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All 59 seats in the Western Australian Legislative Assembly and all 36 members in the Western Australian Legislative Council 30 Assembly seats are needed for a majority | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Opinion polls | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Turnout | 1,467,159 (85.46%) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Winning margin by electorate. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The 2021 Western Australian state election was held on Saturday, March 13, to elect members to the Parliament of Western Australia, where all 59 seats in the Legislative Assembly and all 36 seats in the Legislative Council were up for election.
The incumbent Labor Government, led by Premier Mark McGowan, won a second consecutive four-year term in office in a historic landslide victory. Their primary challengers were the opposition Liberal Party, led by Opposition Leader Zak Kirkup, and the National Party, led by Mia Davies. Several minor parties also contested the election in the Assembly and Council.
ABC News psephologist Antony Green called the election for the Labor Party 42 minutes after the polls closed, with 0.7% of the vote counted.[1][2] Labor won 53 out of 59 of the seats in the Assembly, outdoing its previous record of 41 seats in 2017, whilst the Liberals had a wipeout loss and won only two seats, suffering a 14% two-party preferred swing.[3] The Nationals claimed the four remaining seats and became the largest opposition party in the Assembly. To date, the election is the most decisive result at any Australian state or federal election since Federation in terms of the percentage of lower house seats controlled by the governing party (89.8%),[4] and two-party preferred margin (69.7%–30.3%).[5] Labor's unprecedented victory extended to the Legislative Council, and the party claimed a majority of the seats in the upper house for the first time.[6]
Candidates were elected to single-member seats in the Legislative Assembly via full-preferential instant-runoff voting. In the Legislative Council, six candidates were elected in each of the six electoral regions through the single transferable vote system with group voting tickets. The Western Australian Electoral Commission conducted the elections.
Green formally called the election for Labor on ABC at 6.42pm, just 42 minutes after polls closed and with only 0.7 per cent of votes counted.