July 12, 2016
After a nail-biting 10-day wait, LNP candidate Ken O’Dowd – the sitting Member – has finally been able to claim victory in the seat of Flynn.
His main rival, ALP candidate Zac Beers, phoned Mr O’Dowd on Tuesday afternoon to concede defeat and congratulate him on his campaign.
“And I congratulated him back on the effort he put into his campaign,” Mr O’Dowd said.
The seat of Flynn stretches from Wondai and Proston in the south, north to the Gemfields area and east to Gladstone and Agnes Waters.
It includes a slice of the South Burnett as well as most of the Central and North Burnett regions.
It’s been a topsy-turvy week for both candidates since the July 2 poll.
ABC election analyst Antony Green initially called Flynn as a likely ALP win, before moving it to “uncertain” and then, as postal votes were counted, a likely LNP victory.
However, National Party leader Barnaby Joyce was always counting on Flynn being an LNP win because of the large number of postal votes still to be counted.
In the end, he proved correct, with Mr O’Dowd securing 64.31 per cent of the postal vote.
At 6:02pm on Tuesday, Mr O’Dowd had a clear lead over Mr Beers on a two-party preferred basis, 41,859 to 40,533, a margin of 1326 votes.
The gap was even larger on first preference votes: 30,500 (LNP) to 27,859 (ALP).
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation candidate Phil Baker was in third spot with 14,049 first preference votes.
Anticipating victory, Mr O’Dowd was in Canberra on Tuesday for a meeting of the federal parliamentary meeting of the National Party.
In the understatement of the campaign, Mr O’Dowd told southburnett.com.au the result “took a while didn’t it?”.
When he went to bed on the Saturday night of the election, he was very slightly ahead. But when he woke up on Sunday morning he was several thousand votes behind.
Mr O’Dowd said some of the delays over the past few days weren’t caused by the actual counting – although at a Wondai booth, a bundle of 125 votes had been found in the wrong pile – but rather by the necessary checks to make sure each postal vote was valid.
He said he was happy the result was finally resolved, but even happier for his staff who had been working hard during the campaign, and afterwards scrutineering votes.
The swing in Flynn was all to One Nation: 17 per cent on first preferences, higher than many other areas.
The ALP picked up just 0.37 per cent while Mr O’Dowd was down 9 per cent.
Mr O’Dowd attributed the swing to One Nation as a protest vote against the major parties, as well as the result of the party’s “stance against Muslims”.
“That’s democracy,” he said.
Mr O’Dowd said it was too early to say what role he would play in the new Parliament as the Senate results were still at least 10 days away.
“We haven’t got the team together yet,” he said.
The Nationals are still hopeful of securing another Senate spot from Western Australia, as well as re-electing Senator Barry O’Sullivan in Queensland.
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, who chaired Tuesday’s National Party meeting, reportedly told MPs he was determined to extract “the best deal possible” for the National Party in Coalition negotiations with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
The Prime Minister is facing pressure to give the Nationals an extra Cabinet position.
Related articles
- ABC Calls Flynn For O’Dowd
- O’Dowd Snares Postal Votes
- Flynn Now ‘In Doubt’
- We Can Still Win Flynn: Joyce
- LNP Locks Up Wide Bay, Maranoa
- Sword Hanging Over O’Dowd
- LNP Ahead In South Burnett
