Australia 1977 federal election

Final results from ParlGov, read 5 October 2026: Liberal Party of Australia won 67 of 124 seats with 38.1% of the vote; 95.1% of registered voters cast a ballot, down 0.3 points on 1975.

Australia
Held Saturday 10 December 1977

Result

63 for a majority

Seats and votes by party

Party	Seats	± seats	%	± points	Votes
Australian Labor Party	38	+2	39.6	−3.2	3,141,051
Liberal Party of Australia	67	−1	38.1	−3.7	3,017,896
National (Country) Party / National Party of Australia	18	−4	9.8	−1.2	776,982
Australian Democrats	0		9.4		743,365
Independents	0	0	1.4	−0.3	113,827
Democratic Labour Party	0	0	1.4	+0.1	113,271
Country Liberal Party	1	0	0.2	0.0	16,462

± is the change against the Australia 1975 federal election, party by party.

Votes by party

Australian Labor Party 3,141,051
Liberal Party of Australia 3,017,896
National (Country) Party / National Party of Australia 776,982
Australian Democrats 743,365
Independents 113,827
Democratic Labour Party 113,271
Country Liberal Party 16,462

ParlGov lists parties with at least 1 percent of the vote or 2 seats, so the rows do not add up to the valid votes. How we read it.

Share of the vote

Australian Labor Party39.6%
Liberal Party of Australia38.1%
National (Country) Party / National Party of Australia9.8%
Australian Democrats9.4%
Democratic Labour Party1.4%
Country Liberal Party0.2%

Turnout

95.1% of the 8,548,779 registered voters cast a ballot (8,127,762 ballots), down 0.3 points on 1975. 7,922,854 of them were valid votes. The lowest turnout since 1969 in our data. How turnout is counted.

Votes and seats

Liberal Party of Australia38.1% of votes54.0% of seats
Australian Labor Party39.6% of votes30.6% of seats
National (Country) Party / National Party of Australia9.8% of votes14.5% of seats
Country Liberal Party0.2% of votes0.8% of seats
Australian Democrats9.4% of votes0.0% of seats

Each party's share of the vote (outlined) and of the seats (filled)

The Gallagher index of disproportionality is 15.0 (0 when seats follow votes exactly); the effective number of parties is 3.1 by votes and 2.5 by seats; Australian Labor Party led Liberal Party of Australia by 1.5 points of the vote. How these are computed.

Sources and licence

ParlGov 2024 Release (Döring and Manow), Harvard Dataverse (source). Licence: CC0 1.0 Universal
Wikidata, party colours (P465) (source). Licence: CC0 1.0 Universal

Our text and compilation: CC BY 4.0. How to reuse and cite this page.