Final polling is underway in the ACT where more than 150,000 voters are weighing up whether to give Australia’s longest-serving leader another term or elect a new government for the first time in 23 years.
Like almost half of the territory’s enrolled voters, Chief Minister and Labor leader Andrew Barr has already cast his ballot in the lead-up to Saturday.
His opponent Elizabeth Lee, a moderate, has reinvigorated the Liberals after their many years wandering the wilderness in Australia’s most progressive jurisdiction.
For all his detractors, Mr Barr still commands strong support amongst electors after almost a decade in power at the head of of a Labor-Greens coalition.
Retiree Andrew Grant was still undecided about who to give his vote to in Mr Barr’s central Canberra electorate of Kurrajong, where Ms Lee and Greens leader Shane Rattenbury are also vying for the five seats up for grabs.
While he thought the government was showing signs of complacency, he gave it full marks for its plans to grow housing supply by increasing density and continuing to build out its light rail network.
“Being an older person, I’m more interested in what’s available for the younger people,” he told AAP outside an early polling centre in Dickson.
“I’m in a walking group and young people are always talking about how expensive housing is.”
The Liberals have made housing a key policy pillar as well, preferring instead to release new land for development on Canberra’s outer fringes and cancelling plans to extend the highly-popular light rail to federal parliament and the southern suburbs.
But they seem to be getting the biggest cut-through on the cost of living.
Ms Lee hopes to capitalise on frustration among homeowners who have seen their rates grow substantially since the government moved to abolish stamp duty in 2012, setting a 2.2 per cent cap on rate increases.
However, with big spending promises, including a new sports stadium in the centre of town, and no new taxes, she has come under fire for her policy costings.
The Greens, meanwhile, are confident they can build on the record six seats they won in 2020.
Mr Rattenbury, who has been a member of cabinet since 2012, has said he has what it takes to become chief minister in a Greens-led coalition government.
But electoral analyst Ben Raue, who runs the Tally Room website, says it will be difficult for the Greens to increase their representation, while a small drop in their vote could cost them an out-sized number of seats, due to the territory’s Hare-Clark voting system.
He predicts another Labor minority government, given the ACT’s left-leaning nature.
The Greens are also threatened by a strong independents challenge, led by the David Pocock-backed Independents for Canberra group and their lead candidate Thomas Emerson.
No independents have won a seat in the 25-member Legislative Assembly since 1998 but the success of Senator Pocock and the teals in the 2022 federal election has given them hope.
With no reliable polling to go by, who will be left holding the reins in the nation’s capital on Saturday night is anyone’s guess.
