NSW federal redistribution drafts released – live

1. It would seem that Kylie Tink would run for Bradfield as her home base of Northbridge is now in Bradfield. Nicolette Boele out in the cold?

2. Interesting to see the substantial changes to Bennelong, most notably the complete removal of the Epping/Carlingford/North Epping area (interestingly where Laxale’s office is) and the shift into the Hunters Hill/Lane Cove area, in effect a return towards its original form
   I’m surprised by the decision to move the main area of Epping into Berowra, and the manner in which the Epping area as a whole has been partitioned.
   Labor can now count this as an almost-certain loss, there’s realistically no way for them to win the new parts.

3. Angus Taylor is homeless now. His home base of Goulburn is well and truly out of Hume.

4. Yes I agree with resisted.
   Banks goes back to historical boundaries

5. Redistributed

6. The AEC really wanted that Cooks River boundary for Grayndler and kind of sacrificed Kingsford Smith in the process

7. @conor she wont win bennelong shes probly either gonna run in warringah (good luck), bradfield (boele wont be happy) or retire

   @redistributed teal civil war

8. @redistributed im pretty sure he has an office in Camden as well, or maybe he can run in Whitlam? given Eden-monaro has a cnadidate already. or maybe Hollie Hughes has the last laugh?

   @drake that the boundary i suggested for grayndler too 😀 its only a small portion over the river

9. In reply to Connor, actually the new Whitlam does the best of a somewhat bad situation. The problem is that the wider Wollongong and Illawarra area is too small to be fully contained within 2 federal seats, so you have one seat (Cunningham) which contains all of the Wollongong CBD and its immediate suburbs with the other seat (Whitlam) absorbing the surplus parts around Dapto/Albion Park and then having to absorb some rural communities that see some links to the Wollongong area (Robertson and Moss Vale).

   The alternative is to have Whitlam move south towards Kiama, which could work but then you would have to draw Eden Monaro back inland over the Snowy Mountains, which is an equally bad option (just like the seat on its current boundaries). In fact, there are greater links over the ranges in the Moss Vale-Wollongong corridor (regional coaches run frequent services here) compared to further south between Tumut and Canberra with almost no transportation links between the two.

10. To Redistributed, there is one road corridor (Heathcote Rd) that links the two ends of the new Hughes district together. But I do agree that this district is contorted, very much like the existing Queensland seat of Wright which contains two distinct parts that don’t really share common interest/s between them.

11. it would be interesting so a comparison to 2019 like the other one

12. i dont like the Goulburn into EM though i reckon it shouuld have taken in more of Eurobodalla instead

13. Goulburn was part of a safe liberal seat before now it will be seriously contested by Labor so the minus 2 percent is an illusion. Banks changed by 0.6% but the areas from Watson round Punchbowl narwee are potentially very strong Labor so the margin could be less… if I remember correctly Watson had a small swing against Labor in 2022

14. @John Why the hell would a high-ranking Liberal like Taylor run in a still-safe Labor seat?

15. Agree John, the problem is that they made a mess of Western Sydney by having Hughes stretch as far as Ingleburn. If Hughes had extended towards the Wollongong end instead, they could have made Whitlam as the seat that is ‘abolished’ with Cunningham amalgamated with the Dapto/Albion Park ends of Whitlam. The flow on impacts would be Gilmore moving north to Kiama and EM filling in the gap near Batemans Bay. Hume would then lose all outer suburban parts of Sydney around Camden and would remain a purely Wollondilly, Southern Highlands and Goulburn based district.

16. @Ben Raue in your 2:06pm post you said “ In the inner city, Wentworth has lost part of Clovelly to Kingsford Smith and gained Potts Point and Darlinghurst.”

    The maps seem to show Wentworth moving south and gaining part of Coogee from Kingsford Smith, not losing part of Clovelly. The previous boundary was largely the locality boundary between Coogee and Clovelly. It’s now a local street somewhere in Coogee (which I will be objecting to).

17. I’d made sure I’d lowered my expectations for this one after the Victorian Proposal and I know that it was going to be harder to balance this one compared to the other states, but frankly, some of these changes are pretty unsatisfactory.

