VIC and WA federal redistribution drafts released – live

By
Ben Raue
-
587

6:12pm – I have one last update and then my margins will be finalised.

There are four seats in Victoria where independents made it to the two-candidate-preferred count (2CP), but have added new areas where there was no independent in the 2CP: Goldstein, Kooyong, Nicholls and Wannon.

This issue isn’t relevant in Curtin, since that seat only lost territory. It’s also not an issue in Labor vs Coalition seats with non-classic areas added, since the AEC has calculated a 2PP figure in every part of the country. It’s also not such a big issue in the seat of Melbourne. Since the Greens had a primary vote in the new areas added to Melbourne, you can calculate a margin based on preference flows.

But in the case of Goldstein, Kooyong, Nicholls and Wannon, none of that works. You could theoretically not count any votes in the newly-added areas, or give the independent candidates zero votes in those areas. Neither of those seem fair.

Accounting for these new areas is important in all four seats, but particularly in Kooyong. Almost one quarter of all electors in Kooyong are new to the electorate, all from Higgins. The figure in the other seats ranges from 3.7% in Wannon to 9.1% in Goldstein. This reflects the relatively minor changes in rural Victoria and the major changes in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne.

My first approach earlier this afternoon was to credit all Labor 2PP votes to the independent, and all Coalition votes to the Coalition candidate. But I think that underestimates their support.

In the areas which were not new additions to these seats, we have both a 2CP between the independent and a Liberal or Nationals opponent, plus a 2PP which is Labor vs Coalition. We also have 2PP counts for all the new areas. In all four cases, the newly-added areas are less favourable to Coalition on the 2PP than the areas already contained in these seats. Indeed every seat that gave some territory to a seat where an independent made the final count is held by Labor: Hotham, Isaacs, Higgins, Bendigo and Corangamite.

We know that generally independents did better against the Coalition than Labor did in these seats.

So this table shows my revised approach. I have compared the 2CP and 2PP in the non-moving areas, to calculate how much the independent over-performed Labor. I then add that extra vote to the Labor 2PP in the newly-added areas.

This approach significantly improves the independent position in all four seats. What do you think?

I also want to briefly touch on the peculiar seat of Macnamara. My approach to redistribution (which I believe is similar to Antony and William) is to break up the vote by each SA1, and then reassign the SA1s to the new seats and merge them. Unfortunately this means that, when there is a vote category that has been amalgamated into a single seat-wide total (such as postal votes) effectively I assign the same share of postal votes to every SA1. This is less true for pre-poll votes (where there are multiple pre-poll centres with different geographic patterns) and much less true for election day votes.

I have an alternative approach for state and local redistributions, where we don’t have SA1 results data. For those, I distribute the election day votes then skew the special votes to match the skew of the election day vote. So if Labor does better in one part of the seat on election day, I give it a better share of the special vote in that part of the seat.

I tried to apply that approach to my federal method but it didn’t work, so I’ve left it as is.

Most of the time this doesn’t cause problems. Usually we’re most interested in seats where the changes were significant, not the seats where changes were slight. These estimates are not precise, so when changes are small they should be taken with a grain of salt. 0.1% one way or the other isn’t really meaningful.

Now in Macnamara and Higgins there is a peculiarly large gap between voting patterns in different parts of the seats, and we’ve often seen very left-wing areas around Windsor moved around while they are part of larger seats that have voted Liberal (or at least not been so left-voting). This can produce peculiar outcomes where a small movement of a very left-wing part of a more conservative seat produces a counterintuitive change in the margin.

I recommend that people don’t obsess over very slight changes in the margin or primary vote estimates in Macnamara. The seat was close to a three-way tie in 2022 and any redistribution changes will be much less significant than how voters change in 2025.

4:10pm – I’ve now finished replacing the data after fixing the SA1 issue. The margin in Melbourne has dropped a bit further to 6.9% (I’d previously estimated 7.9%). The Labor margin in Wills is slightly better than I’d previously estimated, now at 4.6%.

3:51pm – Looking at the Victorian 2PP and primary votes, the main changes were Bruce, where the Labor margin is now 5.3%, which is much closer to the pre-redistribution margin and closer to Antony’s margin.

3:06pm – Okay I’ve solved the SA1 problem and will start uploading the corrected figures. Starting with 2PP and primary for WA, the Labor margin for Cowan has dropped to 9.9%, whereas my first estimate had it up to 11.0% (from 10.8%). The Labor margin in Bullwinkel is just 3.3% (not 3.7%) and Labor in Pearce is on 8.8% (not 8.4%). The Liberal margin in Canning is now 1.1%, not 0.8%.

2:33pm – It appears the AEC has switched from using 2016 SA1s for the 2022 election results spreadsheet to 2021 SA1s for the redistribution data, so it will be necessary to add some extra code that adjusts for these changes and this may change some margins. I’ll get that done later today and update the tables.

2:07pm – Okay I’m logging off now. I’m sure there’ll be more analysis later. I will be writing a piece for the Guardian tomorrow and I’ll be carefully kicking some tyres to see if there are any errors in the estimates over the coming days.

If you appreciated this very quick analysis of the breaking news, please consider signing up to support The Tally Room on Patreon!

2:05pm – So the creation of Bullwinkel in the outer east of Perth has then pushed all of the neighbouring seats out of the way.

Hasluck has become a much smaller seat and now sits entirely on the northern side of Perth.

Moore has shifted south, with Pearce adding a small area from Moore. Cowan and Perth have lost their eastern edges to Hasluck.

Swan has also shifted west, while Canning has lost its north-eastern corner to Bullwinkel and compensated by picking up Karnup from Brand. This explains the big drop in the Liberal margin there.

Tangney, Fremantle and Curtin have experienced very minor changes.

1:59pm – And here is the interactive map for WA.

