Western Australia’s state redistribution process has been completed, without making any major changes to the minimalist approach that was unveiled when the draft boundaries were published in July. There have apparently been “a limited number of changes to the original proposals”, but they haven’t made it easy to see where – no geospatial data has been provided, and any acknowledgement of them must be buried somewhere in the report’s discussion of the submissions that were received.
If there are any changes worth remarking on, they relate to two changes in name from the draft proposals. Thankfully, the commissioners have decided not to proceed with a plan to have a new electorate in the northern suburbs called Kingsway right next door to an existing electorate called Kingsley. Rather, the new seat will take the name of Landsdale. Another potential point of confusion has been removed a little further to the south, in that an electorate that was to be called Girrawheen will instead be called Mirrabooka. It can now be said that Landsdale is the successor to abolished Girrawheen, while Mirrabooka maintains continuity with the redrawn electorate of the same name. Had the draft proposal remained intact, Labor’s likeliest approach would have been to “move” Girrawheen MP Margaret Quirk to Kingsway/Landsdale (though she may instead retire), and Janine Freeman from Mirrabooka to Girrawheen. Now, Freeman can, in a sense, “stay put”.
I’ll come up with my own full accounting in due course, but that will be redundant for most purposes as Antony Green has sprung into action with his own set of estimated margins. His calculations include one notable difference with my own in that the northern suburbs seat of Joondalup, which Labor’s Emily Hamilton gained by a 0.6% margin in 2017, is rated as now being notionally Liberal with a margin of 0.4%, whereas I had it as 0.1% in favour of Labor (UPDATE: Antony has revised his numbers, and Joondalup is now fractionally on the Labor side of the pendulum). Neighbouring Hillarys, a 4.1% Liberal seat that I reckoned to be absolutely lineball when the draft was published, is credited by Antony with a 0.6% Liberal margin.
This and other actual and potential redistributions are the subject of a podcast on which I appeared with Ben Raue of The Tally Room, which you can listen to below. My focus is on the changes in the northern suburbs, particularly to Balcatta, Burns Beach and Wanneroo, all of which have been strengthened for Labor. Joondalup wasn’t discussed, the feeling being that anything with that narrow a margin is likely to revert to the Liberals after the once-in-a-generation Labor landslide in 2017.
Since there isn’t a huge amount to discuss in the redistribution, I encourage the thread below to be used to discuss Western Australian state politics generally. The subject hasn’t had much of a run on this blog since the 2017 election, in which time there has been a grand total of one published opinion poll. Last month the Liberals were circulating highly bullish internal polling, but it had an implausibly wide split in its gender breakdowns. The Liberals have been using these to promote the notion that Liza Harvey, who succeeded Mike Nahan as leader in June, has been a big hit with the “soccer moms” of Perth’s suburbs. The state of the Western Australian economy certainly gives the Liberals some cause for optimism, although there are signs emerging that it may be turning around.
However, the Liberals’ hopes of exploiting this are being complicated by the euthanasia laws that have been stuck in parliament for the last few months, which have consumed most of the oxygen available for state politics in the media. Grumblings are accordingly emerging within the party about the role of conservative powerbroker Nick Goiran in keeping the legislation stalled in the Legislative Council. Besides a huge majority, Labor has some other points in its favour: the state’s credit ratings have improved since the government came to office, with S&P Global recently providing an assessment of the situation that the government might well have written itself; and local monopoly newspaper The West Australian, while as conservative as ever in most respects, is showing little of the hostility towards Labor that blighted it during its last tenure in office.
Thoughtful coverage William ………………The enigma is the relatively secure position State Labor seems to have (the large swing to it last time accounts for plenty) when compared with the relatively poor showing for Labor at the Federal level. Your comments about the West are apposite though “conservative” is hardly the word I would use to describe this increasingly poor specimen of a metropolitan daily. I would suggest its coverage has dropped from poor to abysmal and what with its frequent recourse to Murdoch scribes and a team of political journalists who have difficulty seeing both sides of a picture, the paper is almost beyond any serious consideration.
