WA redistributed

80 comments on “WA redistributed”

1. cool I shall be back to the 80s.

   First I was in the seat of Gosnells, then Thornlie, then Southern River now back to Gosnells.

   Something resembling democracy in WA at last

2. A couple of observations:

   Kalgoorlie and Boulder split. Was this done to avoid one seat being too large and thus filled with too many “phantom voters”?

   Just four electorates in the Agricultural regions versus eight in the South West. (Good news for the Nationals in the upper house?) Most submissions went for a 6-6 split.

3. why don’t you cut to the chase William and tell us how many seats the Libs and Nats will lose?

4. I can only see four possible National seats – Eyre, Merredin, Moore, Wagin.
   I imagine Labor would lose Albany on those boundaries, but might well win Goldfields.

5. William am I right in recalling that the seat of Greenough, now abolished, had existed since the first WA legislature?

6. Omadei needs a coalition with the nats in order to have a seat. A three cornered contest could be tricky, could it not?

7. Adam
   I think you may well be right. OTTOMH I seem to recall seeing a result for Greenough in the Federation vote (or it may have been the seccession vote)!

8. Adam, I figured the changes would be so comprehensive that it wouldn’t be quite that easy. Does anyone think they can answer Adam’s question?

9. Firstly William let me point out you are both a legend and an electoral geek’s best friend! 😉
   I noted with interest the Esperance position has been accomodated – they wanted to be linking with Mining/Pastoral and maybe Kal – they’ve basically got their wish.
   Hanging out for your summary of the metro seats!

10. the new southern river seems to have been pushed into canningvale mcmansion territory. a slab of old serpentine-jarrahdale.

11. Looks like Labor end up with 38 seats, 19 for LIb + Nat, 2 Inds. Swing to lose for Labor rises from 2.1% to 3.2%.

    Some very very close seats out of it. Kingsley, Kalamunda and Darling Range end up too close to call.

    Labor seast of Albany and Geraldton become marginal Liberal.

    Lioberal seat of Bunbury becomes marginal Labor.

12. I have now checked, and yes, Greenough has existed continuously since 1890, and before that it was a Legislative Council electorate back to 1870. Amazingly considering how that area votes now, Greenough elected Labor members in 1924, 1927 and 1943.

13. Antony, you don’t have a list of which seats you think each party would hold you could give us do you?

14. I thought Labor had made it completely one-vote-one-value. In that case, it seems strange indeed that the country regions will still have 18 upper house members, the same as the city regions, with 6 members elected from each of the six regions.

15. there is a long way still to go to one-vote one-value – baby steps

16. The Agricultural region really is undersized for the upper house. It’s at a ratio of 2:7 compared to the Metro area on lower house electorates, and it’s notable that three of the four Ag region seats are under quota, while nearly all the Metro seats are over. It even has less than half the electors of the South-West region, and only minimally more than the M&P region, which has that somewhat unpalatable LDA applied to it’s numbers.

17. This is a rough first draft. Now starting my proof check. ‘-‘ margins are non-Labor seats.

    -29.7 Wagin
    -26 Merredin
    -19.7 Moore
    -19.3 Blackwood-Stirling
    -13.9 Eyre
    -11.5 Cottesloe
    -10.1 Churchlands
    -10 Nedlands
    -9.6 Vasse
    -8.4 Alfred Cove
    -8.4 Goldfields
    -7.8 Carine
    -7.4 South Perth
    -6.7 Bateman
    -6.3 Murray
    -3.7 Hillarys
    -3.5 Geraldton
    -2.3 Albany
    -1.7 Dawesville
    -1 Scarborough
    0 Kingsley
    0.4 Kalamunda
    0.6 Darling Range
    0.8 Collie-Preston
    1.2 Bunbury
    1.6 Ocean Reef
    1.8 Riverton
    3.2 North West
    3.2 Swan Hills
    4 Forrestfield
    4.3 Joondalup
    4.4 Jandakot
    4.4 Mount Lawley
    5 Southern River
    6.1 Wanneroo
    6.3 Kimberley
    6.9 Mindarie
    8.2 Mandurah
    9.4 Balcatta
    9.4 Midlands
    10.7 Pilbara
    11.2 Warnbro
    11.3 Rockingham
    11.4 Belmont
    11.5 West Swan
    12 Morley
    12.2 Gosnells
    12.7 Willagee
    13.2 Cannington
    13.6 Perth
    13.9 Fremantle
    14 Victoria Park
    14.5 Armadale
    14.6 Cockburn
    14.8 Bassendean
    17.4 Maylands
    19 Girrawheen
    19 Kwinana
    19.4 Nollamara

