I have previously written about the decline in the total vote for the major parties at federal elections and Victorian state elections, and there is also a story of a decline in the major party vote in New South Wales politics, although the story is not quite the same.
As we commence the NSW state election campaign, there’s a bit of confusion about how many seats we should credit to each party as a starting point. This is understandable considering that we’ve had a redistribution, a seat changing hands at a by-election, and numerous MPs leaving their party to sit as independents or with another party. So for this post, I’m just running through those numbers to hopefully come to an agreed set of numbers.
When results are reported for the NSW upper house, generally there’s an expectation that the primary votes mostly tell us who will win. That’s mostly true, but at the last three elections there’s always been one seat that went to a party that benefited from stronger preference flows – and these stronger flows usually flow in one direction.
Former Liberal minister Alan Tudge announced yesterday that he will be stepping down from parliament, thus triggering a by-election for his Melbourne-area seat of Aston.
The NSW upper house is elected to represent the whole state, proportionally. I have been wondering for a little while – in the absence of any geographical divisions, where do these members tend to come from? Are certain parts of the state under-represented or over-represented?
While there has been a lot of focus on the impending referendum to create the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice at the federal level, South Australia is on track to legislate a similar body on a shorter time frame.
We’re now seven weeks out from the NSW state election, and it seemed like a good time to take down the paywall for my guide to that election.
The guide features profiles of all 93 electorates, along with a profile of the Legislative Council contest.
You can use these links to navigate to each seat’s profile, or click through from the following map:
I have just finished an update of my Legislative Assembly candidate list and I thought I’d pop it up here for everyone to take a look. Over the next day or two I’ll make sure every seat guide has its candidate list updated too.
In the lead up to the state election, there have been quite a few prominent MPs have announced their retirement, including a number in key marginal seats.
This prompted me to collect data on how many members have retired at each election over the past 35 years. This has been aided by Wikipedia keeping lists of retiring MPs on the pages for recent elections.
Yesterday’s post analysed the intra-state trends in terms of enrolment for each NSW federal electorate. Today I’m looking at the trends in Victoria and Western Australia. These states are slightly simpler since we know they will be losing and gaining a seat respectively, and there has been less time since the last redistribution.