Socialist Alliance doubles vote in NSW electionshttp://socialistalliancesydney.blogspot.com27 March, 2007by Alex BainbridgeSocialist Alliance significantly increased its upper house vote in Saturday’s election. With up to a million votes still to be counted, the Socialist Alliance ticket had received 12,476 (0.38%) votes on the latest available figures.
This compares with a final SA upper house vote of 5,428 (0.145%) in the 2003 NSW election. So at this stage we have more than doubled the number of SA upper house votes in the state despite running SA candidates in only two lower house seats: Marrickville and Wollongong.
In the lower house, SA's Pip Hinman in Marrickville (where the Greens have raised their vote to 33% from 29% in 2003 ) has so far received 565 votes (1.8%) (the highest vote after Labor, Greens and Liberals - beating Democrats, Christian Democratic Party, Unity and independents) compared with a final vote of 526 (1.5%) in the 2005 Marrickville by-election.
In Wollongong, SA's Jess Moore has received 510 votes so far. SA did not run in Wollongong in the 2003 elections.
Socialist Alliance campaigning made a difference on the day. In one notable example, two comrades from the Gold Coast branch of SA travelled to Tweed Heads to hand out there and got a very good response. In that electoral district, 207 people voted for SA in the upper house – 114 of them at the booth the comrades staffed!
The same story was repeated in other regional and city areas where other SA members and supporters were handing out.
We got good votes for the upper house in the two electorates that we ran lower house candidates: Marrickville (516) and Wollongong (320); and good results in a range of working-class districts too: Liverpool (193), Campbelltown (158), Penrith (135), Rockdale (224), Granville (171), Auburn (193), Cabramatta (228), Canterbury (240), Lakemba (257), Gosford (137), Fairfield (217), Mount Druitt (201), Blacktown (166), Bankstown (166), Heffron (200). Unsurprisingly, we didn’t poll so well in Sydney’s north shore.
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