    I really don’t understand the mindset of these committees. They seem to make such half-hearted changes, even after acknowledging when a division has a clear improvement available. None of Cook, Hughes, McMahon or Whitlam have been meaningfully improved, despite the opportunity being available. Hughes and McMahon are perhaps worse than before.

    There’s a clear averson to moving electors it seems, even though that is not mandated by the legislation. They really should be putting more focus on the requirements around community of interest first and physical features, even if that means moving slightly more electors around.

    Some other thoughts:
    – Regional NSW has been handled almost exactly as I expected them to. Still a few awkward bits, but we’re generally limited in what can be done given these numbers.
    – I’m quite surprised that Fowler is almost completely unchanged.
    – The proposed Blaxland and Watson are good, but should be amended so that Lidcombe can be fully united in Blaxland.
    – The 3-way split of Blacktown is quite a poor outcome. Parramatta also looks pretty weird. Surely moving the boundary north to the M2 would have been the most obvious solution for Mitchell and Parramatta.
    – I know the community is relatively split on this, but as I’ve tried to argue previously, Bennelong crossing into Lane Cove doesn’t really do much good for any of the divisions on the North Shore.
    – Pushing Kingsford Smith across Cooks River is a really interesting decision, but why not fully commit to it? Go all the way to Georges River, put all of Randwick/Coogee in Wentworth, and all of Kings Cross into Sydney.

    Lots of missed opportunities here. Hopefully there’s room to clean things up.

18. Yes no way Angus Taylor will contest Eden Monaro where he would need a 6% swing to win If the libs want him in parliament then they need to organise it

19. @yoh and yes i dont agree with that either.

    thats exactly what i did i amalgated hughes and cunningham and pushed whitlam into wollongong then retraced hume a bit out from sydney and same with gilmore EEm etc. actualy based on the numbers i did it would still be in outer sydney but less so

20. @Micheal he couldnt since they already have a candidate there. i imagine he’ll stick to hume

21. @angas agreed on the blacktown split Greenway should be a prely blacktown seat along with chifley with mcmahon having the excess. and agree on the m2 so i might add that to my objection list

22. i think the coalition might get the 4% needed but i dont think they will make gains in the teal seats and if they side with labor we could see the coalition win the 2pp but not govt

23. Thanks Ben for following this.

    Some comments:

    1. General – The mountains boundary around Canberra is good. Some very jagged boundaries in the Sydney basin. Cook should also stay wholly south of the river. Hughes looks like a dog’s breakfast.

    2. Southern Sydney – Kingsford Smith is indeed a suprise to be extended past the airport. But having gone there, which I approve of in theory, it’s a missed opportunity not to go further down that path. They should have pushed Wentworth south not west, and Kingsford Smith more southwest. This would have kept Sydney largely intact and in turn made the inner west much easier to deal with.

    3. Nothern Sydney – For all the changes in this area, Bennelong, Berowra, Parramatta look worse for it rather than better.

    Lastly, the important centres of Sydney CBD, North Sydney-St Leonards, Epping, Parramatta, Blacktown and the future city of Bradfield are have boundaries drawn close-by or through these centres (or small clusters of centres). They also each have some of the more nearby neighbourhoods excluded from their division while other more peripheral areas are included. I would like to see centres being given much more prominence when boundaries are drawn – especially in broader urban areas where there are more potential boundaries to choose from.

    Overall, I would have liked to have seen better drawn boundaries.

24. “There’s a clear averson to moving electors it seems, even though that is not mandated by the legislation. They really should be putting more focus on the requirements around community of interest first and physical features, even if that means moving slightly more electors around.”

    Well said, Angus.

