Federal Redistributions – Page 3

Western Australia redistributed: act one

The major parties roll out their wish lists ahead of the redistribution that will grant Western Australia a sixteenth seat in the House of Representatives.

The first batch of submissions have been published for the Western Australian federal redistribution, which will facilitate the increase in the state’s seat entitlement from 15 to 16. Both Liberal and Labor agree that the new seat should be created through a division of Hasluck, which is presently a rather ungainly construction consisting of cross-sections of three suburban corridors in Perth’s east. The parties are also agreed that the southern electorate should encompass Thornlie, Kenwick and Gosnells together with the area around Armadale to the south, which presently makes the seat of Canning theoretically winnable for Labor, and that this should be the electorate that gets the new name. However, the Liberals would have the new electorate extend westwards into Jandakot, whereas Labor would prefer that it extend eastwards into the Darling Range at Roleystone. Either way, the seat would have a notional Liberal margin of around 3%.

Another disagreement concerns which late former Premier the new seat should be named after, with the Liberals favouring Court and Labor going for Tonkin (and not, as I might have anticipated, Beazley). Neither John Tonkin (1971-74) nor Sir Charles Court (1974-82) has any particular connection to the area that I’m aware of, but the Liberals’ choice would have the advantage of acknowledging two former premiers rather than one. On the other hand, Labor might well argue that it’s their turn, Hasluck (2001), Brand (1984) and Cowan (1984) all acknowledging figures from the conservative side of politics. Further to the left, there appears to be a campaign to have the seat named after Jo Vallentine, with Peter Garrett among those making submissions to that effect.

More substantive distinctions concern the manner in which Hasluck should be compensated for its losses. Labor wants the electorate to extend northwards, into the Swan Valley and as far as Ballajura to the west, whereas the Liberals propose that it should reach all the way east to the Avon Valley, extending through the Darling Range around Mundaring to Northam, York and Beverley – an area that presently accounts for a large part of Christian Porter’s seat of Pearce. Pearce would in turn be compensated by absorbing northern Perth suburbia around Wanneroo. This is at odds with the submission from the Nationals, who hope that Pearce might be made winnable for them by losing outer suburban territory while maintaining its overall shape, much of which corresponds with its state seats of Central Wheatbelt and Moore.

Both Liberal and Labor are presumably calculating that the new seat will more likely than not be won by Labor, who surely can’t go on performing as badly as they have at the last two elections indefinitely. However, the Liberal plan would add around 2.5% to their 5% margin in Hasluck, while hardly touching their 9% margin in Pearce (albeit that sedate country areas would be exchanged for the electorally volatile mortgage belt). Labor’s proposal would keep the margin in Hasluck in its existing ballpark, retaining the winnability of a seat it won upon its creation in 2001 and again in 2007. It would also maintain the seat’s consistently urban character, and hence makes considerably more sense on community of interest grounds.

Elsewhere, both sides recognise that the Liberals’ second most marginal seat, Swan (margin 6.5%), is not going to change much, since it is locked in place by by the Swan and Canning rivers – although a small amount of garnishing will be required to bring it within quota. In the traditionally marginal seat of Cowan (7.5%), Labor understandably wants its position strengthened through the addition of strong territory south of the boundary at Balga and Mirrabooka, which is presently being wasted for it in the increasingly safe Liberal seat of Stirling. However, Labor also proposes that Liberal-leaning territory out to Burns Beach be added to the electorate’s north-west, which looks awkward on the map and causes me to wonder if it’s intended to make their overall design for the seat appear less opportunistic. The Liberals’ proposals for the seat look broadly neutral to my eye.

It so happens that a state redistribution for Western Australia is also in its early stages. The quota determinations offer an interesting insight into the state’s demographic upheavals, with Butler on Perth’s northern coastal fringe fully 33.6% over the average enrolment, and the southern corridor seats of Kwinana (25.0%) and Warnbro (23.5%) not far behind. By contrast, the unwinding of the mining boom has caused enrolment to slump by 22.0% in North West Central and 16.4% in Kalgoorlie.

UPDATE: You can see the parties’ proposals on the maps of below, and select which layers you want to see by clicking on “visible layers”. For a bigger view, see here.

Federal seat entitlements: WA up one, NSW down one

Wherein the Australian Electoral Commission formally confirms that Western Australia will gain a sixteenth seat at the next federal election, with one of the 48 seats in New South Wales for the chop.

