2023 New South Wales state election
The 2023 New South Wales state election was held on 25 March 2023 to elect the 58th Parliament of New South Wales, including all 93 seats in the Legislative Assembly and 21 of the 42 seats in the Legislative Council. The election was conducted by the New South Wales Electoral Commission (NSWEC).
All 93 seats in the Legislative Assembly
and 21 (of the 42) seats in the Legislative Council
47 Assembly seats are needed for a majority
5,521,688
4,861,148 (88.04%)
(2.96 pp)
The incumbent minority Liberal/National Coalition government, led by Premier Dominic Perrottet, sought to win a fourth successive four-year term in office, but was defeated by the opposition Labor Party, led by Opposition Leader Chris Minns. The Greens, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, other minor parties and several independents also contested the election. The outcome resulted in the first Labor government in the state in 12 years, ending the longest Coalition government in New South Wales history.[1] It was also the first time since 1995 that Labor had won a New South Wales state election from opposition.[2] The election also marked the second time in history that the Australian Labor Party gained control of the entirety of Mainland Australia at the federal and state levels simultaneously (leaving Tasmania as the only state with a Liberal government), a feat that had last been achieved in 2007.[3][4]
Though the Coalition was defeated, Labor were unable to win enough seats to govern in amajority, resulting in a hung parliament. But Labor will be able to govern with the support of independent MPs Alex Greenwich, Greg Piper, and Joe McGirr, who will guarantee Labor confidence and supply.[5] Piper also made an agreement with Labor to become the Speaker of the Lower House, a role which he had been preparing for by doing duty as a deputy speaker.[6]
New South Wales has compulsory voting, with optional preferential, instant runoff voting in single-member seats for the lower house, and single transferable voting with optional preferential above-the-line voting in the proportionally represented upper house.
The online voting system iVote was not used in this election. The NSW government suspended iVote after the 2021 NSW local council elections saw five wards impacted by access outages, with three significant enough that analysis suggested as high as a 60% chance the wrong candidate had been elected, after which the NSW Supreme Court ordered those elections voided and re-run.[7]
The 2015 and 2019 elections were conducted using boundaries set in 2013. The state constitution requires the Electoral Commission to review electoral district boundaries after every two elections, to ensure that the number of voters in each district is within 10 per cent of the "quotient" – the number of voters divided by the number of Legislative Assembly seats. In 2020, the Commission began work on determining new boundaries for the 2023 election, a process commonly known as "redistribution". The projected population quotient in 2023 was 59,244, meaning that each district needed to have between 53,319 and 65,168 enrolled electors.[60]
In November 2020 the proposed redistribution names and boundaries were released to the public for submission. All proposed abolished, created or renamed districts are within Sydney. In August 2021, the final determinations were gazetted.[61]
The Labor-held district of Lakemba was abolished and largely replaced by the adjacent Bankstown. A new district of Leppington in south-west Sydney was created from Camden and Macquarie Fields.[61]
A number of Liberal-held districts will be renamed, to reflect the population centre in the districts’ new boundaries:[61]
The Liberal-held Heathcote took in parts of the Illawarra from the Labor-held Keira and became a notionally marginal Labor seat.[62]