Jacqui Lambie has secured the fifth seat in the Tasmanian Senate, edging out One Nation leader Pauline Hanson‘s daughter, Lee Hanson.
The Australian Electoral Commission confirmed the count on Tuesday morning following a tightly-contested electoral race.
The Jacqui Lambie Network senator will join Liberal senators Richard Colbeck and Claire Chandler, Labor senators Carol Brown and Richard Dowling, and Greens senator Nick McKim in rounding out the island state’s six upper house representatives.
While Hanson was all but knocked out of the race in the count’s early stages, Lambie’s seat was in doubt for weeks leading up to the final count.
Lambie, along with ACT independent senator David Pocock, played a significant role in negotiating with the first-term Labor government on its industrial relations reforms.
Given Labor is on track to win 28 of the Senate’s 76 seats to the Green’s 11, the governing party would only need to win support of the minor party to secure a 39-vcote majority without the support of crossbenchers.
Recently, Lambie has been outspoken in her opposition to salmon farming in Macquarie Harbour, a shallow fjord on Tasmania‘s west coast where environmental groups claim local species are being endangered by fishing.
Jacqui Lambie (pictured) has secured the fifth seat in the Tasmanian Senate
Lee Hanson (right) was unsuccessful in her Senate bid. She is pictured alongside her mother One Nation leader Pauline Hanson (left)
Lee Hanson fired shots at Lambie in the weeks before the election, agreeing with Sky News host Peta Credlin that her Senate rival tended to vote with the Greens and Labor despite campaigning on conservative values.
The younger Hanson said she had been influenced by her mother’s ‘fantastic family values’ but wanted to offer a ‘different perspective’.
‘I do test my mum’s thinking, like any child tests the older generation or their parent,’ she told Sky News in April.
‘I offer a different perspective, a new perspective, the new challenges of raising children in today’s era as well… we have debate, but it’s good debate. It’s healthy debate.
Lambie’s vote sits currently at 0.51, lower than her previous share of 0.69 in 2019.
Lambie first entered parliament in 2013 after scraping in at sixth place in the Tasmanian senate race as a representative of Clive Palmer’s Palmer United Party.
The following year, she left the since deregistered party to sit as an independent before being forced to resign in November 2017 along with a number of other dual citizen parliamentarians.
In the lead up to the federal election, Lambie said this would be her final term if re-elected.
‘My body is absolutely broken from what I went through with in the army and [Department of Veteran’s Affairs], and I’m struggling now,’ she told NewsWire in April.