The Australian Electoral Commission has announced its determination of states’ House of Representatives seat entitlements, confirming that New South Wales is to lose one of its 48 seats and Western Australia will gain a sixteenth seat. This is the third time New South Wales has lost a seat since the 2007 election, and Western Australia’s third gain since the enlargement of parliament in 1984. Needless to say, redistributions will be required, which will complicate any notion of an early election before they are finalised. This is because “mini-redistributions” would be needed to ensure that WA was granted the seat to which it is entitled. To cop Antony Green’s description of this ugly and so far never used procedure: “The AEC would divide the two neighbouring seats with the highest combined enrolment into three seats. In a state set to lose a member, the two electorates with the lowest enrolment would be amalgamated into a single seat.”

Ben Raue at The Tally Room earlier did posts on how the two redistributions might play out, which you can see here for New South Wales and here for Western Australia. In the former case, the simplest option would be to excise a seat from an under-quota stretch extending from the Central Coast to Ballina, the most likely candidate being one of the Hunter region seats. However, Antony Green offers that you “might see a more radical re-design which abolishes both Hunter and Riverina and creates a new upper hunter/mid-west seat”. For Western Australia, what seems to me the logical strategy would be to divide the ungainly eastern suburbs electorate of Hasluck to create one seat oriented around Midland and another around oriented around Gosnells (and I might further suggest naming the former seat Swan, and renaming the seat currently bearing that name).

No doubt though there is a lot I have failed to consider. So here is a thread for discussion of the matter.

Essential Research: 56-44 to Coalition

Essential Research has Labor recovering a badly needed point on the two-party preferred vote, with the Coalition’s lead back to 56-44 after rising to 57-43 last week. On the primary vote, Labor is up one to 32 per cent, the Coalition down one to 48 per cent and the Greens up one to 11 per cent. The survey also finds opposition to Australian’s involvement in Afghanistan little changed since November at 64 per cent, with 21 per cent wanting the current presence to be maintained and 4 per cent wanting it increased. Forty-four per cent agreed women were not “respected and treated fairly” in the defence forces against 31 per cent who thought they were, with a strong gender gap recorded in the expected direction. A timely question on Wikileaks had 53 per cent supporting its release of material against 26 per cent opposed, with 36 per cent believing the government had failed to provide sufficient support to Julian Assange in his legal travails, 22 per cent believing he had received appropriate support and 41 per cent saying they didn’t know. The survey also found strong support for unions, with 48 per cent saying they had been good for workers against 17 per cent bad, and 56 per cent agreeing they remained important for working people against only 19 per cent who disagreed.

Plenty of further recent news to report, most of it involving preselections, and most of it involving the Liberals.

Continue reading “Essential Research: 56-44 to Coalition”

Matters South Australian

Three thereof:

• Draft boundaries have been published for a redistribution of South Australia’s federal electoral boundaries. Antony Green reviews the damage. This is not one of the more momentous redistributions of recent history: the changes are fairly minor, Labor has no seats on margins of less than 5 per cent, and one doubts the direction of the electoral tide at the next election will be such as to endanger the Liberal margins of Boothby and Sturt. This is just as well for the Liberals in the former case, as three amendments have cut the margin from 0.8 per cent to 0.3 per cent, while Christopher Pyne in Sturt has gained an extra 0.4 per cent buffer on his 3.4 per cent margin. Labor has had a 0.4 per cent free kick in its most marginal seat of Hindmarsh, pushing Steve Georganas’s margin from 5.7 per cent to 6.1 per cent, while Kate Ellis’s margin in Adelaide has been garnished from 7.7 per cent to 7.5 per cent. It’s a measure of Labor’s extraordinarily strong performance in South Australia last time that Kingston, Makin and Wakefield, which were all in Liberal hands late in the life of the Howard government, now have double-digit Labor margins. The redistribution hasn’t disturbed this, although an exchange of northern Adelaide Labor heartland for parts of the Barossa Valley has cut Nick Champion’s margin in Wakefield from 12.0 per cent to 10.3 per cent.

• The Advertiser has taken advantage of the leadership transition to conduct one of its occasional self-conducted polls of state voting intention. Conducted in the wake of Mike Rann’s semi-involuntary retirement announcement, this has the Liberal lead narrowing from 58-42 in late June to 54-46, from primary votes of 32 per cent for Labor (up seven) and 44 per cent for the Liberals (down five). However, given a margin of error of around 4.5 per cent, and suspicions that the paper’s polling expertise might not be all that great, caution should be exercised before diagnosing any kind of durable Labor revival. Nonetheless, a substantial 57 per cent of respondents say they expect better from incoming Premier Jay Weatherill than they have been getting from the incumbent.

• The date for the Mike Rann-Jay Weatherill leadership transition, in case you missed it, has been set for October 20.

