and the five Greens. Xenophon, although reported as left-of-centre, indicated plans to work closely with the renegade National, Senator Barnaby Joyce. If sufficient Coalition senators voted for government legislation, support from the crossbench was not required. Xenophon's election was at the expense of a Liberal candidate, without his presence the Coalition would have held enough Senate seats to block legislation. Compared to the previous Senate, the Greens gained one (losing Kerry Nettle in NSW but gaining Sarah Hanson-Young in SA and Scott Ludlam in WA), a new Independent was elected (Xenophon), and Labor gained four seats. The Coalition lost two, and the Democrats lost all four of their seats. The informal rate of 2.55 per cent ties with the 1993 election as the lowest informal rate in the Senate since federation. The introduction of the group voting ticket at the 1984 election saw the number of informal votes drop dramatically. Defeat of the Prime Minister Prime Minister John Howard lost his own seat of Bennelong, in Northern Sydney, to Labor candidate and former journalist Maxine McKew, becoming the second sitting prime minister, and the third party leader, since Federation to be defeated in his own electorate. Prime Minister Stanley Bruce and National Party leader Charles Blunt lost their seats in 1929 and 1990 respectively. Howard had held the seat since 1974, and it had been in Liberal hands ever since its creation in 1949. However, successive redistributions, along with demographic change, had made the once safe Liberal seat much friendlier to Labor; much of the area was represented by Labor at the state level. Howard's two-party majority was four percent, putting it right on the edge of seats that Labor would likely take in the event it won. Late on election night, when conceding Labor had won government, Howard also acknowledged the likelihood he had lost Bennelong to McKew, though he and McKew agreed the margin was "very tight". He had been ahead by thin margins for most of the night, never leading by more than 0.2 percentage points. Howard had been 206 votes ahead of McKew on the first count, and finished 2.8 percentage points behind McKew on the estimated two-party vote. McKew declined to claim victory at first, saying that the seat was on "a knife edge," while the Australian Broadcasting Corporation listed Bennelong as a Labor gain on election night, and ABC election analyst Antony Green said