Category: Federal Redistributions

It’s been a busy week on Poll Bludger, which a new thread on the US election joining posts on state polls in Victoria, Western Australia and Queensland. Meanwhile at federal level:

• The federal redistribution for New South Wales has been finalised, with only very minor adjustments made to the boundaries proposed in June, none of which affect my calculations of the new margins by more than 0.1%. Certainly there has been no revision to the abolition of North Sydney, held by teal independent Kylea Tink. The only redistribution process still in train is that for the Northern Territory, charged with drawing a new boundary between its two seats of Solomon and Lingiari, for which a proposal should be published shortly.

• The Liberal candidate for the crucial Melbourne seat of Chisholm will be Katie Allen, who was the member for Higgins from 2019 until her defeat by Labor’s Michelle Ananda-Rajah in 2022. Allen was endorsed on the weekend by the state party’s administrative committee, which was charged with ratifying local party preselection processes that were conducted before new boundaries revealed that Higgins, for which Allen had again won endorsement, was to be abolished. The decision came at the expense of Monash councillor Theo Zographos, who was last year preselected unopposed for Chisholm.

• Ronald Mizen of the Financial Review reports the looming preselections for the Melbourne seats of Maribyrnong and Gorton, respectively to be vacated with the retirements of Bill Shorten and Brendan O’Connor, will be shaped by a long-standing agreement that the Left will take Gorton from the Right when O’Connor retires, while the Left will take “the next safe Right seat that becomes available”. The matter will be determined by the party’s national executive, which has again taken over the federal preselection process from the Victorian branch. Maribyrnong is considered likely to go to Jo Briskey, national co-ordinator of the Left faction United Workers Union, although The Age reports she “could face a challenge from Moonee Valley mayor Pierce Tyson”.

• In Gorton, the Labor preselection appears to be developing into a contest between Alice Jordan-Baird, a climate change and water policy expert, and Ranka Rasic, the mayor of Brimbank. The two candidates are back by rival sub-factions of the Right, the former with that of Richard Marles and the Transport Workers Union, the latter with Bill Shorten and the Australian Workers Union. James Massola of The Age reports the matter could be decided by a third Right union, the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association, supporting Rasic and the AWU in the interests of checking the rising power of the TWU.

The federal redistributions for Victoria and Western Australia have been finalised, with only minor changes made to the proposals published in May. Higgins duly remains abolished, with adjustments made to the boundaries between Ballarat and Bendigo, Bendigo and Nicholls, Chisholm and Hotham, Corangamite and Wannon, and McEwen and Scullin. My estimates of the new margins suggest this increases the Labor margin from 3.5% to 3.7% in McEwen as compared with the original proposal, reduces it from 12.0% to 11.3% in Bendigo, and is barely measurable anywhere else.

In Western Australia, Fremantle and Tangney swap territory and Canning gets to keep the Shire of Waroona. The closest any of this comes to being of electoral interest is that Labor’s margin in Tangney is down from 2.9% on the proposed boundaries to 2.6%. The finalisation of the New South Wales boundaries can presumably be expected very shortly.

Preselection news:

• Bill Shorten announced yesterday he will bow out of politics at the next election, creating a vacancy in his safe Labor western Melbourne seat of Maribyrnong. Shorten will take up a position as vice-chancellor of the University of Canberra in February, which will presumably be close enough to the election that no by-election will be held. John Ferguson of The Australian reports the ascendant Left is hopeful of gaining the seat, with one potential contender being Jo Briskey, national political co-ordinator of the United Workers Union and unsuccessful candidate for the Brisbane seat of Bonner in 2019. Potential candidates from within Shorten’s own Right faction Australian Workers Union orbit include state minister Natalie Hutchins and former AWU official and political staffer Shannon Threlfall-Clarke.

• Labor’s candidate for the new seat of Bullwinkel on Perth’s eastern fringe will be Trish Cook, deputy president of the Shire of Mundaring. Cook was chosen ahead of widely touted front-runner Kyle McGinn, a member for the state upper house region of Mining and Pastoral who failed to secure a winnable position on the ticket for the March state election. Hamish Hastie of WAtoday reports the preselection was determined by the party’s national executive, at which “some in the party were surprised” since it would normally be left to the state party administration.

