The Tally Room

New Zealand will go to the polls next year at their next general election, and the electoral map of New Zealand has been redrawn in advance of that election. New Zealand's parliament is elected via mixed member proportional, with a majority of MPs elected to...

A state by-election will be held in the north Queensland seat of Hinchinbrook at some point near the end of this year or early in 2026, following local MP Nick Dametto's announcement that he will contest the mayoralty of the City of Townsville at...

Today's blog post is inspired by a strange opinion piece in the Nine papers yesterday by former federal Liberal Attorney-General George Brandis. Brandis' piece (in addition to incorrectly stating that the last increase in the size of parliament was in 1987) makes two main claims...

We rely on independent mapmakers to draw electoral boundaries at each redistribution. There is an extensive process of public consultation, and there are rules about how seats can be drawn, but ultimately the mapmakers have quite a lot of discretion about how they apply...

The Tasmanian government has announced plans to "reform" Tasmanian local government by slashing the number of councillors across the state. The government has put up a discussion paper on the topic, but in short it would reduce the number of elected officials on councils...

11:20 - I don't think we'll get any more voting data tonight. I've done a quick video summing up the results on Instagram. That's it for tonight. 10:13 - Kiama pre-poll and postal two-candidate-preferred has reported. Labor is on 60% of the two-candidate-preferred vote, a...

Ben was joined by Matt Dennien from the Brisbane Times to discuss the Queensland state redistribution, specifically the first round of submissions. The conversation focuses on the Labor and LNP submissions, and also run through some of the other public submissions. This podcast is supported...

The first round of public submissions for the Queensland state redistribution were published last week - about three weeks after they were submitted to the Commission. So I thought it would be useful to examine what they say, with a particular focus on the...

There's been a lot of talk about expanding the size of Australia's federal parliament in the last few years. Some of us have been talking about this for a lot longer, but it has seemed feasible since Labor took power in 2022. Expanding the parliament...

We now have a quiet period following the federal election and the Tasmanian election, and I'm using it as an opportunity to complete my election guides for the elections next in the queue. The South Australian election guide has already been published for some time,...