Crikey’s Election Tipping Comp right on the money

Forget the opinion polls and predictions from the so-called expert pundits. Just stick with the readers of Crikey. With results for the House of Representatives almost complete the collective wisdom of entrants in the Crikey Federal Election Contest is apparent for all to see.

Our readers were asked to nominate how many seats the Coalition, Labor and Independents/Others would win in each state in the House of Representatives.

The median prediction was that Labor would emerge with 84 members, the Coalition 64 and Independents 2. Unless there is some freak happening as the final votes are counted that will turn out to be spot on.

When it came to assessing the result by state there was again considerable accuracy by our forecasters.

The split for the ACT, New South Wales, the Northern Territory, South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria was as the collective wisdom predicted. The only mistakes were in Western Australia where Labor did worse than expected, and Queensland where the result was better with the discrepancies cancelling each other out when it came to the Australia wide prediction.

Opinion pollsters would be proud of the way Crikey predicted the Coalition’s primary vote too. Our media figure was 42.9% – just slightly higher than the actual 42.14%.