• Jeremy Neal, a paramedic and former Cairns councillor, won a Liberal National Party preselection vote last weekend to succeed retiring veteran Warren Entsch in the far north Queensland seat of Leichhardt. The Australian’s Feeding the Chooks column reported rival contenders included “local aviation identity” Alana McKenna, who had the backing of Entsch.

• Mal Hingston, a defence contractor with “a long history of work in the manufacturing, mining, oil and gas industries”, has won Liberal preselection for the north-western Tasmanian seat of Braddon, which will be vacated at the election with the retirement of Gavin Pearce. Earlier reports indicated there were five candidates, including Belle Binder, founder of a farm labour scheme, and Vonette Mead, Latrobe deputy mayor.

• Alex White of the Herald Sun reports Fiona Patten, who enjoyed a high profile as member of the state upper house with the Sex Party and Reason Australia from 2016 to 2022, has been announced as the lead Victorian Senate candidate of Legalise Cannabis party.

The proposed federal redistribution for New South Wales, requiring the abolition of one of its 47 seats, is being published today. The boundaries will presumably be up on the Australian Electoral Commission site shortly, but for now there a gazetted notice informs us that the proposal abolishes North Sydney, held by teal independent Kylea Tink. The fact that no other electorate names are identified as having been abolished, and the revelation that More to follow.

UPDATE: Full boundaries now available on the AEC site, and here are my two-candidate and two-party preferred (the latter boiling it down to Labor and Coalition) estimates for the new margins. Teals are treated as a single entity so, for example, where Warringah gains territory from North Sydney, Kylea Tink’s votes there are transferred to Zali Steggall. In areas where there was no teal candidate last time though, it’s not possible to estimate how they would have gone.

UPDATE 2: I just unearthed an error in the code that was causing errors in a few places, notably Hume and Eden-Monaro. The numbers below should add up now.

UPDATE 3: My analysis of the new boundaries has just been published in Crikey.

Proposed new federal boundaries have been published today for both Western Australia and Victoria.

Victoria

The Victorian proposal is here. The proposed seat for abolition is Higgins, reflecting under-enrolment in the inner eastern areas of Melbourne. Below are my estimates of the new vote shares (you’ll have to click on the image for it to be legible), which can be compared with Ben Raue’s similar exercise. Note that there are three seats where the two-candidate preferred has to be split three ways: Melbourne is to take a chunk of Higgins, for which there are no ALP vs GRN numbers; Goldstein gets parts of Hotham and Isaacs, where there is no TEAL vs LIB; and Kooyong gets a big piece of Higgins, ditto.

The best news for Labor is that Menzies now has a notional Labor margin of 0.7% (0.3% by Ben Raue’s reckoning) compared with an actual Liberal margin of 0.7%. Beyond having lost Higgins, the news is bad for them in Chisholm, where their margin is down from 6.4% to 3.3% by Ben Raue’s reckoning and 2.8% by mine, and Wills, where the Greens have been handed the gift of Carlton North and Fitzroy North from Melbourne, cutting the Labor margin over them from 8.6% to 4.2%. However, their 0.7% improvement in Dunkley might prove handy one day.

At first glance, I would imagine that Monique Ryan would be pleased not merely to have had her electorate maintained, but to have had it supplemented with the inner urban end of Higgins and to have lost territory in the east to Menzies and Chisholm. Goldstein teal MP Zoe Daniel’s gains from Hotham and Isaacs are perhaps less helpful, though that is harder to read.

Western Australia

The proposed sixteenth seat for the state is called Bullwinkel and encompasses eastern suburbs of Perth and the Avon Valley further afield, taking much of the territory of Hasluck along with parts of Swan, Burt, Canning, Durack and O’Connor. The new seat has a notional Labor margin of 2.9%, but in the absence of a defending sitting member and given the unusual nature of the 2022 result, the Liberals would be favoured to win. However, its creation has given Labor a helpful 4.7% boost in Hasluck, which loses its most conservative territory to the new seat. Andrew Hastie is a loser out of the redistribution in Canning, but is presumably not in too much danger. Labor has been favoured slightly in Tangney and Swan, Liberal in Cowan. The changes are unlikely to make much difference to teal independent Kate Chaney in Curtin.