Ta William. Interesting read. 🙂
What I find extraordinary about Antony’s numbers is that almost half of the Liberal seats – after such an extraordinary defeat – remain on margins above 10%.
In Victoria only 6 of the LNPs seats are above 10%, and all of them rural and held by Nationals.
I know nothing of WA, but this suggests to me that Perth must be incredibly socially stratified with very high concentrations of wealth. Is that right?
Nice to see David Michael getting a bigger buffer in Balcatta and also Yaz in Jandakot (although I’m not sure he can make it stick on such a small margin after the big anti-Barnett swing.)
I expect a swing back to the LNP but probably only 5-10 seats and the ALP will comfortably get a second term unless something seriously go wrong.
3z @ #3 Wednesday, November 27th, 2019 – 6:24 pm
WA Labor won the last election on the biggest swing in state election history – 12.8%, which IIRC is the third biggest in Australian history, pretty much every metropolitan Liberal seat on a margin of under 20% fell. After a swing like that, which didn’t really scratch the paint on any of the Nationals seats, only the safest of the safe Liberal seats remained.
Perth isn’t any more or less socially stratified than any other Australian city.
Bucephalus @ #4 Wednesday, November 27th, 2019 – 6:39 pm
100% agree. Some of those seats were won by Labor for the first time in 2017, and they’ll revert to type in 2021.
Liberal leadership in WA is weak at the moment and the Stoke’s outfit subdued on its anti-Labor stuff. This can all change. The demise of the Queensland State government when Labor only had a minibus full of members should always be remembered as what can happen to a party when they think they are high and dry. Same applies to Morrison and his motley crew………….There is no reason why 2-3 currently held Federal LNP seats (Liberal) could not go Labor’s way if and when the wheels fall off for the LNP in WA. People who bemoan the poor standing of Labor are confused by the party’s apparent lack of direction/substance with some kind of terminal condition.
William, I’ve re-checked my calculations and written some notes on both Hillarys and Joondalup on my blog. Trying to get the right transfer of booths from Burns Beach to Joondalup is complex. Making new guesses on how polling places split pushes Joondalup back on to the Labor side of the pendulum, which has some advantage in classifying seats come the next election.
https://antonygreen.com.au/2019-western-australian-state-redistribution/
I think that regardless of the theoretical margin or the incumbency that WA Labor has very little prospect of retaining/winning Joondalup or Hillarys.
Like us all I don’t know what that very large group that swung so broadly to Labor were looking for but if they were looking for a well managed, pretty tight, 1990s LNP tickle down type Government they would be very very happy indeed.
If they were looking for a Labor Govt, or a a Govt that showed leadership, or a Govt that was really going to make things better out in the mortgage marginals they are at very real risk of being a one term wonder were 100% of the wonder was on election night.
It was a marvellous night. But I thought a Labor Govt had won. I thought they’d act on renewables and the climate. They haven’t. I thought they’d just be generally more progressive, they aren’t. I thought they’d be smart enough to know that an economy effectively in recession needs stimulus, they do not know this.
I don’t expect it this to be known / resonate but it is pretty clear they are captive to every vested interest on the Terrace, just like a liberal Govt would be. The Property Council, the CCI, you name it they are doing exactly what the vested interest wants and very very little if anything for the actual mortgage marginals.
I’m Labor guy, but as I said I was expecting a Labor Govt and we most certainly do not have one of them.
@ WeWantPaul
WA Labor have generally been a good Labor government, the over optomistic expectations of those of us on the left aside.
I was at an AEMO briefing about the impact of rooftop solar on the SWIS a few months ago. Based on the current actual rate of rooftop PV installation on the SWIS, which is well in excess of the “worst” case AEMO forecasts which were presented, the impact on the grid of rooftop PV is going to catch up with whomever is in government during the next term, probably on a Saturday or Sunday in September or October 2022.