18. The compromises to one-vote-one-value in the legislation were the price the Greens demanded to get the bill through the Council, yes? Presumably they hope the peasants will vote for them in gratitude for saving some of their rotten boroughs.

19. Thanks Antony. When I first looked at the maps, it looks like I completely misjudged a few seats (Darling Range and Swan Hills in particular that seemed like they should be safe Liberal). Plus I thought most of the Labor marginals you’ve listed would be Lib ones (Kalamunda, Collie-Preston, Ocean Reef, Bunbury and Riverton). I did get my electorate (Scarborough) pretty much right though…

    Of course, it was all gut feel, as I didn’t bother going out and doing that much research – I’ll leave that for you experts.

20. If anyone’s interested, I’ve changed my write-up on Collie-Preston because I’d missed about 4000 new voters from Leschenault.

21. A pity that the Upper House will still be a huge case of zonal malapportionment, or gerrymandering in layman’s terms.

22. Kalgoorlie and Boulder have traditionally had separate electorates. I think all submissions to the review supported this continuing, presumably to maintain a balance of numbers for seats in the Mining and Pastoral Zone.

    Independent MP John Bowler preferred not to have Esperance as part of his electorate, and you can see why on Antony’s figures.

    I’ve noticed a shift in John’s language from “Labor Independent” to “genuine independent” over the past few weeks.

    He was upbeat today about his chances if he decides to contest the seat.

23. Thank you for the coverage
    re the country seats of Bunbury, Geraldton, Collie_Preston, Albany
    I think they are all too close to call
    I would not be suprised if all the sitting MPs held on
    look at What has happened with Goldfields (Kalgoolie) Mr Birney has obviously built up a personal vote
    Also WA labor has not had the consolidation with an increase in the vote which has occurred in other states.

24. It actually looks EVEN worse in the Upper House than before. In the old system, city and country each had 17 members from 3 regions, divided 5-5-7. This meant the South-West region, with more electors than either Agric or M&P, had 7 members, with the other 2 each having 5. Now, it looks like all 3 country regions and all 3 city regions each get 6 members, regardless of population.

25. My 2c on the upper house:

    One of the main functions of upper houses around the world is to represent different regional areas or demographics in a distorted fashion in order that these aforementioned groups aren’t dominated by the larger population group in such a way that the ‘tyranny of the majority’ always prevails.

    That was a long sentence.. let me try again – it’s ok for Upper Houses to be a little undemocratic to keep everyone happy. Lower Houses are where fairness matters.

    Unless of course you support WA losing some senate seats to NSW ?

26. i’m surprised mount lawley is not more marginal for Labor. From the maps, it seems to take in all of the fairly safe liberal parts of the inner city (Menora, Coolbinia – blue ribbon Lib, Mount Lawley – marginal and yokine – marginal).

27. In respect of a comment earlier, Kalgoorlie and Boulder have usually been in separate electorates, due to the fact that rural electorates were required to have lower enrolments. For a long time, they were also separate municipalities, but today they form the one municipality.

    Now with the equality of enrolments between city and country electorates, there is now no need to split the two halfs of the one municipality.