In a remarkable display of synchronicity, yesterday saw the announcement of finalised new federal electoral boundaries for Victoria, which will be followed today by the publication of draft new boundaries for Victorian state boundaries, the result of an entirely separate process. While the former release is limited to written descriptions of the changes that have been made to the draft that was published in March, with maps and geospatial data not to be published until July 28, I have taken the effort to conduct a full analysis of the final boundaries, which you can read about below. I hope to be able to provide an analysis of the state boundaries later (probably much later) today.

The federal redistribution gives effect to an increase in Victoria’s representation from 38 House of Representatives seats to 39, at the expense of Western Australia, which is down from 16 to 15 and has accordingly undergone its own redistribution which was finalised a fortnight ago. The final boundaries in Victoria make changes to the draft boundaries affecting 20 electorates, by far the most significant of which is the abandonment of a major adjustment that was proposed for the boundary between Macnamara and Higgins in Melbourne’s inner south, an area of particular interest to the Greens.

N.B.: I am a little confused by the assertion of the AEC release that a remnant of the change remains in that most of Windsor has been transferred to Higgins, as it seems to me that both draft and final boundaries have this suburb remaining entirely in Macnamara. This analysis proceeds on the assumption that this statement is in error, but I may well be missing something. Ben Raue’s maps of the draft boundaries at The Tally Room are instructive here. (UPDATE: This has finally penetrated my skull — Windsor will indeed be transferred to Higgins, with effects that do little to disturb my overall analysis. The spreadsheet linked to at the bottom of the post has been revised to reflect this).

The practical upshot of the reversal is that the Greens are now less likely to take Macnamara from Labor, but the chances of them rather than Labor taking Higgins from the Liberals has increased, without much affecting the Liberals’ overall chances of losing the seat. The draft proposed a straight north-south boundary along Williams Road, resulting in Macnamara gaining territory around South Yarra at the northern end, while an area around Caulfield in the south was to go the other way. This would have boosted the Greens in Macnamara by around 2% from their 24.2% at the 2019 election, drawing in roughly equal measure from the Liberal and Labor vote. Just a few days ago, this prospect had the Greens talking up their chances of taking the seat from Josh Burns, who retained it for Labor when Michael Danby retired in 2019.

Macnamara, which was known prior to the 2019 election as Melbourne Ports, has been in Labor hands since 1906, but has lately evolved into a tight three-way contest involving the Liberals, who came within 2.2% of winning the seat in 2016, and the Greens, who would almost certainly win if they were able to reduce Labor to third place. This they fell 5.8% short of doing so in 2019, when they were excluded at the second-last count with 27.33% of the vote to Labor’s 33.2%. Greens preferences then flowed heavily enough to Labor to secure a comfortable 6.2% margin for Josh Burns, despite the Liberals outpolling him by 37.4% to 31.8% on the primary vote. The changes proposed by the draft boundary would have brought the Greens’ shortfall to around 3%, in a seat where their primary vote had steadily escalated from 15.0% to 24.2% since 2007.

However, the Greens’ gain in Macnamara would have been balanced by a weakening in Higgins, which on my analysis would have cut their primary vote by 1.6% while boosting Liberal and Labor by 0.7% each. Higgins has also developed into a three-cornered contest in recent years, a particularly notable fact in a seat that the Liberals have held since its creation in 1949, with members including John Gorton and Peter Costello. The Greens came closer to taking second place in Higgins in 2019 than they did in Macnamara, being excluded from the count with 24.3% to Labor’s 26.2%. However, the Liberals only fell just short of a majority at this point with 49.5%, and would have picked up enough stray preferences after the final exclusion to have retained the seat in any case.

Preference flows in Melbourne’s inner urban seats in 2019 suggest the Liberals would be slightly more likely to lose Higgins if Labor rather than the Greens made the final count, since flows from the Greens to Labor were slightly stronger than vice-versa — particularly in Macnamara, where Greens preferences split 87.5-12.5. However, the distinction seems to blur in areas where the Liberal vote is stronger, with Greens preferences in Higgins splitting 83.4-16.6, which was equal to how Labor preferences split between the Greens and the Liberals after they finished third in Kooyong.

