In the 2025 Federal election the NT CLP took one step forward, two steps back …
Sometimes too much of a good thing is a bad, bad thing …
It was a surprise to no-one that the NT Country Liberal Party was short-priced favourite to win the NT general election in late August 2024.
The incumbent Labor government had grown fat and lazy and its pitch for a third term under a third Chief Minister was asking too much of a tired and emotional electorate.
But no-one – least of all party president Shane Stone – expected the extent of the CLP’s go-you-good-thing win.
It’s a no-brainer that electoral success in the NT lies in the baker’s-dozen-or-so of seats clustered around Darwin’s northern suburbs and CBD, the satellite city of Palmerston and nearby peri-urban centres.
The CLP took all of these bar the most left-leaning electorates, the “people’s republic” of Nightcliff and the adjoining seat of Johnston, respectively taken by the Greens and a Teal-like independent.
Elsewhere the CLP dominated in and around the small towns of Alice Springs, Tennant Creek and Katherine apart from seats held by two long-term independents, one a right-leaning conservative in suburban Alice Springs, the other a senior Aboriginal man in the north-east Arnhem Land electorate of Mulka.
Labor was reduced to a rump of 4 members, all based in bush seats.
In late September the NT News’ reported that it wasn’t in the CLP’s “wildest dreams” they would take a virtual clean-sweep of Darwin’s northern suburbs.
That was on the eve of the CLP’s first post-election central council meeting, where candidates for the NT’s lower house seats of Lingiari and Solomon for the upcoming Federal general election would be chosen.
But the NT’s political gene-pool is tiny and the scale of the CLP’s local success in August 2024 meant that the stock of available, and more importantly, electable, candidates had shrunk considerably.
Solomon
Of the six nominations for the Darwin-based seat of Solomon, the CLP chose Detective Sergeant Lisa Bayliss to run against incumbent, Labor’s Luke Gosling.
Bayliss was as close to CLP royalty as you can get: a 30-year NT police veteran, senior vice-president of the powerful NT Police Association and daughter of former CLP NT minister Daryl Manzie.
Early speculation had it that then Liberal Party opposition leader Peter Dutton – himself a former copper – had approached his long-term friend NT Police Association President Nathan Finn, to run in Solomon for the CLP.
Neither of the two nominations for the rest-of-the-NT seat of Lingiari appealed to the CLP in late September and preselection was deferred to late November.
When they did get around to it, the CLP chose (another!) copper – Senior Constable Lisa Siebert, a 16-year veteran of the Federal Police – to run against sitting member for Lingiari, Labor’s Marion Scrymgour.
In the Solomon election on 3 May 2025 Lisa Bayliss ran a creditable, if unspectacular and closely corralled, campaign against Gosling, taking a 7.09 per cent swag of votes off him but eventually falling 1,576 votes short, leaving four-termer Gosling with a substantially diminished 2.62 per cent margin.
Three years out from the next election it’s impossible to say if Gosling will go round for a fifth term, though for mine his electoral arc peaked in the 2022 poll, when he took a nice 6.29 per cent swing off the CLP’s Tina MacFarlane and romped home with nearly 59 per cent of the vote.
If the CLP can get their act together Solomon could be ripe for the picking at the next Federal election in 2028.
Lingiari
Lingiari is a massive electorate that covers 99.99% of the Northern Territory, excluding the larger population centres of Darwin and Palmerston on the mainland.
Every parliamentary term, the Federal Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM) holds an inquiry into the preceding election.
The JSCEM report into the 2022 Federal election includes the following reference to Lingiari, that it says stands out because:
… voter participation [at the 2022 election] was the lowest in Australia, at a record low of 66.83 per cent. For the 2019 federal election, this figure was 72.85 per cent. According to the Northern and Central land councils, Lingiari consistently has the lowest turnout of enrolled voters and has the highest number of unenrolled voters in Australia.
For context, 77 per cent of Aboriginal people in the NT live in remote or very remote areas … This cohort is the most disenfranchised in terms of electoral participation. Lingiari also has some of the highest levels of poverty, as well as the widest gap in employment.
Despite the Australian Electoral Commission’s considerable and creditable efforts to increase remote enrolment between elections they could only be disappointed that the 2025 turnout in Lingiari fell further to around 62 per cent – more than 10 per cent across 3 elections.
A few weeks after the election the Geoff Bloom, head of the AEC in the NT, expressed his disappointment at the Lingiari turnout to the ABC Darwin’s Rick Hind:
… people in Lingiari are not turning up to vote in the numbers that we would hope … for whatever reason, they’re not engaging … We don’t quite understand what’s happened there, but certainly less voters turned out in Alice Springs.
Bloom noted the Solomon turnout was on a par with previous elections, but in largely remote Lingiari it was:
… significantly different in that division. And it is extremely low.
Because Prime Minister Albanese called the election for early May – at the end of the northern wet season – many small Aboriginal communities were still inaccessible by road and could only be reached by fixed wing aircraft, helicopters or boat.
School and public holidays may also have affected turnouts or provided distractions for voters.
In the NT end of first term school holidays ran for the first two weeks of April, followed by Easter then Anzac Day. The NT’s May Day public holiday fell on the Monday immediately following election day.
The larger towns in Lingiari – Katherine, Tennant Creek and Alice Springs – all ran “static” pre-poll and polling-day booths. Other pre-polling booths operated in Darwin and Palmerston in Solomon. In total voters used 190 locations across Lingiari.
Mobile polling in the NT
34 mobile polling teams – called “Remote Mobile Teams” (RMTs) by the AEC – operated across Lingiari, most collecting votes along dedicated “runs” that typically included a number of small communities and homelands in a particular district and other areas as required by demand.
