Shane Easson has been drawing up redistribution submissions for the Australian Labor Party since 1984. This year he’s not doing the Labor submission for New South Wales, although he is working on those in some other states, and he came on the podcast to talk about how it works, the things you’ve got to consider when writing such a submission, and whether they have any influence on the outcome.
The suggestions from members of the public, MPs and political parties for the current redistribution of federal electoral boundaries in New South Wales were released yesterday. Unfortunately I was a bit preoccupied on my way back from Malaysia so it’s taken some time to respond.
Antony Green has written a good summary of the major submissions from parties and MPs, so instead I’m going to go through the submissions by region, looking at how they differ in particular areas.
Today’s podcast was recorded at the roundtable on Boundary Delimitation and Malapportionment in Asia and the Pacific held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on October 28-29, 2023. The event was hosted by Indonesian NGO Perludem and Malaysian organisations Bersih and Tindak Malaysia, in coordination with International IDEA.
I attended to present on Papua New Guinea’s electoral boundaries and while there I recorded interviews with six of the other participants.
We’re now one year out from the next Queensland state redistribution. Queensland was the last state to extend its parliamentary terms to four years, and probably doesn’t hold redistributions often enough for the new term lengths.
The Australian Electoral Commission has now officially published the population projections to be used when redrawing Victoria’s federal electoral map prior to the next federal election. This follows on similar moments in the NSW and Western Australia federal redistributions in recent weeks.
Electorates must be drawn within 10% of the average enrolment as of the start of the process (August 2023, in this case) and within 3.5% of the average projected enrolment as of April 2028.
The Australian Electoral Commission has now released the numbers to be used when drawing new federal electoral boundaries for Western Australia. This follows up on the NSW numbers released last month, with Victoria due next week.
Western Australia will get a sixteenth seat, making up for the seat lost three years ago. This means that all fifteen seats in Western Australia are currently over quota.
When I went to look at the Voice referendum results at the booth level in my local area, I noticed some surprising trends in terms of which booths voted Yes.
In Parramatta, I was surprised that the north-east of the seat generally voted No, while more suburban areas in the west tended to vote Yes, particularly around Westmead and Wentworthville.
This map shows the booth results in the seat of Parramatta.
There has been some confusion and even some misleading analysis looking at how the Yes vote performed in seats with large Indigenous populations.
In particular, the focus has been on the seats of Lingiari, Leichhardt, Parkes, Kennedy and Durack, all of which voted No. The No vote was very strong in four of these seats, but a lot closer in Lingiari, where No only polled about 55%.
Ben is joined by William Bowe from the Poll Bludger to recap the results of the Voice referendum.
Polls have just closed in south-eastern Australia in the Voice referendum. Polls will close in 30 minutes in South Australia, in one hour in Queensland, an hour and a half in the Northern Territory, and three hours in Western Australia.
I’ll be on ABC Radio tonight – local, Radio National and News Radio – as part of their coverage. If I get a chance I’ll add a link to the broadcast.
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