Australian federal election, 1961

Federal elections were held in Australia on 9 December 1961. All 122 seats in the House of Representatives, and 31 of the 60 seats in the Senate were up for election. The incumbent Liberal Party of Australia led by Prime Minister of Australia Robert Menzies with coalition partner the Country Party led by John McEwen defeated the Australian Labor Party led by Arthur Calwell.

Independent: Reg Turnbull

Seats changing hands

• Members in italics did not contest their seat at this election.

Issues

Due to a credit squeeze, the economy had gone into a brief recession in 1961. This combined with initial enthusiasm for the new Opposition Leader, Arthur Calwell, was enough to see a swing against the Menzies Government.

Significance

For a long time, the 1961 election remained the closest Federal election in Australian history, with the Coalition being reduced to a one-seat majority. The election was decided in the seat of Moreton, which was won for the Liberals by Jim Killen by only 130 votes, as the result of receiving 93 vital Communist preferences. The record for the closest election in Australia's history was eventually beaten by the 2010 election, which was a 72-72 seat draw.

The most notable casualty was Earle Page, the second-longest serving MP in Australia's history. He had been the member for Cowper since 1919. Although he was 81 years old and gravely ill with lung cancer, he decided to fight his 17th general election. His Labor opponent, Frank McGuren, needed a seemingly daunting 11-point swing to win the seat, but managed to win by a slim three-point margin on the second count. Page, who had been too sick to actively campaign, died 11 days after the election without ever knowing he had been defeated.

One fact which is rarely noted about the 1961 result is that even with Killen’s win in Moreton, Labor actually won the same number of House of Representatives seats as the Coalition. Both Labor and the Coalition won 62 seats, but two of Labor’s seats were for the Northern Territory and the ACT, whose representatives at that time only had limited voting rights. Their votes could not be counted on matters such as confidence votes which determine who would be in government.^[1]

See also

• Candidates of the Australian federal election, 1961
• Members of the Australian House of Representatives, 1961–1963
• Members of the Australian Senate, 1962–1965

Notes

References

• University of WA election results in Australia since 1890
• AEC 2PP vote
• Prior to 1984 the AEC did not undertake a full distribution of preferences for statistical purposes. The stored ballot papers for the 1983 election were put through this process prior to their destruction. Therefore the figures from 1983 onwards show the actual result based on full distribution of preferences.