The only other change to the finalised boundaries that might potentially have a bearing on the election result involves Chisholm, Higgins’ eastern neighbour, which Gladys Liu retained for the Liberals in 2019 by 0.6% after a 2.3% swing to Labor. The seat will be reoriented southwards with the redistribution, which by my reckoning added 0.2% to the Liberal margin on the draft boundaries — although Antony Green’s calculation was that it had in fact gone 0.4% the other way. My assessment is that the minor adjustments made in the final boundaries boost the Liberals by a further 0.3%.

You can find my party vote share estimates for the new boundaries, together with detailed accounting of how they were arrived at, here for Victoria and here for the Western Australian redistribution.

Federal redistributions for Victoria, South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory have been finalised over the past fortnight, a development that removes procedural obstacles for the staging of a normal election for the House of Representatives and half the Senate. At the bottom of this post is a new electoral pendulum based on post-redistribution margins. This illustrates that the goverment has, notionally speaking, lost its majority, being reduced from 76 seats to 74 in a chamber that increases in size from 150 to 151. The Liberal-held Victorian seats of Corangamite and Dunkley move into the Labor column (just barely in the former case – others who calculate the margins might very easily fall the other way), while Labor also gains new seats in Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory, but loses a seat through the abolition of Port Adelaide in South Australia. That gives Labor 72 seats, assuming the cross-bench remains unchanged with its existing five members. All margins shown in the pendulum are Labor-versus-Coalition, except in the five seats held by minor parties and independents.

The main changes made from the draft to the finalised boundaries are cosmetic, in that Corangamite will retain that name and not be renamed Cox, and Batman will be renamed Cooper. Beyond that, minor changes were made to eleven seats in Victoria. The most significant change was to Deakin, costing it around a third of the 19,000 voters it was originally to gain from Casey in the east, and compensating it at the other end with more than 3000 extra voters in Vermont South from Chisholm. The electoral impacts are very slightly advantageous to the Liberals, boosting their margin in Dunkley relative to the draft proposal by 0.4% to 6.6%. There are no changes to the draft as far as I can see in South Australia, and only a minor and inconsequential one in the Australian Capital Territory.

The links below provide my full accounting of the new margins, both for the three redistributions just finalised, and the other three concluded since the last election.

Federal Redistribution of Victoria 2018
Federal Redistribution of Australian Capital Territory 2018
Federal Redistribution of South Australia 2018

Federal Redistribution of Queensland 2018
Federal Redistribution of Tasmania 2017
Federal Redistribution of Northern Territory 2017

The two-party results featured above are strictly Labor-versus-Coalition, which leaves some explaining required where this doesn’t apply. None of the three Melbourne inner-city seats where the Greens threaten Labor has been significantly changed. There is no difficulty counting a new Labor-versus-Greens result in Wills and the seat now known as Cooper, since neither gains territory from a seat in which no Labor-versus-Greens count was conducted. David Feeney held the Greens off in Batman by 1.0% in 2016, but I now make it at 0.5%, while Ben Raue at The Tally Room has it at 0.7%. However, given Ged Kearney’s succession to the seat in the March by-election, comparisons based on the 2016 election are rather academic. Labor’s margin over the Greens in Wills is unchanged at 4.9%. Cathy McGowan’s seat undergoes only minor changes, although territory gained from Murray (now Nicholls) now provides about 4% of its voters, which obviously cannot be used to measure support there for McGowan. This is not enough to significantly alter the position of McGowan, who held off Sophie Mirrabella in 2016 by 4.8%.

In South Australia, the Nick Xenophon Team reached the final count in four seats, winning Mayo from the Liberals by a margin of 5.0%, and finishing 2.0% and 4.7% short of Liberal incumbents in Grey and Barker, and 14.9% short of Labor in Port Adelaide. In no case can new margins be determined: Port Adelaide is abolished; Grey and Barker have both gained territory from Wakefield, respectively accounting for around 15% and 8.5% of their voters, where no Liberal-versus-NXT count was conducted; and Mayo gains territory from Kingston and Boothby, collectively accounting for over 17% of the voters, neither of which had useable counts.

Pendulum over the fold below. Seats whose notional party has changed are indicated with an asterisk. The “redist.” column records the effect on the margin of redistributions, where they have been conducted (i.e. everywhere but New South Wales and Western Australia). Margins shown for the five seats held by minor parties and independents are their winning margins at the 2016 election, with no change made for the redistribution.

Continue reading “Finalised redistributions and federal election pendulum”