    In my submission to the review I included them in the one division – but no one agreed with it as it resulted in one of the Mining and Pastoral seats having a small actual enrolment with a large notional enrolment. Something that is allowed under the Act. It would seem that the Commissioners would prefer (despite their report) to have electorates with large numbers of actual electors AND split communities, rather than keeping communities intact. They have probably implicitly included a criterion that is not in the Act in their deliberations.

28. tonyr – I’d guess that Mt Lawley is not more marginal for the same reason Scarborough is marginal unlike the electorates it’s between – it’s an area that attracts the “latte-sipping” lefties. It’s probably the main part of the city that has that sort of voter – the “doctor’s wives” if you like. There’s not enough of them in WA to have a huge impact on a Federal electorate, but there’s certainly enough in that area to vastly impact at State level. In fact, if you check Coolbinia’s voting pattern (in Yokine) at the last election it actually tended to vote Labor more than the Libs.

    Michael, I guess the problem would be that to not split Kalgoorlie up would mean there would have to be an electorate that had Esperance in one corner and vast areas of empty space – I’d be certain that a member for such an electorate would be beholded entirely to the one medium sized town, and hardly at all to the remaining areas of the electorate – thus defeating the supposed reason for the LDA in the first place. Kalgoorlie-Boulder is by far the largest town in the M&P district, so I guess it had to be split into parts, as undesirable as that is. I did read through your submission though, good work on that – I wouldn’t know where to start.

    Speaker, the biggest problem with the upper house here is that one regional area (the South-West) is being treated one way, the others a different way. I’ve always said that regional WA should retain more than it’s one-vote-one-value share of upper house seats, but the Ag district just has too many (so does M&P, but that’s another matter). I guess there was no way they could create electorate boundaries that would have enabled Albany to be in the Ag district without including the whole area west to Augusta, so this is what they came up with. I guess the question would really be, would it be more appropriate for the far south-west corner to be considered in the Agricultural region, or have one that’s too small. Unfortunately the Blackwood-Stirling seat seems to be a necessity, so that’s the way it falls. To be honest, this would seem to be a case for the retention of the 7-5-5 split in country MLCs.

29. Mr. Speaker,

    Concerning Upper Houses, the US Senate actually represents the interests of the states, as you need to win your state to get elected to the Senate. Here in Australia, no-one except possibly Brian Harradine puts the interests of their states first; it’s party ideology first, and state a long way second. In prop. representation, the 1st two candidates on each major party ticket are guaranteed election, and so don’t need to care about their states. I agree with having an Upper House as a check on the excesses of the governing party in the lower house, using prop repres to give minor parties a chance to win seats, but I do not agree with zonal malapportionment, which will favour the Tories in WA with the Agric region giving a 4 Cons, 2 Left split.

    As to the Federal Senate, I would prefer prop. repres over the whole of Aus, with parties needing to get at least 4% to qualify for seats; a similar system is currently used in NZ and Germany. I recognise that this will never happen, as the Constitution says that no state can have its right to equal Senate representation abridged without its consent.

30. The major problem with the argument that the Legislative Council is a chamber to reflect the different regions and each region should have identical numbers of members is that it was never intended to be and no-one has given anyone the chance to consider this. The Greens used this argument in the negotiations over the changes to one-vote one-value.
    The Commonwealth Constitution is a compromise agreed to by the people who voted for it. The voters then chose a system to specifically bring about a Senate to protect the States. They were not to know that party politics would bring an end to the politics of the late 19th century.
    If WA needs to have regions – so that the LC doesn’t just become a version of the Legislative Assembly, then the regions should have a number of members to represent their populations.
    Because there was no consititutional settlement to establish the LC as a local senate, the current system of equal members is undemocratic.

    Interestingly, as an aside, the Labor Party has been a big loser in the Mining and Pastoral Region through the use of the additional voter top-up.