1:55pm – Okay now here we have the 2CP margins for WA. Curtin thankfully didn’t add any extra territory so no complicated calculations needed there. Bullwinkel is a notional Labor seat with a 3.7% margin. Labor has also significantly improved their position in Hasluck, and the Liberal position is weaker in Canning. Labor’s margin has also been dented in Burt.

This means that Labor has gained a seat and the Liberal Party has lost a seat so far in this redistribution, with NSW yet to come.

Seat Old margin New margin
Brand ALP 16.7% ALP 17.1%
Bullwinkel (new) ALP 3.3%
Burt ALP 15.2% ALP 13.3%
Canning LIB 3.6% LIB 1.1%
Cowan ALP 10.8% ALP 9.9%
Curtin IND vs LIB 1.3% IND vs LIB 1.3%
Durack LIB 4.3% LIB 4.7%
Forrest LIB 4.3% LIB 4.2%
Fremantle ALP 16.9% ALP 16.7%
Hasluck ALP 6% ALP 10.1%
Moore LIB 0.7% LIB 0.9%
O’Connor LIB 7% LIB 6.7%
Pearce ALP 9% ALP 8.8%
Perth ALP 14.8% ALP 14.4%
Swan ALP 8.8% ALP 9.4%
Tangney ALP 2.4% ALP 3%

1:49pm – And here we go with WA. This table shows the 2PP and primary vote estimates for each seat.

Seat ALP 2PP LIB 2PP ALP prim LNP prim GRN prim IND prim
Brand 67.1 32.9 50.7 21.8 11.3 0.0
Bullwinkel 53.3 46.7 36.4 35.74 11.3 1.8
Burt 63.3 36.7 49.8 24.78 9.5 0.2
Canning 48.9 51.1 35.1 41.44 8.4 1.6
Cowan 59.9 40.1 45.8 30.97 10.0 0.0
Curtin 44.4 55.6 13.8 41.36 10.4 29.7
Durack 45.3 54.7 28.8 44.84 9.5 0.0
Forrest 45.8 54.2 27.7 43.13 13.3 0.1
Fremantle 66.7 33.3 44.0 24.38 17.9 0.0
Hasluck 60.1 39.9 43.7 30.12 11.4 2.1
Moore 49.1 50.9 31.9 41.81 14.1 1.3
O’Connor 43.3 56.7 26.7 44.5 10.9 0.0
Pearce 58.8 41.2 42.4 30.12 11.2 0.0
Perth 64.4 35.6 39.1 27.21 22.0 0.0
Swan 59.4 40.6 40.0 31.64 15.1 0.0
Tangney 53.0 47.0 38.2 39.41 12.4 0.0

1:36pm – So just a quick description of what the map shows before moving on to WA.

The seat of Melbourne has jumped the river into South Yarra, which has then pulled Wills and Cooper south, making Wills much stronger for the Greens. This doesn’t appear to have done much to the Greens’ position in Macnamara, although we’ll need to wait for a 3CP estimate to know for sure.

The abolition of Higgins has had dramatic impacts in the eastern suburbs, with Kooyong and Chisholm absorbing most of the seat.

Menzies has lost areas further east and expanded into Box Hill, which explains the seat becoming notional Labor.

Deakin has retracted to areas further east, further reducing the Liberal margin from a slim 0.2% to 0.02%.

Aston was barely touched, as was Goldstein, but Hotham, Isaacs and Dunkley have all been pulled north. Casey also expanded west to take in areas from McEwen and Menzies.

In the western suburbs, Lalor has contracted sharply, and Hawke has taken in the area around Melbourne Airport. But generally changes in the west were mild.

Outside of Melbourne, Corangamite has again shrunk in size, now almost entirely fitting within the Bellarine Peninsula.

Indi, Gippsland, Mallee and Monash appear to be unchanged, or close to it. McEwen has moved closer to Melbourne, but it has made no difference to the margin.

1:26pm – Okay I have now had a chance to revise my Melbourne 2CP estimate which was very quick. I now have the Greens on 7.9% by applying the same preference flows to the new areas as the rest. That is a drop in the Greens margin of 2.3%, but nothing like my first estimate.

1:18pm – Okay here is my interactive map where you can toggle between the old and new boundaries for Victoria. Will take a quick bathroom break then be back.

1:05pm – And here is my first stab at the new margins for Victorian seats compared to the old margins.

Seat Old margin New margin
Aston LIB 2.8% LIB 2.6%
Ballarat ALP 13% ALP 13%
Bendigo ALP 12.1% ALP 12%
Bruce ALP 6.6% ALP 5.3%
Calwell ALP 12.4% ALP 12.4%
Casey LIB 1.5% LIB 1.4%
Chisholm ALP 6.4% ALP 3.3%
Cooper ALP vs GRN 8.7% ALP vs GRN 7.8%
Corangamite ALP 7.6% ALP 7.8%
Corio ALP 12.8% ALP 12.5%
Deakin LIB 0.2% LIB 0%
Dunkley ALP 6.3% ALP 6.8%
Flinders LIB 6.7% LIB 6.2%
Fraser ALP 16.5% ALP 16.6%
Gellibrand ALP 11.5% ALP 11.2%
Gippsland NAT 20.6% NAT 20.6%
Goldstein IND vs LIB 2.9% IND vs LIB 3.9%
Gorton ALP 10% ALP 10%
Hawke ALP 7.6% ALP 7.6%
Higgins (abolished) ALP 2.1%
Holt ALP 7.1% ALP 7.1%
Hotham ALP 14.3% ALP 11.6%
Indi IND vs LIB 8.9% IND vs LIB 8.9%
Isaacs ALP 6.9% ALP 9.5%
Jagajaga ALP 12.3% ALP 12.2%
Kooyong IND vs LIB 2.9% IND vs LIB 3.5%
La Trobe LIB 8.7% LIB 8.4%
Lalor ALP 12.8% ALP 12.8%
Macnamara ALP 12.2% ALP 12.2%
Mallee NAT 19% NAT 19%
Maribyrnong ALP 12.4% ALP 13%
McEwen ALP 3.3% ALP 3.4%
Melbourne GRN vs ALP 10.2% GRN vs ALP 6.9%
Menzies LIB 0.7% ALP 0.4%
Monash LIB 2.9% LIB 2.9%
Nicholls NAT vs IND 3.8% NAT vs IND 2.5%
Scullin ALP 15.6% ALP 15.3%
Wannon LIB vs IND 3.9% LIB vs IND 3.4%
Wills ALP vs GRN 8.6% ALP vs GRN 4.6%

The Greens margin in Melbourne has been weakened quite significantly, while the Greens are much closer in Wills. Labor is also slightly weaker in Cooper.

