Western Australia will be holding council elections on 17 October 2015 – over the course of the subsequent year, there will be local government elections across Australia’s four largest states.
Since the 2008 elections, I’ve produced ward maps for councils in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, but until now I’ve never done maps for Western Australia.
Over the last month or so, I’ve been working on a map of Western Australia’s local council wards, as of the last council election in 2013.
You can download the map here.
I’m now working on updated ward maps for Queensland, Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia. Conveniently, the electoral commissions provide a neat summary of which councils are changing their wards, along with the timelines and all relevant information. I’m not so lucky in the case of New South Wales and Western Australia.
In both cases, I am going to assume that councils without wards are undergoing no changes, and then go through the painstaking process of identifying which warded councils require changes, and identifying the new boundaries for those councils which are undergoing changes. If you have information about a warded council in NSW or WA, I’d appreciate it if you posted the information as a comment.
In the meantime, you’ll likely hear from me next when the next round of draft boundaries from the various federal, state and territory redistributions are released.
WA state redistribution boundaries will be up on Friday (24th), apparently.
WAEC give a teaser, saying “significant changes to the boundaries are unavoidable”. It seems like they have avoided the ultra-minimalist approaches of the Liberals and Nationals, and that a rural seat is likely to be abolished. But we’ll see.
Also in WA news, we’ve got a by-election coming up. Don Randall died yesterday, so Canning will have one. Should be an interesting snapshot of political feeling in the west, considering how rarely this state gets polled properly. It’s pretty safe for the Libs at the moment (although the high PUP vote from 2013 is a bit of a wildcard), but a big swing against them would be bad news – they have plenty of seats to lose here. The redistribution will make things weird, too – whoever wins will be running for a very different seat in a bit over a year’s time. If the Libs hold it, they’ll end up with a safer Peel-based seat. If Labor win it (that would be a BIG swing), the new MP would probably waltz straight into the new seat in the SE suburbs, and Labor might get optimistic about a majority of WA federal seats for the first time in decades.
There aren’t too many by-elections caused by an MP dying these days. There were two in Victoria in 2000 and 2001, but before that it’s all the way back to 1981. (It’s also the first federal by-election in WA since 1994.)
UGH! That is one fugly redistribution proposal.
They’ve hacked away all over the place even when they didn’t have to. Some strange looking “bits and pieces” Districts they’ve drawn………..
There was a federal by-election in WA just last year.
Once again the commissioners have decided the Perth Metropolitan Region boundary is inviolate. That no doubt ties their hands when it comes to drawing the districts. At least they’ve re-united Kalgoorlie.
I’m intrigued that they want to gradually move away from locality based districts. I wonder why. Geographically named districts work quite well at the state level. They could well be stealing the thunder of their federal counterparts here. (e.g. Gosnells is proposed to be renamed Coombs.)
When there’s already such a lack of understanding of how the electoral system works, the move away from locality based district names doesn’t make any sense.
Perhaps the commissioners like the power to select which distinguished person gets the gong…a bit like handing out knighthoods.
I seem to recall Collie-Capel was the name then Liberal MP Steve Thomas argued for when his seat of Capel was merged with Collie-Wellington to form Collie-Preston. It’s funny that they’ve finally acceded to his request two redistributions later.
It’s notable that the Collie-Capel/Vasse boundary unnecessarily splits Busselton in two. This should be a pretty contentious change; all the more so given the marginal status of one of those seats.
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