Voting in Alice: Caning for CLP, small growth for Greens

By ERWIN CHLANDA

Labor’s Marion Scrymgour extended her margin in all but one of the seven Alice Springs booths during the landslide Federal election on Saturday.

The sitting Member for the massive seat of Lingiari, more or less all of the Territory except Darwin and Palmerston, in the town council polling place got almost 10% more votes than three years ago, and achieved a 7.96% margin in Gillen.

The respective results for the CLP, represented by Lisa Siebert, were drops by 7.42% and 10.62%.

Only in Ilparpa, where just 207 formal votes were cast, Ms Siebert beat Ms Scrymgour 120 votes to 45.

Greens candidate Blair McFarland received 23 votes in that booth, but in the other six he recorded increases ranging from 0.32% to 3.56%.

It was a significant achievement for the party that is now the third-biggest political force in The Centre.

In last year’s Territory elections they were getting close to wining the seat of Braitling.

Asta Hill received 1937 votes compared to the CLP’s Joshua Burgoyne’s 2261.

In the two candidate preferred count across all of Lingiari Ms Scrymgour received 22,546 votes to Ms Siebert’s 16,329, a swing of 6.4%.

With 56 of 60 polling places returned the first preference count for Lingiari was:-

Scrymgour 17,994; Siebert 12,407; McFarland 3,918; Sakellarios Bairamis (Pauline Hanson’s One Nation) 3,481; Chris Tomlins (Indigenous – Aboriginal Party of Australia) 993 and Peter Flynn (Citizens Party) 842.