Labor is much weaker in Bruce, Chisholm and Hotham, but stronger in Isaacs.

The seat of Menzies has flipped from 0.7% for the Liberal Party to 0.3% for Labor.

With Labor losing Higgins but picking up Menzies, that’s a net loss of one seat for the Liberal Party.

12:47pm – Okay I have calculated the 2PP and primary vote for the main parties for each seat, below.

Seat ALP 2PP LNP 2PP ALP prim LNP prim GRN prim IND prim
Aston 47.4 52.6 32.5 42.8 12.2 0.1
Ballarat 63.0 37.0 44.8 27.1 14.5 2.1
Bendigo 62.0 38.1 42.8 26.7 14.0 4.4
Bruce 55.3 44.7 40.3 31.7 9.7 0.2
Calwell 62.4 37.6 44.9 23.7 9.8 0.0
Casey 48.6 51.4 25.1 36.6 13.1 11.4
Chisholm 53.3 46.7 35.0 39.2 13.8 4.0
Cooper 75.7 24.3 40.7 16.2 28.4 0.0
Corangamite 57.8 42.2 38.4 34.0 15.3 0.0
Corio 62.5 37.5 41.9 25.0 14.7 0.1
Deakin 50.0 50.0 32.9 41.5 14.2 1.1
Dunkley 56.8 43.2 40.5 31.7 10.6 3.4
Flinders 43.8 56.2 22.8 43.3 9.5 11.7
Fraser 66.6 33.4 42.1 24.5 18.9 0.0
Gellibrand 61.2 38.8 42.8 27.2 15.6 0.3
Gippsland 29.4 70.6 19.2 54.1 8.5 0.0
Goldstein 46.3 53.7 13.6 39.6 8.4 31.3
Gorton 60.0 40.0 41.3 27.4 9.0 2.5
Hawke 57.6 42.4 36.7 26.4 8.9 7.9
Holt 57.1 42.9 40.8 29.5 8.6 3.0
Hotham 61.6 38.4 42.9 28.6 15.0 0.2
Indi 44.7 55.3 8.6 34.3 3.6 40.7
Isaacs 59.5 40.5 42.8 29.5 12.1 0.0
Jagajaga 62.2 37.8 40.8 29.2 16.7 3.0
Kooyong 46.3 53.7 11.3 43.4 9.9 31.0
La Trobe 41.6 58.4 26.2 45.2 10.9 0.0
Lalor 62.8 37.2 44.1 25.0 10.4 2.8
Macnamara 62.2 37.8 31.7 29.1 29.7 1.9
Mallee 31.0 69.0 16.8 49.1 5.3 12.2
Maribyrnong 63.0 37.0 42.2 26.8 16.7 0.0
McEwen 53.4 46.6 36.9 33.1 14.2 0.0
Melbourne 73.1 26.9 25.7 19.5 44.7 1.0
Menzies 50.4 49.6 31.8 41.0 12.9 4.9
Monash 47.1 52.9 25.6 37.8 9.9 10.7
Nicholls 34.1 65.9 13.2 43.5 3.7 24.0
Scullin 65.3 34.7 46.1 21.9 10.9 0.0
Wannon 41.4 58.6 19.7 44.2 6.7 20.8
Wills 77.1 22.9 36.4 16.2 32.8 0.2

12:40pm – The AEC has now published the Victorian redistribution. I’m going to focus on getting the new margins up first then analyse the trends.

12:17pm – While the AEC has not published anything, the Gazettes are now up.

In Victoria, the seat of Higgins has been proposed to be abolished. No other seat has changed names, and apparently 34 other divisions have been changed. 8.31% of all electors have been moved to a new seat.

In Western Australia, the new seat is named Bullwinkel, after Lieutenant Colonel Vivian Bullwinkel. The seat seems to be located in the outer eastern suburbs of Perth. 14.57% of electors have been moved to new seats.

12:00pm – The Australian Electoral Commission will be announcing the draft federal electorate boundaries for the states of Western Australia and Victoria this afternoon. They have indicated that the boundaries will be published at some point between 12:30pm and 2:30pm AEST.

My plan is to publish my estimated margins for each electorate, and estimated primary votes for the main party groupings, some descriptions of what changes have happened, and maps showing the old and new boundaries.

In 2021 I was held up by a problem where they didn’t publish the SA1s for Victoria until a couple of hours after they published their report, and then there was a problem with the data. Hopefully that won’t happen again, but I’ll be relying on that data to calculate the new margins.

On the other hand, I have previously drawn my own KML versions of the electorate boundaries. I am not planning to do that this time, so it should be quicker to take the AEC shapefile and make interactive maps this afternoon.

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587 COMMENTS

  1. Agreed Marh; although, I can somewhat understand that the committee decided to base Chisholm on the state seats of Ashwood and Glen Waverley with bits of other suburbs added to make a quota. This Kooyong certainly has weird boundaries and abolishing Hotham would have been the simpler option to ensure a community of interest for most eastern Melbourne seats.

  4. @daniel t where then? with goldstein and kooyong already setup with candidates her only other chioces would be hotham or macnamara because melbourne is out of the question

  5. @Ian, I agree. Higgins may have had 3 distinctly different parts – progressive/inner-city west, affluent “old money” centre, and suburban east – but it still had least had a far stronger community of interest than Hotham had.