Essential Research: 52-48 to Coalition

Newspoll looks to be taking a week longer to return than I expected, but Essential Research was back in action yesterday with a poll showing no change in voting intention since the previous survey on December 20: the Coalition leads 52-48 on two-party preferred, with primary votes of 46 per cent for the Coalition, 38 per cent for Labor and 10 per cent for the Greens. Unusually, the two-survey rolling average for the latest figures encompasses polling done last week and in mid-December, suggesting little change in sentiment over the break. While Labor remains where it was on voting intention, Julia Gillard has enjoyed a spike in her personal ratings. Her approval is up eight points to 51 per cent and her disapproval down four to 36 per cent – her best figures since July 19 – and her lead as preferred prime minister has increased from 45-34 to 47-32. Tony Abbott’s ratings have improved as well: approval up three to 42 per cent and disapproval down two to 37 per cent. Other questions in the survey related to respondents’ online shopping habits.

The Australian Electoral Commission has also published the full report for the redistribution of Victorian federal electoral boundaries. I don’t believe Antony Green has calculated margins for this redistribution (he did for the more radical first version, which was entirely abandoned after a generally negative response), but I have it on pretty reliable authority that the Labor marginals list runs Corangamite (little change, with the margin still under 0.5 per cent), Deakin (pared back from 2.4 per cent to about 0.5 per cent) and La Trobe (a very slight boost but still around 1 per cent), followed by a big gap before Chisholm (6 per cent), Bruce (8 per cent), Melbourne Ports (8 per cent), McEwen (a four point boost to 9 per cent) and Bendigo (9 per cent). On the other side of the ledger, the 1.8 per cent Liberal margin in Aston has been cut to almost nothing, while Dunkley is unchanged on 1.0 per cent – beyond that are Casey (2 per cent), McMillan (4 per cent) and clusters of traditionally safe seats around 6 per cent (Wannon, Higgins and Goldstein) and 9 per cent (Menzies, Flinders and Indi).

UPDATE (24/1): Crikey reports this week’s Essential Research has Labor gaining a point to trail 51-49. The poll also inquired into various leaders’ handling of the flood crises, with 77 per cent rating Anna Bligh favourably against 6 per cent poor; 61 per cent against 4 per cent for Brisbane lord mayor Campbell Newman; 42 per cent against 23 per cent for Julia Gillard; 19 per cent against 32 per cent for Tony Abbott; 34 per cent against 8 per cent for Ted Baillieu; and 21 per cent against 23 per cent for Kristina Keneally.

UPDATE 2: Full report here. Primary vote figures show there’s not much in the shift on two-party: both the Coalition (45 per cent) and Labor (37 per cent) are down a point. Also covered are “most important issues in deciding how you would vote” (“ensuring a quality education for all children” down from 32 per cent to 23 per cent, for some reason) and best party at handling important issues (results much as you would expect).

Victorian federal redistribution: take two

Following the public consultation process into the draft Victorian federal boundaries that were unveiled in August, the redistribution commissioners have announced they have essentially junked their original proposal and gone back to the drawing board. Unusually for a situation where the number of electorates had not changed, the original proposal was for a radical rearrangement in which the electorate of Murray on the border of New South Wales was to be abolished and a new electorate of Burke created in Melbourne’s northern outskirts. The response to this was sufficiently hostile that they have now decided on a more conventional course of action that merely tinkers with the 37 electorates that currently exist. Since this clearly amounts to a “significantly different” proposal to the original, the public inquiry process will begin anew.

I have not had time yet to examine the new boundaries in any detail, but since the original proposal was very bad news for Labor (while it created a new Labor seat in Burke and abolished a Liberal seat in Murray, it also made Liberal seats out of Labor-held Corangamite, Deakin and McEwen), it presumably follows that they will be more than happy with the plan to pursue a more conventional approach. More to follow.

UPDATE: Patricia Karvelas of The Australian reports Coalition MPs are “furious” with Murray MP Sharman Stone for her successful efforts to have her seat restored, at the expense of her party’s broader electoral interests.

Victorian federal redistribution and other tales

In the event that we do face an election sooner rather than later, one difficulty Labor will have to factor in is what looks like an unfavourable redistribution in Victoria, draft boundaries of which were released during the election campaign. Despite the fact that the number of electorates in the state has not changed, the redistribution commissioners propose a radical overhaul that will abolish the rural electorate of Murray and create the new electorate of Burke in Melbourne’s northern outskirts. While this involves the abolition of a safe Liberal seat and the creation of a new one with a notional Labor margin of 10.8 per cent (as calculated by Antony Green on the basis of the 2007 results), knock-on effects make Corangamite and Deakin notionally Liberal, and McEwen (newly acquired by Labor at the recent election) very safely so.

