Mike Seccombe

6 days ago | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Mike Seccombe

Greens leader Adam Bandt has lost his seat. At 2.15 on Thursday afternoon he held a media conference to announce he had just called Sarah Witty, his Labor opponent for the seat of Melbourne, to concede defeat. Almost 24 hours earlier, ABC election analyst Antony Green had called the result, but Bandt held back, in the hope that absent and declaration votes, which broke solidly to him in 2022, would do so again.

1 week ago | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Mike Seccombe

The Albanese government will be returned with an increased majority, there will be an expanded cross bench in the parliament, and the Liberal Party will win the lowest proportion of seats in the house since its foundation in 1944. This is the prediction of Paul Smith, director of public affairs and public data for YouGov, on the basis of the company’s final poll before today’s election, released late on Wednesday night.

2 weeks ago | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Mike Seccombe

News After decades of principled condemnation, the Liberal Party has done sweeping preference deals with One Nation and Family First. By Mike Seccombe. SHARE Copy Link Bluesky Facebook X LinkedIn Just days out from the 1996 election, Jim Barron, then Queensland state director of the Liberal Party, decided he had to disendorse one of the party’s candidates.

3 weeks ago | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Mike Seccombe

Peter Dutton failed to anticipate the obvious question on Monday, when he trotted his son out to speak to the media about the high cost of housing. Harry, 20, a second-year apprentice, told the reporters gathered at a real estate development in Brisbane that despite “saving like mad”, he saw no prospect of getting into the housing market “in the near future”. It’s a common story, to which millions of other would-be home owners might relate, except in one regard.

1 month ago | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Mike Seccombe

This week, before the release of the economic analysis underlying the opposition’s election promise to reserve more gas for domestic consumers, Danny Price predicted how the gas industry would respond. “What’s going to happen,” said Price, the principal of Frontier Economics, who did the opposition’s modelling, “is the gas producers are all going to catastrophise. “They’ll say there will be an investment freeze.