    What was clear from a few of the proposals, was that abolishing Hotham as the starting point actually strengthened the communities of interest in all its surrounding seats, because each part of that cobbled-together seat actually bordered a seat that it was better suited to, and that the new larger quotas as a result of losing a seat now enabled them to absorb.

    It actually presented a really good opportunity to clean up the south-eastern seats and consolidate communities of interest a lot better. Chisholm based on Monash. Higgins based on Stonnington (minus the Chapel corridor) and Glen Eira. Macnamara based on Port Phillip and Chapel St. Isaacs based on Kingston. Bruce based on Greater Dandenong. Everything just fell into place really nicely, with only small tweaks needed to make the numbers work, but MUCH better than what the current boundaries had.

    Whereas I feel like abolishing Higgins, while it has probably resulted in a bit less change in the outer eastern suburbs than what would otherwise have been required, has really made the mess of the south-eastern suburbs worse. Hotham now covers FIVE city councils I believe which is worse than before. It was bad enough having Bentleigh East and Noble Park in the same seat, now it has part of Malvern East and Noble Park in the same seat!

    Isaacs is probably only a little bit worse than before but missed the opportunity to really consolidate it as a Kingston based seat by gaining areas like Clarinda, Clayton South and Oakleigh South.

    Kooyong, what the actual…? Suburbs like Balwyn and Camberwell are split in half to add part of Prahran to the seat? Kooyong could actually have just used the Boorondara LGA boundary and been within quota range, with a perfect community of interest.

    It’s definitely a bit of a strange proposal.

  6. Community of interest is subjective because it could be said that Toorak and Melvern should be in the same electorate as Hawthorn and Kew, however, Where I am a little surprised is the AEC didn’t shift Caulfield out of Macnamara but can see why they didn’t.

    The AEC was always said to be focusing on the eastern suburbs due to the number of electorates under quota, and while I can understand the idea behind abolishing Hotham, it makes more sense to abolish Higgins, and then shift eastern suburb electorates west, whereas abolishing Hotham made it more difficult to realign the eastern suburbs without taking Chisholm south of the Monash Freeway into Oakleigh and possibility Clayton.
    The Monash Freeway has been traditionally a demographic boundary between Melbourne’s eastern and south-eastern suburbs. I also think the AEC may be trying to make it easier to reverse this redistribution when the time comes for Victoria to gain a seat.

  7. @john, she may not run at all. She lives in Toorak which is now in Kooyong. I doubt she’d bother going to the effort of running in a neighbouring seat that a) She doesn’t live in; and b) She has no chance of winning, like Macnamara, Melbourne or Hotham.

  9. If Voice Referendum results were on draft the boundaries I estimate based on my calculations
    – Hotham turns from a very narrow No Vote to a narrow Yes Vote (Removes some 50/50 areas but then adds in mostly stronger Yes vote in the new western part and possibly 50/50 in the new Northern part)
    – Deakin seems to be too hard to predict if it will be a very narrow Yes or No as it removes both strong No votes and moderately Yes Voting areas and adds in moderately Yes Voting areas
    – Issacs similarly seems to be too hard to predict if it will be a very narrow Yes or No as it removes sizable Yes Vote areas and adds in possibly 50/50 areas
    – Another hard to predict narrow Yes or No seat would be Corangamite as it now removes strong No Voting areas (other than the small Strong Yes voting Bellbrae which I assume AEC let his place remain in Corangamite)

  11. I agree, if she was to run at all I think she would only have bothered in either Kooyong or Chisholm where she’d have a chance. If those two are out of the question, she won’t run.

  12. i doubt these will be the final boundaries anyway im sure you and others are gonna be objecting and saying hotham should be abolished and i dont like what theyve done either what they have essentially done is taken a bad situaion and made it worse. i can see why theyve abolished higgins as it was the most under quota division. but this mess is the exact reason i didnt choose to abolish it. but for now Hotham lives to fight another election.

  14. I think the Greens would be happy with these boundaries because they probably have their best chance yet of ending up with 3 seats in Melbourne:

    – Melbourne should be a comfortable retain albeit with a reduced margin now;

    – Wills was already going to be tough one for Labor to hold due to current events even on existing boundaries, it’s now a lot easier for the Greens to win with such a reduced margin to overcome;

    – The Greens have to be favoured to win Macnamara now, not only gaining Windsor but I expect there will be at least a small ALP to LIB swing around Caulfield which should keep the Libs in the 2CP but probably drop Labor to third.

  15. Some weird proposals in Victoria, that’s for sure…..

    Most have commented on the south-east, but there’s a few head-scratchers in the north too. Slicing off the western end of Oak Park and Glenroy into the Division of Maribyrnong makes no sense – there’s literally no communication across Moonee Ponds Creek in that area.

    Ditto with hiving off the eastern end of Campbelltown into Scullin – it completely isolates this area from its own community of interest.

  16. @Trent, I would prefer a swap with Southbank area to be in Melbourne and South Yarra ares to be in Macnamara as the Southbank has strong pedestrian connections to Hoddle Grid (many if not most Southbank residents work in the Hoddle Grid by walking or taking a short tram trip) whereas South Yarra requires driving/cycling/train ride to the Hoddle Grid

  17. Mark Mulcair
    Oak Park and Glenroy have links to the Maribyrnong area through the local Essendon DFL however the trainline may be a better boundary than what looks like Pascoe Vale Rd.

  18. Have just read through the main section of the report and taken a look over the maps for Victoria.

    Maybe I’m out of touch, but almost every every decision made seems incredibly odd.

    My sense is that the committee has leaned far too much on the original suggestions which were made under a way different numerical context.

    There’s all these weird crossings of strong physical and LGA boundaries that seem completely unnecessary, like with Lalor.

    I don’t actually mind the transfer of South Yarra into Melbourne, but Higgins is not the right division to abolish. Stonnington is now split between 5 divisions.

    I’d say you could pick any of the proposals shown here on Tally Room at random and it’d be better balanced redistribution than this. Perhaps I’m just being melodramatic though. Does anyone think they’ve done a reasonable job here?

