A well-known firebrand senator has beaten an upper house colleague’s daughter to retain her seat after a nail biting election count.
Tasmanian Jacqui Lambie faced a tight race for the state’s final Senate seat against One Nation’s Lee Hanson, whose mother Pauline founded the party.
But on Tuesday the Australian Electoral Commission declared Senator Lambie had triumphed and will return to parliament for another term.
Tasmania’s other senators include Labor’s Carol Brown and Richard Dowling, the Liberals’ Claire Chandler and Richard Colbeck, and Nick McKim from the Greens.
The upper house chamber will also be home to at least one new face after Labor’s landslide May 3 election win produced another surprise result.
Charlotte Walker will become Australia’s youngest-ever senator at just 21 years old after she was preselected in the usually unwinnable third spot on Labor’s South Australian ticket.
The youngest person to be elected to an Australian parliament was Liberal Wyatt Roy, who was 20 when he became a member of the lower house, but Ms Walker will be the youngest holder of an upper house seat.
In the lower chamber, two seats are undergoing recounts after fierce contests.
Election officials in the north Sydney seat of Bradfield are undertaking a full recount after just eight votes separated Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian from independent challenger Nicolette Boele.
Meanwhile, a partial recount is underway in the inner-Melbourne seat of Goldstein, where independent Zoe Daniel was fending off Liberal candidate Tim Wilson.
The full distribution put Mr Wilson ahead of the incumbent by 260 votes.
The Bradfield recount could take up to two weeks while the tally in Goldstein is expected to take four days and will begin on Wednesday.
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