Far from being a mob of raving lefties, Crikey readers showed they are quite a conservative lot with their entries in our 2007 Federal Election Competition and quite good judges to boot. The collective wisdom of the 400 entrants was that the Coalition would get a primary vote of 42.9% – higher than the 41.5% shown last night on the Australian Electoral Commission website but the final figure after postal and absentee votes will probably see the Coalition figure creep upwards. Not a bad margin of error by anyone’s reckoning.

When it came to the main event of predicting how many seats each party would win in each state in the House of Representatives and the Senate, the performance was again creditable. The median of the entries was 84 seats for Labor, 64 for the Coalition and two independents. A slight understatement of the likely Labor total but, as I wrote, Crikey readers are a conservative lot! They were, though, a little optimistic about the expected performance of the Greens in the Senate so perhaps I should change the description of the readership to conservatives with a Green tinge.