According to the redistribution commissioners, the sweeping changes have been deemed necessary because relative population decline has made it unfeasible to preserve the existing northern regional trio of Murray, Mallee and Indi. However, this has been disputed in a highly critical submission from Tim Colebatch, a senior journalist for The Age, who calculates that one-in-six Victorian voters will be transferred to different electorates. Colebatch complains there has been a failure to account for future growth in outer suburbs and the inner city, which in partisan terms will mean bloated enrolments in nine Labor seats by 2018 and deficient ones in four middle suburban Liberal seats. It is tempting to speculate the commissioners have been influenced by the fact that redistributions of New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia turned Labor’s 83 seats from the 2007 election into a notional total of 88.

However, another submission from Jenni Newton-Farrelly of the South Australian Parliamentary Library reaches a very different conclusion. Newton-Farrelly has brought to the process her jurisdiction’s enthusiasm for electoral fairness, with reference to margins she has calculated from both the 2007 election and preliminary results from 2010. When these are adjusted to a 50-50 two-party outcome, Labor is found to receive more than its fair share: 20 seats to 17, with no margin in any seat lower than 1.4 per cent. On the results from the recent election, Newton-Farrelly finds the Liberals would have won Corangamite by 0.8 per cent and McEwen by 6.6 per cent, while Labor would have gained Aston by 1.5 per cent.

Elsewhere:

• Antony Green crunches the numbers from seven electorates where there were only Labor, Liberal and Greens candidates and finds “little difference between the 2010 preference flows and the flows in the same seats at the 2007 election”. This comes as a profound shock, as we were repeatedly warned not to trust two-party opinion poll results based on exactly this assumption. Dennis Shanahan of The Australian, for example, wrote on August 2 that Labor’s primary vote had fallen into “the fatal zone below 40 per cent, where the party has only a slight hope of winning, and then based only on heroic assumptions about the results and the delivery of Greens preferences”. I like to think that the moral of this story is that even in this jaded and cynical age, heroism can sometimes still win the day.

• Amusingly, Labor has pulled ahead at the time of writing on the AEC’s meaningless national two-party vote figure, which excludes results from eight electorates. In the past few days I have heard Andrew Bolt, Barnaby Joyce, Kerry Chikarovski and Kenneth Wiltshire (no doubt there were many others) use the progress score on this count to assert that the Coalition had won, which is very clearly untrue. As Peter Brent of Mumble points out, it is almost certain that the complete figures which will be available in a few weeks’ time will show Labor the winner, by however narrow a margin. Smarter Coalition operatives have been limiting their pitch to the perfectly reasonable observation that the Liberal and National parties won “more votes and seats” than Labor.

• In the comments thread from the Mumble post linked to above, Peter Brent tells a reader that “Newspolls will take a breather for a little while”. Speaking of Newspoll, here’s an exchange from Sunday’s edition of Insiders:

Barrie Cassidy: (The Australian) ran the results of a poll on Saturday, not talking about individual seast but country-wide, that more people were in favour of a minority Labor government than a minority Coalition government. Now Glenn, you’ve had some experience with this, they actually polled a week ago and published six days later. That’s unusual, isn’t it?

Glenn Milne: Well, it’s clear they didn’t like the poll results.

Victorian federal redistribution proposal

In an inconvenient bit of timing for the psephological fraternity, the Australian Electoral Commission has published proposed draft boundaries of federal electorates for Victoria. Antony Green notes Sharman Stone’s seat of Murray is abolished – perhaps setting up a Liberal-versus-Nationals contest involving Stone at the next election in the seat of Mallee. The new seat is Burke, extending from the strongly Labor outer north of Melbourne through more conservative territory to the Macedon Ranges. Burke revives a name that was put out of commission when Victoria lost a seat at the previous redistribution, meaning Wills is no longer out on a limb. There is now a period where objections will be lodged and the boundaries probably slightly revised – obviously these boundaries will not be in effect for the election.

Please keep this thread for the redistribution – general discussion regarding the election should go to the thread below.

UPDATE: Some impressions gleaned from discussions here and elsewhere. Jenny Macklin’s seat of Jagajaga might become loseable owing to losses at the Heidelberg end and gains at semi-rural Diamond Creek. VexNews notes that the addition of Endeavour Hills to Aston (where Alan Tudge will succeed Chris Pearce as Liberal candidate at the coming election) could make life difficult for them in what had once been a safe seat. Psephos notes that Burke might become available for Rob Mitchell in 2013 should he win McEwen in 2010, and that McEwen rather than Mallee might be an option for Sharman Stone given it will now include Shepparton.