Senate may have a progressive majority as Greens and David Pocock make election gains

While election night coverage was mostly focused on the House of Representatives, there has been a significant shift to the left, potentially setting up a progressive Senate majority, unlike the deadlock experienced by the first Rudd government.

Now it looks as though Labor, the Greens and the progressive independent David Pocock may together form an absolute majority in the Senate.

Labor and the Greens will disagree on plenty of issues, but both will have an incentive to ensure success in the next term. And with up to four Greens elected to the House of Representatives, legislation with Greens support will have a handy buffer in the lower house.

A large swing to Labor in Western Australia has put them on course to win three seats, in addition to the incumbent Greens senator. That third Labor seat also comes at the expense of the Liberals.

So the Liberals have lost their third seats in Queensland and Western Australia, and look unlikely to win more than two seats in any other state except for New South Wales.

Tammy Tyrrell of the Jacqui Lambie Network is in the box seat to take the third Liberal seat in Tasmania, unseating veteran Liberal senator Eric Abetz.

The race is wide open for the final seat in South Australia and Victoria, where the major parties and the Greens will win five seats between them, but are not in a position to challenge for the last seat. The United Australia Party is leading in Victoria and One Nation is leading in South Australia, but their lead is narrow and could easily change as more votes are counted. In addition to the two larger right-wing minor parties, Legalise Cannabis looks surprisingly competitive for these seats.

The most interesting result is in the Australian Capital Territory, where former Wallaby David Pocock is narrowly behind Liberal senator Zed Seselja on primary votes, 23.4% to 22.1%. The ACT shares some demographic similarities with the inner city seats where Liberal lower house MPs were defeated en masse, and the Liberal vote has crashed across central and northern Canberra.

While Seselja is leading, Pocock should benefit from preferences from the Greens, who are polling 10.5%, and fellow independent Kim Rubenstein, sitting on 4.5%, and should do respectably on preferences from most of the remaining candidates.

If he wins, as seems likely, this will be the first time since the introduction of proportional representation in 1949 that one of the major parties is entirely locked out of a jurisdiction.

There are still a lot of Senate votes yet to be counted, including all prepoll votes. And of course preferences are very unpredictable and may produce unusual results.

While the successes for minor parties and independents in the House of Representatives were more dramatic, a record crossbench in the Senate may prove almost equally significant. There were 18 crossbenchers in the Senate elected in 2013, but the current results suggest there may be as many as 19 in the next parliament, reducing the major parties to their lowest ever share of seats.