  19. Overall I’m supportive of the WA changes. Not likling the dog leg around Ballajura in Cowan and Husluck, and disappointed that Canning Vale remains detatched in Tangney, but overall I think they did a pretty decent job.

    I don’t mind the name Bullwinkel. Wonder how many will lodge objections about it being similar to the cartoon. However, in reply I’d say it’ll match the Mr Bean reference in the ACT.

    @john, Bullwinkel was not suggested by anyone. The committee published a list of names they were considering themselves at the end.

    I think Victoria is a mess though. Some look sensible, others are odd shaped. I cannot comprehend the reasoning on some of the divisions.
    – The whole of Macnamara, Melbourne, Kooyong and Chisholm just does not make sense.
    – Keeping Blackburn Road through Blackburn as a boundary – the one place that road united the community – is just preposterous. At least they now removed the additional division along Whitehorse Rd.
    – I’m disappointed that McEwen still spans from Gisbourne across to Hurstbridge. They have no connection. Likewise stretching Hawke to include both Melbourne Airport and the outskirts of Werribee!
    – Wannon pushing all the way into Geelong, and Corio crossing into Wyndham.
    – Bruce with its dog legs into Cranbourne North and Beaconsfield just looks bad.
    – Not keen on Sydney Road being used as the boundary in Callwell. The part of Scullin west of Merri Creek has no real connection. I’d have preferred to see Calwell come south and the McEwen-Scullin boundary move north

    On the other hand, I like Goldstein and Hotham (wish they changed the name though), I like Tooborac and Pyalong in Bendigo and I like Nicholls. I think Flinders and Dunkley are Ok, but I’d probaby suggest adding Bangholme to Dunkley at least part south of Patterson River.

    Not liking that they’re just resorting to SA1 boundary lines. I like my boundaries to be strong and identifiable on the ground.

    I really wish the Committees would go back to including reasoning for making certain decisions over others in their reports. Now they just read as a description of what changes were suggested and changes they made.

  20. Darren, I also wish the Committees went back to outlining their proposals in geographical order rather than an alphabetical one.

    If it started at the ends of the state and worked inwards, you could at least follow the logic. Doing it alphabetically means the reports jumps around all over the state, and it’s much harder to understand.

  22. @Angas, I totally agree. So many strange boundaries and I feel like more LGAs are split up, and more seats encompassing more LGAs, than before.

    Not only is Stonnington split across 5 divisions, but Hotham covers 5 LGAs. When a number of submissions stated that Hotham already had a poor community of interest by stretching from Bentleigh East to Noble Park, their response is to now stretch it from MALVERN EAST to Noble Park? Huh??

    @Marh, you make a great point and I think that would have been stronger boundary actually. The committee could have used the northern boundary between Port Phillip & Melbourne as the boundary between Melbourne & Macnamara, and then put the Chapel St corridor in Macnamara instead of Melbourne. I agree that Docklands & Southbank have much better connections across the Yarra (they are pretty much extensions of the CBD) compared to the links between the Chapel St corridor and Richmond. Which aren’t too bad, they have been in a division together before, but are certainly not as strong as Southbank/Docklands/CBD being united.

  23. i cant find anything really in wa to complain about i id however submit my revised proposal anyway. however i think vic is now more of a mess then it was. though its mainly the south east i have an issue with. this is preceisely the reason i didnt abolish higgins

  24. @Mark
    I absolutely agree. Logical order makes so much more sense. They obviously have some decisions that they make first which lead to other decisions, but it’s all completely muddled in alphabetical order.

    Just start somewhere like Indi, snake throughout Regional Victoria then Melbourne, and finish at Gippsland. Or work at it from a few different corner seats, but at least keep those angles in order.

    I’ve been using the following, which pretty closely aligns to the key potential interactions as I see them:
    Indi -> Nicholls -> Bendigo -> Mallee -> Wannon -> Ballarat – > Corangamite -> Corio -> Lalor -> Gellibrand -> Fraser -> Gorton -> Hawke -> McEwen -> Calwell -> Maribyrnong -> Melbourne -> Wills -> Cooper -> Scullin -> Jagajaga -> Menzies -> Deakin -> Casey -> Aston -> Chisholm -> Kooyong -> Higgins -> Macnamara -> Goldstein -> Hotham -> Isaacs -> Dunkley -> Flinders -> Holt -> Bruce -> La Trobe -> Monash -> Gippsland

  25. The creation of Bullwinkel was expected (not sure about what the name means though) but I NEVER expected them to abolish Higgins.

    More analysis to come.

  26. As McEwen (and draft) boundaries is a Frankenstein of a seat and with Northern Suburbs continuing to sprawl, it will eventually need to radically change and shrink maybe by 2030s

  27. I just noticed that Antony Green’s estimates have Macnamara’s new 2PP as -1.2% for Labor. This makes no sense at all based on the area that has been swapped.

    I know I’ve harped on this before, but do some of these estimates not correct the Postal / Early vote percentages for how far above/below the seat-wide result the booth results were?

    Sorry if that sentence doesn’t make sense, but to illustrate…

    Just say a seat gains an area where the polling day booth was 20% higher for Labor than the seat-wide result. You have those numbers for the booth itself, but for the remainder of voters – early postal – surely you wouldn’t just apply the entire previous seat’s postal/early result to the remaining voters, you would give it a +20% Labor adjustment, assuming the area you have transferred is 20% better for Labor than the seat as a whole.

    Macnamara has gained an area where the polling day 2PP was about 8% better for Labor than the area it lost. So how can that possibly translate into a reduced notional Labor 2PP, unless for the remainder of the voters it’s literally just swapping Higgins’ early/postal result for Macnamra’s without weighting it?

  28. *Never mind I actually read the post and I see why it’s called Bullwinkel.