The SWIS is going to need a very large battery.
I am sure Mr McGowan would prefer the position of Premier rather than LOTO. I am happy to see a restrained Labor government in office rather than, a so-called “dynamic” Labor party in Opposition. Labor tried this at the Federal level under Shorten – the result being…………..what?
I somethings think some Labor supporters prefer to be on the opposition side – bit like the Greens – as this means lots of room to have a go at the government without actually having to put policies into action. Among other things, in Perth, the Liberals are not into expanding public transport and good old Charlie Court had all but closed down the Freo line when in office. Meanwhile, I see that some considerable kilometres of new suburban rail has already been completed with more to come in the next two years. True the Libs did “the Stadium” and “the hospital” and with some of Rudd’s money did the railway cover over to Northbridge (still unfinished it seems to me) but at the same time spread over $1 billion to the Nationals in Royalties for Regions. Apart from that and a $38 billion debt, what else was achieved by Colin and his crew?
Do you have some examples of this goodness, that wouldn’t be the goodness of a well managed circa 1990s LNP trickle down Govt?
I will give them some credit, it was less than 200 years after progressive people realised jailing people for being poor was deeply shit , and a string of instances concluding with a particularly vile arrest and strip search of a woman with broken rips who had literally gone from a vicious assault to the police for protection and was then arrested and strip searched, with broken ribs, for unpaid fines. 200 years and a string of disgusting outcomes like that and they acted.
Why next term, wtf haven’t they acted already, done the feasibility, put out a reverse auction. Collie has potential pumped hydro sites, is a great place for solar thermal, and surely there is a wind resource offshore or onshore somewhere near collie. My point being they don’t even need to screw over collie to do the right thing, and still they are NOT doing the right thing. They had same lame half arsed thing in Collie and they pulled the plug. The had a great idea to monetise the value of metronet and they caved into the property council. They are doing exactly what the CCI would want a liberal government to do with about everything.
But feel free to outline how great they’ve been?
That is not my point, my point is that trickle down has a 40 year strong record of screwing over everyone in WA bar Kerry Stokes, Andrew Forrest and Gina Rinehart and noone in the Perth marginals should be stupid enough to vote for a Govt like that. And McGowan is 100% a government for those billionaires.
The Federal ALP has tried your ‘be a slightly less shit LNP’ for something like thirty years now, and in the last 26 years have WON ZERO elections that could be attributed to the cowardly, flipflop, no principles, pandering to billionaires strategy. Everyone knows if you want to f*ckover ordinary Australians, see more workers killed at work , have inequality skyrocket, have wages fall and stagnate, have medicare slowly decay and be privatized in parts you go for the LNP, you don’t go for a slightly less sh*t version of the LNP, who run a campaign on fairness with*check notes* very very few very very minor policies at the margin to actually address fairness. It didn’t get the attention of most people who really wanted fairness and made the greedy that much more likely to vote LNP.
Final addendum the only reason I can think of them not doing anything, other than them not being at all progressive, and not caring about the disaster occurring in the outer Perth Metro marginals, is that doing anything costs money and they are trapped in the trickle down belief that is it better to run a surplus, EVEN IN A DISASTROUS STATE RECESSION / SLUMP than it is to help people and tackle a global climate change. If that is it, it is very f*cked. If you can think of something else it might be feel free to suggest.
Apology and correction:
I had assumed the WA ‘Labor’ Govt had carried through with its changes to jailing people for being poor. Alas I significantly over estimated them. They have just announced that they will. Sometime. In the future. Maybe. Bit like the Metronet line, they might actually do it, after 20 or 30 years of business case making, maybe.
But anyway Western Australian’s will be in jail this Christmas, rather than with their families, for being poor. People, particularly women, will just suffer domestic violence this Christmas because they know that if they report a physical assault to the police they will be arrested, for being poor.
But sure tell me the WA Labor Govt is doing a grand job, and is super dooper progressive.