31. Well, at first glance I thought the distribution was pretty good, logical and clean.
    On closer consideration it seems to be less than perfect.
    I understand that our electoral act doesn’t require it but it would have been nice to see some consideration given to the principle that the party that wins 50%+1 wins govt (as I believe they do in SA).
    Anyone else got a view?
    At least my POV was accomodated… (that’s an unspoken challenge in there)

32. The decision by the Greens to support such a large malapportionment for the Upper House is the worst one ever made by Green MPs in an Australian parliament. The only good thing I can say about it is that it was certainly not done out of partisan self interest, since it will almost certainly work against us. However, just because it was done out of principle does not mean it was a good principle.

33. The “fairness idea” in SA is bunk.

    Because it assumes a uniform swing, which just doesn’t happen. Some seats swing 10%, others swing one.

    Say the TPP vote is 55% for Labor, for example, and they won with a majority of five seats.

    The boundaries commission MUST set up the seats so that there are five seats that will be lost if there is a “UNIFORM” 5% swing against them next election.

    But there isn’t a uniform swing! One seat might swing 20%, another might swing 1%. Even if the Labor vote in the following election was 48% they could still win because of the lack of a uniform swing.

    (does this make sense? I’m no good at this)

    The only thing that guarantees correct representation is proportional representation, and Lib/Lab are in no rush to introduce it and lessen their power.

34. VPL – it is impossible to make a single-member-constituency system guarantee that a party winning 50.1% of the 2PV will win the election, without gross gerrymandering, and even then it can’t be guaranteed. The SA legislation is well-intentioned but pernicious since it forces the commissioners to gerrymander the boundaries. If people want proportional outcomes they should support PR and live with the consequences.

    If the Greens didn’t support a malapportioned upper house in WA out of electoral self-interest, why *did* they support it? What “principle” were they upholding? Equal rights for cows?

35. VPL – If you read the submissions to the South Australian redistributions, there is an obsession with characterisation of votes in electorates won by independents. How do you classify these? The South Australian system was set up on the assumption that the contest is between the ALP and the Liberals (as it usually is in South Australia).

    Western Australia currently has a house based on proportional respresentation – the Legislative Council. However, it does not have equal voting so it overrepresents the rural areas. This doesn’t mean in WA that it acts to benefit any one side of politics (Left v Right) as the use of regions seems to work to provide a close approximation of the vote. However, it probably does benefit the Labor, Liberal-Nats and Greens versus the Democrats (if there were any left) and the Christian and ONP groups.

    Only 3 groups (Labor – Liberals – Greens) got enough votes over the whole state to get 1/34th of the vote.

36. One of the reasons the WA malapportionment in both houses has survived as long as it has is that until recently it had no real partisan effect, because Labor usually won many of the small rural seats thanks to the AWU and the miners. I think I am right in saying that Jack Tonkin was the first Labor Premier of WA to hold a city seat: Scaddan held a goldfields seat (I forget which one), Phil Collier held Boulder, Jack Willcock held Geraldton, Frank Wise held Gascoyne, Bert Hawke held Northam. This has only changed since the 70s, with the decline of Labor’s vote in the country towns. The pressure foer OVOV has really only mounted since the malapportionment began to have a partisan impact – even then I don’t think it’s possible to point to a WA election which Labor lost because of it.

    The real impact of the malapportionment was that it kept *both* major parties dependent on rural votes and thus increased the leverage of the farmers and the AWU regardless of who was in power.

37. No I am wrong, Henry Daglish was member for Subiaco. But I don’t think that weakens my point.

38. Indeed, Labor won the 1989 election with a markedly inferior share of the vote, both on primary (42.5 per cent to 47.4 per cent) and two-party preferred (no figures available, but the gap would if anything have been even wider, given the minor vote was dominated by conservative stalking horses Greypower).

