The ins and outs of Gilmore, one of Australia's most marginal

Illawarra Mercury

Illawarra Mercury political reporter Glen Humphries and deputy editor Kate McIlwain discuss the fight for the knife-edge seat of Gilmore ahead of the federal election. Footage by Joel Ehsman.

Transcript

00:00Hi, I'm Glenn Humphreys from The Mercury. I'm the political reporter here and I'm

00:03chatting with Kate McElwain about the very, very tight race in Gilmore.

00:07It's one of the tightest races, I guess, in the country. The margin is, I think, 0.2 or something tiny.

00:15A couple of hundred votes. And I guess the main candidates, Labor and Liberal, we've got Andrew Constance,

00:21who's quite well known, and the sitting MP, Fiona Phillips. It's the very, very edge of the

00:27Illawarra for us, so our southernmost readership. And last week we had the candidates, the ballot

00:34draw, and I think, was it Fiona that came out on top?

00:37Yeah, Fiona's come out on top, similar to Cunningham, where Labor finished number one on the ballot.

00:43That could actually be quite helpful for her in a race where if Andrew Constance last time

00:49around got about 180 odd votes, he would have won. So it's really, really tight. While the

00:55AEC doesn't tally donkey votes as a stat, because it's a valid vote, there is that anecdotal thing

01:03with political parties that's worth about one or two percent of the vote, because people

01:07just go one, two, three, four, five, and get out. So in a tight race like that, where there's

01:11only a couple of hundred votes, every vote counts, so it could well actually be quite beneficial

01:17to her to have top spot.

01:19Yeah, I guess anything could make a difference in something that type.

01:22Yeah, if you have a bad day campaigning when it's that tight, you could change everything.

01:26So it's just, yeah, it's really, really tight.

01:28I think probably it's one of the ones we won't know the outcome maybe on election night.

01:33They'll be counting every single vote. It'll be something to watch very closely, even following

01:38the election.

01:39Yeah, I have no doubt that we won't find out on election night who's won at Gilmore.

01:44If the voting goes totally skew-whiff and we end up getting a winner on Gilmore on election

01:50night, that'd be a complete shock. I think we'll be like three or four, five, six days.

01:54Maybe an indicator of the election at large too, I guess, if something like Gilmore were

01:59to swing wildly one way or another.

02:00Yeah.

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