Australia 1983 federal election

Final results from ParlGov, read 5 October 2026: Australian Labor Party won 75 of 125 seats with 49.5% of the vote; 94.6% of registered voters cast a ballot, up 0.3 points on 1980.

Australia
Held Saturday 5 March 1983

Result

63 for a majority

Seats and votes by party

Party	Seats	± seats	%	± points	Votes
Australian Labor Party	75	+24	49.5	+4.4	4,297,392
Liberal Party of Australia	33	−21	34.4	−3.0	2,983,986
National (Country) Party / National Party of Australia	17	−3	9.0	+0.1	779,130
Australian Democrats	0	0	5.0	−1.6	437,265
Independents	0	0	1.7	0.0	149,293

± is the change against the Australia 1980 federal election, party by party.

Votes by party

Australian Labor Party 4,297,392
Liberal Party of Australia 2,983,986
National (Country) Party / National Party of Australia 779,130
Australian Democrats 437,265
Independents 149,293

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

Turnout

94.6% of the 9,372,064 registered voters cast a ballot (8,870,175 ballots), up 0.3 points on 1980. 8,684,863 of them were valid votes. How turnout is counted.

Votes and seats

Australian Labor Party49.5% of votes60.0% of seats
Liberal Party of Australia34.4% of votes26.4% of seats
National (Country) Party / National Party of Australia9.0% of votes13.6% of seats
Australian Democrats5.0% of votes0.0% of seats

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

The Gallagher index of disproportionality is 10.6 (0 when seats follow votes exactly); the effective number of parties is 2.7 by votes and 2.2 by seats; Australian Labor Party led Liberal Party of Australia by 15.1 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.