25. Angas* sorry.

26. Overall thoughts:

    * The worst thing about the new map is that tail for Kingford-Smith. Yes Bayside Council does spiral across Botany Bay, but out of all the amalgamations that’s by far the worst of them. Not only is there little community of interest between Brighton and Botany/Mascot, it’s also done in a really lazy way.
    * Cook doesn’t cross the Georges River as much as it did, but Sans Souci being in Cook looks really weird. Giving it to Barton would enable a more logical Hughes as well, because as things stand there’s no major road connection between Holsworthy and Glenfield.
    * Epping feels really detached from the rest of Berowra. It would be a bit more logical if you dragged Bradfield further south, gave Epping back to Bennelong and Berowra gained Wahroonga and surrounds.
    * No land connection between the Balmain Peninsula and the rest of Sydney feels weird, though I guess it was hard to know where the line between Sydney and Grayndler should exist otherwise.
    * McMahon looks really, really weird. I guess the old one did as well but at least that one was south of the M4/Great Western Highway. Going from Blacktown to Fairfield is extremely suboptimal.
    * That said, it does mean that the new Blaxland is pretty logical, as is the new Watson.
    * I’ve seen people criticise the Whitlam boundaries but unless you got rid of another seat in that area that whole area was always going to look weird. At least this one takes the whole of the Southern Highlands/Wingecarribee Council rather than split it amongst the Hume Highway. It also means Hume is a lot more logical than the previous version that combined Camden with Goulburn.
    * It does however mean that Eden-Monaro and (especially) Riverina look a bit of a mess. If it was up to me I would’ve abolished one of the seats on the South Coast (Cunningham?) and created a new SW Sydney seat, but I guess the AEC didn’t have the stomach for it.

    Not sure on the best way to fix the issues though. Perhaps something to think about.

27. I think with the NSW and Vic redistribution it’s clear that after trying to abolish Murray in 2010, the AEC will never abolish a seat unless they absolutely have too. They’d much rather drag every seat west, than try and create a new seat.

    Also if a regional seat is at quota, they will basically never change it unless they absolutely have too.

    Something that would actually be really good, is if next parliament they increase the size of the senate, meaning more seats in the house are created. This would actually allow for an almost complete redo of the boundaries for every state. The AEC gets a bit too hungup on exisiting boundaries when it’s clear that this is not how they would draw the seats if previous boundaries didn’t exist.

28. @drake i imagine that the redo would coincide with every state being somewhere close to a redistribution given 3 states currently are plus the nt with qld tas sa and act scheduled for next year so they will all reach their 7 years expiry around that time anyway

29. Drake – clearly you have no clue how a redistribution works

30. Better than Victoria’s bullshit but still a few errors:

    1. Cowper and Lyne have been untouched. I’ll be objecting as soon as I can to this. My proposal is to move most of the rest of (if not all of the rest of) Port Macquarie into Lyne and expand Cowper to include Woolgoolga.
    2. Macquarie still sucks. Like literally the Hawkesbury and the Blue Mountains have quite little in common.
    3. North Sydney should stay as it’s a Federation seat. Doesn’t have to be in the same spot but it the name should be retained. Same as Higgins in Victoria even though that’s not a Federation seat it’s still a historically important seat given that two PMs and a Treasurer have represented the seat.
    4. Paterson should’ve probably lost more western territory to Hunter.
    5. Etc.

    Interestingly Bennelong notionally going Liberal makes it the first seat in a while to flip from Labor to Liberal even though it’s happened the other way round many times recently (including as recently as 2019 in Victoria).

31. @NP
    1. cowper has a minor adjustment in the north
    2. I agree on this too but the numbers elsewhere just cant be done atm unfortunately. the fact calare is at quota means little can be done atm. i wanted to split it up also as well as pitt town richmond and windsor removed but couldnt do this atm.
    3. federation names when no longer relevant get abolished same as south east and west sydney
    4. probably
    5. etc.?

    i think theres some room for imporvement in places like parramatta. it can fit enitrely within the city of parramatta and doesnt need to be a 4th blacktown division. greenway can stay entirely within blacktown. hughes shouldnt be going into northern campbelltown. hume in my opinion doesnt sound like it should be a sydney division but w/e. goulburn doesnt belong in eden monaro.

    i like what theyve done with whitlam tbh. i think barton is good and next redistribution im hopin takes in the rest of that territory fro cook and KS so it straddles the cook and georges river

32. Greenway and Macquarie Will almost certainly be liberal gains when the respective members retire,

    Bennelong, Still could be a labour hold Considering Dutton is unelectable and will do poorly in the cities, However, I think Patterson is a strong prospect for a Liberal gain.