Mobile polling teams working in some larger remote communities – Maningrida, Wadeye, Borroloola, Numbulwar and Yirrkala among others – ran static polling booths for multiple days dependent on demand – while also collecting votes in nearby homelands or being transferred to other areas as needed.
For these reasons, in Lingiari it is not generally possible to accurately attribute polling numbers to specific booths, though there are some exceptions.
For present purposes I will refer to individual mobile polling team results as “RMT runs” rather than booths, communities or homelands.
The AEC’s “two-candidate preferred” data (perhaps better known as two party preferred or TPP) data for Lingiari can be accessed here.
The AEC records data for 26 static booths and 34 RMT runs – a total of 60 – which I will collectively call “polling places”.
One Lingiari RMT, the AEC’s PPVC (pre-polling voting centre) located in Canberra collected a statistically insignificant 7 votes, so for present purposes that polling place will be ignored.
The following analysis is based on AEC data for the remaining 59 polling places.
Lisa Siebert’s campaign
Lisa Siebert gained a majority of votes in 15.5 polling places (Scrymgour and Siebert tied with 146 votes each at the Katherine North static booth).
Siebert, who has strong family ties to the Aboriginal community of Gunbalunya in western Arnhem Land, led in nine Darwin urban, peri-urban and rural polling places, one in Alice Springs, four in Katherine and one off-shore polling place on the Cocos Keeling islands.
Siebert’s winning margin ranged between 50 per cent (the Katherine North static booth she tied with Scrymgour) to 70.41 per cent (Remote Polling Team 31).
Siebert received 19,108 TPP votes – 41.87 per cent – of the two-party preferred vote.
It is useful at this point to briefly examine – as I did with the CLP’s successful Senate candidate Jacinta Price here and here– the public face of Siebert’s campaign.
As with my analyses of Price’s campaign, I’ll primarily rely upon Siebert’s Facebook posts – from her first campaign-related post on 1 February through to her last posts on election day, 3 May 2025.
Siebert’s campaign-related Facebook posts kicked off in early February with a week in and around Tennant Creek, followed by a fortnight in and around Darwin and the local rural area.
Then followed a week in and around Katherine after Anzac Day and then a few early March days back in Tennant Creek.
Siebert then spent a fortnight based in Alice Springs, with short trips to regional and remote communities and appearances with fellow candidates, local and interstate politicians at shopping centres and community markets.
By early April Siebert was back in Darwin for Peter Dutton’s unfortunate “kick the cameraman in the head incident” followed by another short trip to Mutitjulu and Alice Springs with Senate candidate Jacinta Price, then another quick trip back to Darwin, the Tiwi Islands and her familial support base of Gunbalunya.
Siebert spent the last week of the campaign at Alice Springs static booths and flooding her Facebook page with last-minute and overwhelmingly negative CLP-sourced campaign posts.
From my study of Siebert’s campaign I suspect that the CLP knew that she would never best Scrymgour out bush and withdrew – or had never allocated – financial and logistic support for her campaign, diverting those assets to the Bayliss campaign in Solomon and Price’s campaign in the Senate.
From very early in the campaign it was obvious that the CLP’s ground-game – personnel at the polling places, logistic and financial support etc – was a long way south of Labor’s, even with the support of the Exclusive/Plymouth Brethren for the CLP at many remote polling places.
Marion Scrymgour’s campaign
Lingiari incumbent Marion Scrymgour gained a majority of votes in 43.5 of 59 polling places, receiving 26,524 TPP votes – 58.13 per cent, a 7.18 per cent increase from her 2022 result of 23,339 votes – 50.95 per cent.
Scrymgour’s TPP dominance was also reflected in the votes, particularly in remote areas.
Scrymgour polled greater than 70 per cent in 32 of the 43.5 polling places she won, with 9 of those polling greater than 90 per cent of the vote.
In RMT 27’s run, centred on the NT’s second largest remote community of Wadeye and nearby homelands, Scrymgour drew a whopping 92.65 per cent of the vote.
It is unsurprising that Scrymgour did very well in the bush, where she is well known – she’s worked in remote community service provision for decades, represented the seat of Arafura in the NT Legislative Assembly from 2001 to 2012 and was Labor Party Deputy Chief Minister of the NT from 2007 to 2009.
Scrymgour did particularly well in and around Alice Springs, taking six of the seven town-based static booths and eight RMT runs across central Australia.
She also took the static town-based booth in Tennant Creek and the RMT run for the scattered homelands to the east, as well as the town of Borroloola and adjacent homelands.
Scrymgour would be pleased with her result in Darwin, where she took two static booths and she also did well in the CLP’s stronghold of Katherine, where she tied Siebert in one static booth and ran close to Siebert in the pre-poll, other static booths and at the nearby Tindal Airforce base.
One stark distinction between the campaign Facebook posts by Marion Scrymgour and those of Price and Siebert is what I can only call the “smile-out-loud” factor.
For mine this is best illustrated by this photo of Senator Malarndirri McCarthy and Scrymgour taken on the campaign trail but there are a hundred more of the Scrymgour and McCarthy surrounded by family, campaign and support staff and most of all, community members.
McCarthy and Scrymgour formed a formidable team and were relentlessly positive without losing focus on the prize. This positivity worked in terms of message effectiveness and also made it easy for visiting southern politicians to catch their vibe.
Scrymgour and McCarthy were having fun and weren’t afraid to show it.
Sometimes too much of a good thing can be a good thing.
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