2016 Australian federal election

The 2016 Australian federal election was a double dissolution election held on Saturday 2 July to elect all 226 members of the 45th Parliament of Australia, after an extended eight-week official campaign period. It was the first double dissolution election since the 1987 election and the first under a new voting system for the Senate that replaced group voting tickets with optional preferential voting.

In the 150-seat House of Representatives, the one-term incumbent Coalition government was reelected with a reduced 76 seats, marking the first time since 2004 that a government had been reelected with an absolute majority. Labor picked up a significant number of previously government-held seats for a total of 69 seats, recovering much of what it had lost in its severe defeat of 2013. On the crossbench, the Greens, the Nick Xenophon Team, Katter's Australian Party, and independents Wilkie and McGowan won a seat each. For the first time since federation, a party managed to form government without winning a plurality of seats in the two most populous states, New South Wales and Victoria. One re-count was held by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) for the Division of Herbert, confirming that Labor won the seat by 37 votes.

The final outcome in the 76-seat Senate took over four weeks to complete. Announced on 4 August, the results revealed a reduced plurality of 30 seats for the Coalition, 26 for Labor, and a record 20 for crossbenchers including 9 Greens, 4 from One Nation and 3 from the Xenophon Team. Former broadcaster and Justice Party founder Derryn Hinch won a seat, while Jacqui Lambie, Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm and Family First's Bob Day retained theirs. The Coalition will require nine additional votes for a Senate majority, an increase of three. Both major parties agreed to allocate six-year terms to the first six senators elected in each state, while the last six would serve three-year terms. Labor and the Coalition each gained a six-year Senator at the expense of Hinch and the Greens, who criticised the major parties for rejecting the "recount" method despite supporting it in two bipartisan senate resolutions in 1998 and 2010.

A number of initially-elected senators were declared ineligible a result of the 2017–18 Australian parliamentary eligibility crisis, and replaced after recounts.

As of 2023 this is the most recent federal election for the major parties to have new leaders when Shorten replaced Kevin Rudd after the 2013 Australian federal election, loss for the latter, as Labor leader after beating Anthony Albanese in the October 2013 Australian Labor Party leadership election a month later, and Turnbull replaced Tony Abbott as Liberal leader and prime minister on 14 September 2015 after a leadership challenge win in the September 2015 Liberal Party of Australia leadership spill ten months prior.