    However this redistribution so far seems to be yet another one that favours Labor over the Coalition, with Labor reasonably gaining a seat in Perth but losing a seat in Melbourne but also gaining a seat in Melbourne from the Liberals. However it makes sense why they did it.

    BUT, if the NSW redistribution favours Labor and doesn’t address quota issues within regional and rural seats then I will be submitting a complaint as my objection.

    The past few redistributions really helped Labor, plus NSW is well overdue for a redistribution. Seats like Cowper and Paterson have been over quota for too long. For too long the AEC has crammed multiple growing urban areas into the same seat even though people think differently in different areas and have different priorities and industries.

    Cowper has four cities and towns with over 10,000 people in its boundaries: Coffs Harbour (>70,000), Port Macquarie (>50,000), Kempsey (>15,000) and Nambucca Heads (>10,000), yet part of Coffs is in Page and part of Port is in Lyne which splits one city across two electorates. Simply just expand Cowper to take Woolgoolga and northern Coffs from Page and then move the rest of Port Macquarie and Telegraph Point into Lyne and that issue’s solved.

    As for Paterson, you have a seat spread across Maitland (>80,000), Kurri Kurri (>15,000) and part of Newcastle (Port Stephens; >70,000).

    It would make more sense if Kurri Kurri was in Hunter with Cessnock given that it’s in the City of Cessnock LGA, and it would make more sense if Port Macquarie, the council seat of the Port Macquarie-Hastings LGA, would be in Lyne with the rest of the LGA.

  29. @Trent that would be the Greens margin I think since the redistribution could’ve swapped the final count from Labor vs Liberal to Greens vs Liberal.

  30. “surely you wouldn’t just apply the entire previous seat’s postal/early result to the remaining voters, you would give it a +20% Labor adjustment, assuming the area you have transferred is 20% better for Labor than the seat as a whole.”

    In theory, yes, but it’s a question of whether it’s worth the trouble. You’re quibbling over pretty small changes here.

    Both Antony and I have been trying to work out some issues around the AEC switching from using 2016 SA1s for the 2022 results to 2021 SA1s for the redistribution data, so it’s possible he hasn’t fixed that yet.

    Yes, generally we do adjust for the special votes but in some cases it can produce some weird results. I know in the past these weird results have been noticed around Macnamara, where you take a general sample of the postal vote but they are more pro-Liberal than the likely postal votes cast in the moved area.

    I’ve explained how my system works before. For state redistributions, I do skew special votes to reflect the skew in the election day vote, but for federal I don’t do that. I use the SA1 data from the AEC which means that pre-poll votes are probably more representative of the local area than if you just treat pre-poll as a single block, but postal votes remain one big block.

    So it’s possible you could build a bespoke calculation for Macnamara which would give a different result but these are just estimates, they aren’t going to be perfect. We’re not really aiming to precisely demonstrate the impact of small changes, but rather give you a sense of the make-up of seats that have undergone significant changes.

    FWIW after fixing the SA1 issue I’ve got the ALP 2PP in Macnamara down 0.08% (basically nothing).

    On primary votes I have Labor down 0.11%, Liberal up 0.11%, and Greens up 0.02%.

  31. I’ve been mostly a distant spectator to these redistributions and didn’t really do any investigation or experimentation of my own into boundaries.

    But looking at the proposal for Victoria… this looks like one of the most objectionable redistribution proposals a committee has ever produced. Am I being too harsh?

  32. Just my random thoughts:

    * Aston – I grew up in Knox so I expected to see this pushed up into the hills BUT I get the logic of wanting to keep Upwey, Tecoma and Belgrave together with the rest of the Dandenongs. If you must breach Dandenong Creek boundary, then where they’ve done it is the best option.

    * Ballarat/Bendigo – surprised they made minimal change here. I thought they’d at least clear up the Macedon Ranges tail in McEwen by putting it into Bendigo…..

    * Bruce – they’ve created a boundary running right through the middle of Dandenong. Bruce is now 80% a fairly coherent Casey seat but with a weird 20% appendage of Dandenong North tacked on.

    * Calwell – cutting off the eastern part of Campbellfield and Somerton is silly. I’m sure they could find a way to rotate Calwell, Scullin and McEwen slightly to retain this.

    * Chisholm – like Bruce, this seems to be 80% a very coherent Waverley seat, but with Ashburton and Glen Iris oddly tacked on.

    * Corio – Bannockburn is logical but I’m surprised at the proposal to push the seat right up to the urban growth boundary. Any overspill will create a poor community of interest if it results in a few houses isolated from ‘Melbourne’ and placed in ‘Geelong’.

    * Deakin – I guess this makes sense but continuing to leave Blackburn split is messy.

    * Dunkley – I don’t like how they’ve made a new split of Mount Eliza. Either leave the split where it is, or work out a way to unite the suburb.

    * Fraser/Gellibrand – Spotswood is another example of a weird add-on. Surely they could have found a way to use WG Fwy instead of placing a small amount of Hobsons Bay in Fraser….

    * Goldstein – Another one where they’ve made a new split of a suburb. Seems odd they couldn’t just unite it somehow. Also I still think Caulfield is a much better fit here than in Macnamara.

    * Hotham – I actually don’t think this one is too bad in terms of community of interest. Almost all of what might be called ‘Greater Oakleigh’, ‘Greater Clayton’ and ‘Greater Springvale’ is united here.

    * Issacs – seems destined to remain a bits-and-pieces seat of multiple parts. It’s a bit disappointing they’ve ended up making it worse than before.

    * Kooyong – they’ve left a fairly narrow connection between the Stonnington and Booroondarra parts. If they could have found a way to put Glen Iris in this seat, the connection would be wider and the linkage would make more sense.

    * Macnamara – they’ve retained its weird L shape and arguably made it worse by making the L narrower. I don’t see why they couldn’t put Southbank in Melbourne and unite the Chapel Street precinct here. Surely the numbers could work out somehow?

    * Melbourne – See above -> Southbank seems a far better fit if they needed to cross the Yarra.