39. the problem with P. R in it’s pure form is that you do not get a stable
    majority government, this is more the case the smaller is the quota for
    election. eg in WA if all MPs were elected in one lot the quota would be less than 2% for each seat. SA has tried to remedy the situation on the basis of drawing the boundaries which is difficult to do.
    maybe some form of adjustment can occur after the single member election is
    held via a pool of seats. which is available
    eg say the ALP wins 60% of the vote and gets 70% of the seats the pool of votes would allocate 10% extra seats to the L_NP to even things up

40. I think the compromise we have federally and in four states is a good one: a lower house with single-member seats, a system which usually allows the leading party to form a stable majority government, and an upper house elected by PR, which gives minorities a voice. Tasmania is the other way round, but they like being different.

41. “I understand that our electoral act doesn’t require it but it would have been nice to see some consideration given to the principle that the party that wins 50%+1 wins govt (as I believe they do in SA).”

    Logical problem with ensuring this – in how many ways can a party obtain 50%+1 votes? More than one can imagine. How do you know that in the next election, there major two parties will be the ALP and Coalition – what if a Purple Party and Blue Party appeared? (Unlikely, but not impossible.)

    No, a single member system cannot be guaranteed to ensure that the party receiving overall more 2PP votes wins a majority of seats. If you want that, you have to have a system in which the entire state (or territory) forms a single electorate (and you can superimpose local electorates if you like and have something like the NZ system). It just can’t be done as in single member systems, votes cast in one seat have no impact whatsoever on the result in a different seat.

42. Premier Scaddan (1911-1916) was the member for Brown Hill-Ivanhoe, an electorate long since abolished

43. It will be interesting to see what happens to Paul Andrews – a MP with health issues who all of a sudden finds himself in a marginal electorate.

44. Brendon Grylls told the Kalgoorlie Miner today he will concede Merredin to Max Trenorden if he wants it and seek Upper House preselection for himself.

    He said the Nationals will be seeking the balance of power in the Upper House.

45. He would lead the Nats from the Upper House, or resign as Leader?

46. He didn’t say anything about stepping down as leader, so I expect he would seek to continue as leader from the Upper House.

    He likened the Nats to the Democrats in wanting to “keep the bastards honest”. They will take a policy to the next election to quarantine 25 per cent of mining royalties for use in the regions where they are generated.

    Grylls appears to be modelling his independent approach on Peter Ryan’s in Victoria. I haven’t been in WA long enough to know if there is tension within the National Party regarding this.

47. Summary now up at the ABC elections site.

    http://www.abc.net.au/elections/wa/redistribution2007.htm

48. Thanks Antony.

    Just looking at the changes… Has anyone noticed the surprising result within metropolitan Perth?

    With eight new seats created in metropolitan Perth, the Liberal Party might reasonably have expected to be holding two or three extra metropolitan seats. Instead they’ve suffered a net loss of one metropolitan seat! The Liberals have gained Scarborough, but have lost Darling Range and Serpentine-Jarrahdale.

    (Note that this has NOTHING to do with the move to statewide one vote one value; since the metro seats already had relative equal enrolment.)

    The ALP’s share of the metro seats has risen from 71% to 79%. So Labor would appear to have benefited not only from the increased emphasis the reforms place on metropolitan Perth, but also from the way the lines have been drawn within metropolitan Perth.

49. Ok – I know that it is much easier said than done to produce boundaries so as to ensure the majority vote winner wins government, but I think David’s point (and William’s) is also well made, the new boundaries have made it harder for the coalition in terms of this outcome.
    Shame about Grylls – seemed like he might finally be a Nat who could do something worthwhile!
    As for Trenorden, this is the perfect time for him to retire and leave the seat to Brendan. Oh course, the upper house isn’t the end of the world (in spite of many comments in the West lately). Maybe Max should be the one moving to the red room!
    Will Omodei be safe or will Redman take him on and maybe win…???

50. Ok – for the pedants – scratch ‘coalition’ and make that ‘conservatives’.
    😉
    While I’m here – hope I’m not being insensitive but it looked like Brendan Grylls got hit in the face from his picture in today’s West…
    Anyone know what the deal is? Did he get in a punch-up with Max Trenorden over the seat? Does that explain why he’s happy to move to the Upper House? (I kid, I kid…)

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