    Eden-Monaro Could also be a liberal gain once the member retires,

    Hughes Will be difficult but not impossible for labour to win, But you would probably need a different kind of labour party to win it (Hawke-Keating)

    Banks is a possibility for a labour gain.

    Although I am objecting to New England Moving that far south It has no business being two hour drive from Sydney.

33. @John yeah Cowper gained Korora (a northern suburb of Coffs). That’s it. Should’ve gained Woolgoolga and Nana Glen from Page and lost most of Port and all of Telegraph Point to Lyne.

    Also, they could’ve created a Hawkesbury seat and abolished another Sydney seat.

    Also, East Sydney, South Sydney and West Sydney were abolished a long time ago (like 80 years ago or something) when the rules were different. Corangamite isn’t in Corangamite and Kooyong isn’t in Kooyong but they’ve stayed the same (though they do have Indigenous names which they AEC doesn’t want to change despite the name Jagajaga having little significance, well not enough to have a federal electorate named after whatever it means, I think it’s three local Aboriginal elders or something?).

34. Overall, its not too bad. A few very odd things – Cook, Kingsford Smith and Hughes. I think we will see some seats go very under or very over quota in the next few years. Robertson (under), Lyne, Gilmore, Cowper and Whtlam (over) . I found the Robertson projects very odd from the get go.
    Personally, I would still prefer Bradfield to take Belrose and Frenchs Forest and Northbridge / Willoughby be in the new Warringah. You would then have an Upper Middle Harbour and a Lower Middle Harbour electorate.

35. Sydney looks winnable for the Greens on Liberal preferences if they can find a good candidate. I think Jamie Parker meant it when he quit politics and the local Greens group can be very hit and miss with its candidate choices.

    I think Labor can retain Bennelong on those Boundaries with Lane Cove not looking too bad for Labor these days, and Bradfield is winnable for a teal (Maybe Tink).

    The Hume redistribution is sensible. Based on state seats (Wollondilly+Camden), maybe Angus Taylor isn’t safe? He’s based in Goulburn and probably doesn’t want to take on McBain’s Bega power base and the Canberra suburbs vote. Hughes could also be winnable for Labor and is seriously stretching credibility as a seat.

    Overall with the redistribution I think Labor is well placed to win the next election even if they lose majority.

36. @Nether Portal: What’s your alternative if you want the name “North Sydney” to be kept? Renaming Bradfield or Bennelong to North Sydney doesn’t make sense, because neither the new Bradfield nor new Bennelong contains any part of North Sydney Council. The new Warringah does contain all of North Sydney Council, but there is not a strong case for renaming Warringah to North Sydney either. The Redistribution Committee have considered renaming another division to North Sydney, but there was no sufficient reason to do so, therefore they have decided to retire the name.

    IMO North Sydney is a geographic name and has no significance besides being a federation name. I also think that geographic names are good candidates for retirement not only because geographic names go against the AEC guidelines of naming seats, but also a seat’s boundary can change so much that it doesn’t contain its namesake any more.

    What’s more, it’s not unusual and in fact pretty common to abolish or rename federation seats. Of the 65 federal electoral divisions first contested at the 1901 election, only around half of them, 33, are still in existence without ever being abolished. As recently as 2019, the federation seat of Melbourne Ports was renamed Macnamara. As recently as 2007, the federation seat of Gwydir was abolished with its territory divided around surrounding seats.

    If you want North Sydney not to be dismembered, then you basically have to push every seat north of the Parramatta River west until Macquarie takes in Lithgow and Bathurst from Calare and Calare abolished, or adopt the Labor Party’s weird submission of dismembering Hughes. You are basically asking the Redistribution Committe to start the process all over again if you want North Sydney to be kept.

37. On these boundaries, Bennelong will be a key seat but winnable for the Libs with a good candidate in Scott Yung. If he gets passed over for the preselected North Sydney candidate, then Labor will win.

