat on has widened.

03:07But she is being challenged by the country liberal party's Lisa Siebert, who's appeared

03:12with press events around the territory with Jacinta Price, who is, of course, the country

03:16liberal party's senator for the Northern Territory, along with Marion's, sorry, Malandiri McCarthy,

03:23who is the other Northern Territory senator.

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