It could have possibly been the most boring election ever and the result looks like a hung parliament, but that didn’t stop all the networks that had election coverage specials from attracting reasonably good audiences.
The ABC election coverage broadcast was the most watched and had a national average of 1.7 million viewers during the peak time of 8-9.30pm according to OzTam figures.
Some 679,000 viewers were still tuned in to the public broadcaster after 11pm when the broadcast switched to The Drum and the result was still unclear.
Channel Nine was the best of the free-to-airs (not that Network Ten had any dedicated election coverage at all). The Nine telecast averaged 606,000 metro viewers across three-and-hours. Seven had a peak of 553,000 viewers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcY5bFN8cuA
Arguably two of the highlights of the evening were on Channel Seven when Liberal senator James McGrath had a heated exchange with broadcaster Alan Jones live to air, resulting in McGrath calling Jones a “grub”. While over at the ABC, Leigh Sales, finished her broadcast – the longest ever in ABC election night history – telling her predecessor, Kerry O’Brien to “suck on that”.