    * Maribyrnong/Wills – I live in Pascoe Vale, and PV Road is just not a boundary here. It completely cuts off the western part of Wills where it has no connection to the Division of Maribyrnong. Would be better to pus Maribyrnong into Attwood and then have Calwell maybe gain Fawkner from Wills. I’ll see if that works in my Comments.

    * McEwen – another one that seems destined to be a mish mash bits-and-pieces Division, made up of all the leftover bits that didn’t fit in other seats.

    * Scullin – if they put Campbellfield back in Calwell, maybe they could fit all of Mernda in here, which would seem a better outcome than continuing to split the suburb.

    * Wills – pushing down into Melbourne makes sense if they can fix up the north. I’d also put the small area north-west of Royal Park in here as well.

  33. “However this redistribution so far seems to be yet another one that favours Labor over the Coalition, with Labor reasonably gaining a seat in Perth but losing a seat in Melbourne but also gaining a seat in Melbourne from the Liberals.”

    I don’t see how Bullwinkel’s creation favours Labor in the slightest. The new electorate is one that is clearly Liberal-leaning compared to the state and seeing that it’s based on semi-rural/outer suburban territory it’s not likely to continue trending Labor. Most likely that’s an extra seat to the Liberals in future non-McGowan elections. The only positive for Labor is having Hasluck’s margin shored up and maybe a slight boost in Tangney.

  34. I think the problem with the Victorian redistribution is they’ve placed too high an emphasis on maintaining the existing divisions. Were you starting from a blank slate, this is not the result you’d end up with. It’s fine to place some emphasis on the existing boundaries (it’s in the guidelines), but trying to minimise elector movements should not be the overriding concern. The shapes of Melbourne and Kooyong in particular can only be explained by their mopping up an abolished seat.

    Western Australia is much better. It’s good they’ve put the new seat in the eastern suburbs instead of trying to recreate Stirling. However, I think it’s suboptimal to have three seats straddling the Perth Metropolitan Region (Durack, Bullwinkel and Canning). This really ought to be tidied up in the final stage. At a minimum Durack should lose Bullsbrook to Bullwinkel (in exchange for Toodyay?). Ideally Bullwinkel wouldn’t have any of those four rural shires, though fixing this this would involve knock on effects for several divisions.

  36. @Ben, thanks for the explanation around difference between how the state & federal redistributions are calculated.

    That makes sense, and if the pre-poll votes are more reflective of the local area but the postal ones aren’t – and the post votes are significant in both Higgins & Macnamara – that explains why it doesn’t look correct.

    I agree that when doing 38 seats, it’s probably not worth doing those clunky calculations, especially when it’s a small difference, in a seat with a 3PP that’s a wild card that could go any way and we don’t even really know what the 2CP contest will even be anyway.

    It is clear though that the redistribution would not have improved the Liberals’ position – even by a tiny amount – it would definitely have moved in the opposite direction, even if only by a little bit, but the way the numbers are calculated based on what’s available just throw up the opposite.

    It is one of the more extreme examples of skewing too, because Higgins is such a varied seat. I just calculated that Labor’s polling day 2PP in the Windsor booths was a full 20.8% higher than it was in Higgins overall, which is a massive difference. Conversely, the area being transferred out of Macnamara was only 1% better for Labor than Macnamara’s overall result.

    That’s why it’s certain that the Labor 2PP in Macnamara will be notionally increased (assuming of course they are even still in the 2CP contest, which realistically they probably aren’t, making the margin irrelevant anyway), rather than decreased.

  37. I’ll leave a longer comment later but what they’ve done is very bizarre to me. I liked all the suggestions on here more 😀

    Do you think when the Yarra needs to be crossed the other way in a future redistribution, they’ll put Sth Yarra/Prahran into Macnamara (they can’t do Higgins anymore) and then they’ll put all of Caulfield into Goldstein. Seems that’s what they are going for in the long term

  38. @Adda I agree that it will benefit the Liberals long-term but at the moment it’s notionally Labor.

  39. The new Bullwinkel reminds me of Burt. When Burt was created it was a notional Liberal seat, but you looked at the boundaries and it was a natural Labor seat. Once Labor started campaigning there it became safe Labor. With all the Labor incumbents having better seats to contest, I think Bullwinkel will not have a Labor incumbent and will resume to being a natural Liberal seat.

  40. They couldn’t find a better alignment of Kooyong/Chisholm/Hotham? Hotham was a hodge-podge to begin with and now cuts across 5 LGAs.

    I’ll have to run the numbers, but I reckon you could just rotate the three and come up with something much better. Hotham = blue-ribbon Stonnington out towards Oakleigh and Bentleigh East. Kooyong = Boorondara. Chisholm = rest of Monash LGA + whatever else from Hotham to make the numbers work. Springvale would be a bit of an orphan – but it’s already paired with Mulgrave at state level. Better to fit it with a direct connection along Springvale Rd than jamming it together in a seat with East Malvern as they’ve proposed

  41. Fundamentally, I don’t have a problem with the Victorian redistribution – abolishing Higgins, having Melbourne cross the river etc. However, it is the edges and boundaries of seats that could do with some tinkering especially Kooyong, Menzies, Deakin and Chisholm which are all a bit of a dog’s breakfast. Admittedly, sometimes it is hard to find a well defined boundary.

    I will need to have more of a think but some things do stand out:
    – No issue with Melbourne crossing the river but like others, Southbank would have been a logical expansion as well as that corner of Windsor.
    – The Menzies, Deakin, Chisholm south boundary is all very messy – as it was last time.
    – The Commissioners in the past have been quite slavish in following local government boundaries. This time it seems they have been totally ignored with – as others have pointed – some seats having multiple LGAs or LGAs being split across 4 or 5 electorates.
    – Considering the f*** up over the projections, it is a tad disengenuous to refer to submissions when those were based on totally wrong information.

  42. @Darren @Mark
    Strong agreement with both of your sets of detailed comments.

    At a glance, I reckon about half of these slightly awkward changes could be unpicked with some careful adjustments.

    @Trent
    I’d say that Hotham has shifted into a slightly more recognisable character now that it is more centered on Clayton, but I had to define what that character was, it’s effectively “the part of Melbourne that doesn’t really have a consistent identity.” I don’t know why it needs to incorporate parts of Glen Eira and Stonnington.

    Overall, the committee seems to have had little respect for LGA boundaries. I’m certainly not a stickler for maintaining them at all costs, but they’re often a great way to delineate a boundary in a clear way.

    @Nether Portal
    One reason I think that redistributions tend to favor Labor over the Coalition is due to demographics. As long as Labor is consistently winning outer suburban growth areas they are likely to pick up every newly created seat. On the other hand, Coalition favourable areas in the regions and well-established metropolitan areas are slower growing or even in decline. As these Coalition leaning seats have to keep expanding, over time there are less seats covering these areas.

    That said, NSW is a complex redistribution and depending on which way the committee choses to make shifts in areas likes the North Shore and the South Coast, it could well benefit the Coalition by a seat or two.

    @David
    That’s a good observation but I would say that they haven’t applied this concept fully consistently. There’s at least a handful of changes they’ve made that seem completely unneccessary, particularly around Western Melbourne.

    @Nicholas
    I’m in full agreement with you. There’s pretty significant room for improvement with this one. I hope we can get it cleaned up somewhat.

  43. I’ve read a lot of the committee’s report, and I don’t understand why they are completely ignoring the error with initial data projections. They reference the submissions throughout the entire report like they usually do, despite the fact that literally none of these submissions were made on the basis of correct enrolment projections. Bizarre

  44. I’ve updated my VIC tool to include the new boundaries. https://kevinchen870.shinyapps.io/redistributiontoolSA1/ I’ve had to assign split SA1s to the division with the most projected population.

    I’m with most people that think the VIC redistribution seem to be out of kilter. The report describes the bounds of what they have to consider when making changes, then jumps straight to what they ultimately did in each division, with little actual reasoning on why they made their decisions.

  45. Does anyone know of any software available similar to Dave’s Redistricting that people can use to create Australian electoral divisions?

  46. Can someone from WA explain why the seat of Fremantle looks like that? Wouldn’t it make better sense to have places like Bicton, Attadale, Applecross and Bateman in the seat of Fremantle? Those places have a lot more in common and have better transport links than Fremantle does with places like Treby or Jandakot.

  47. In reply to patreon_57 the Commissioners have tried to align the boundaries of Tangney with the City of Melville. Also the City of Cockburn forms the core of the division of Fremantle.
    Where they have gone overboard in following LGA boundaries is further east where Leeming is split along boundary fences thanks to an archaic LGA boundary.
    Bullwinkle is a most appropriate name even if it attracts a few juvenile comments. A true Australian heroine.

  48. What makes the redistribution so weird, is there is so many cases where 99% of an LGA/suburb will be in one seat, and then they leave out a tiny bit, often for no reason.

    – 99% of Hepburn is in Bendigo, a tiny part goes to Bendigo
    – Pretty much all of Wyndham council is in Lalor, except a tiny part goes into Corio and Hawke. I don’t even think the – Hawke section needs to be in Hawke?
    – All of Hobson council in Gellibrand, except for a tiny part in Fraser, which doesn’t even need to be done.
    – Keilor Nth into Hawke when it could just stay in Gorton
    – A tiny section of Whittlesea in Jagajaga

    I get some of the time you have to do these to get the numbers to work, but often the numbers would work fine without it.

  49. @Drake
    I agree. All of these seem to be completely unneccessary.

    The boundaries for Lalor are my favourite I think. Using random SA1 boundaries is bad enough, but it gets even worse once you realise that those 3 large SA1s contain new housing estate areas, which maybe don’t have any residents now but are very soon going to become part of suburban Werribee.

    I get it. They transferred Truganina, Williams Landing, and Point Cook to Gellibrand which got Lalor to +3.90%, and then didn’t think it through properly.

    There’s 3 reasonably neat solutions to this which would be significantly better:
    1. Transfer a small part of Tarneit to Gellibrand (as per the state district of Laverton)
    2. Transfer the half of Werribee South east of Duncans Road
    3. Transfer all of Werribee South (as per the state district of Point Cook) and transfer the Corio portion of Little River into Lalor to balance it out

    That’s my first objection written.

  50. My thoughts on electoral implications (if the drafts go ahead)

    Higgins
    This is the talk of the town. Michelle Ananda-Rajah obviously is unhappy. There’s a possibility of a challenge to Carina Garland to run for Chisholm where Glen Iris and Ashburton will be and thus forcing Carina Garland to go to Menzies or Deakin.

    Melbourne
    I agree with comments that if it were to cross the Yarra, it should subsume Southbank. RBG, AAMI Park and MCG cut off South Yarra from the rest of Melbourne. At least Southbank is in the same LGA and has multiple river crossings to the CBD.

    Menzies and Deakin
    Both are more winnable for Labor. They’ve lost the outer, lower-denesity suburbs. There was talk that they’re easy targets for Labor for two years now given that their low Liberal margins and because it’s Victoria. Deakin has expanded to Burwood East and Nunawading. Menzies has expanded to Box Hill South and Blackburn South. Aforementioned suburbs are in Whitehorse LGA have large ethnic Chinese communities and to a lesser extent, Indian migrant communities. Labor overperformed with voters of those demographics. Labor could flip those two seats if it holds onto their gains from last fed/state election.

    Dunkley
    Dunkley loses Mt Eliza and becomes stronger for Labor as it moves northward. Carrum and Patterson Lakes had strong swings to the Liberals in 2022. The swings may recalibrate next election.

    Flinders
    This could become a stronger teal target with the addition of Mt Eliza. Mt Eliza is quite affluent and small-l liberal. A teal was close to winning the state seat of Mornington, which includes Mt Eliza. I’m not saying a teal would win though.

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