38. Everyone should also remember these are only drafts. My proposal has Labor losing its majority due to Coalition gains in NSW (Bennelong, Gilmore, my new Hawkesbury seat and Paterson).

39. Is there a consensus that these are better than the draft Vic boundaries? They seem a lot better to me.

    The sore points I see are Fairfield/Blacktown in the same seat and the mismatched Hughes electorate. I think the other changes are sensible, but I am not as familiar with Sydney as I am with Melbourne.

    I also wonder where Tink will run? Bennelong or Bradfield? Boele seems intent on running in Bradfield again as the “shadow member”. If Tink contests Bennelong surely that helps the Libs?

40. I wonder if Teal will gain Bradfield if Paul Fletcher retires and/or a strong Teal plus it is the only Coalition Seat to vote Yes to Voice (both on old and new boundaries)?

41. I think Tink will choose Bradfield

42. Stuff I like
    – The regional areas are pretty solid. Riverina, Parkes, New England are all good. Glad they fixed up Eden Monaro, no problem with it gaining Goulburn.
    – Hume turning from a regional/Sydney hybrid to just a Sydney seat. Really like the boundaries here.
    – Grayndler has very solid boundaries even if it came at the expense of Kingsford Smith and Barton.
    – Abolishing North Sydney and dividing the north shore seats almost identically to how I did it.
    – Blaxland and Watson look fine
    – Greenway losing it’s southern end

    Stuff I don’t like
    – Kingsford Smith is just a mess. The Barton/Cook/Kingsford Smith corner is just a mess and K.S has the shape of a gerrymander.
    – Parramatta losing its Cumberland council part is good, but I wish they took the Parramatta part from Mitchell instead of keeping it’s western part.
    – McMahon is less of a mess but it’s still pretty incoherent
    – Hughes is way too stretched. Campbelltown, Liverpool and Sutherland shires all together is a massive mess.
    – I still think they should have abolished either a seat in ‘inner Sydney’ or a Sutherland/Wooloongong seat to create a new seat in the west.

43. Interestingly, the committee claims to have considered only a small handful of the many seats nominated for abolition:
    – Banks
    – Cunningham
    – North Sydney
    – Warringah
    – Werriwa

    Considering that they’ve avoided all the prime minister named divisions, that indicates to me that they might be letting the names of divisions influence the drawing of boundaries and not the other way around. You’d think that Watson or Hughes, even McMahon might have been looked into.

    In Victoria it was similar. McEwen was the only prime minister division considered, even though Menzies and Deakin were reasonable divisions to be investigated.

    To expand on some of the earlier points, it does seem like they try to avoid moving electors at all costs. Not abolishing a 2nd division (even when the numbers support it) is a great way for the committee to keep their moved electors percentage lower.

44. That strip at the lower end of KS feels not coherent at all.

    The intention likely would have been using the existing council area where a lot of KS already sits. The underlying issue is the council area itself being a squish together of two other councils from 7-8 years ago.

    If you want to do a legit “northern Botany Bay” coastal seat, then do it properly and make a curved seat from Sans Souci to La Perouse and then out until you get the numbers. Then shuffle everything around it.

    A better intent would be if you want to do an SYD airport seat, then start at the airport and take in a large NW leaning block and then shuffle everything around it.

    But right now, the sum of the parts does not equal the whole.

    And that little spoltch at the top of Cook is weird. Similar to the above, it’s like they’re trying to hang onto the sentiment of the current Cook for the sake of hanging onto it.

45. @Adam I agree that the draft NSW boundaries look much better than the draft VIC boundaries, however the draft NSW boundaries still contain some areas that are pretty messy. First, I agree that the Barton/Cook/Kingsford Smith corner is a huge mess, especially Kingsford Smith’s “tail” around the Botany Bay. I think areas in the “tail” should be placed in Barton. Secondly, Sydney taking in the Balmain Peninsula with no land connection to the rest of the mainland part of Sydney also looks a bit weird. To establish the land connection, I suggest Sydney take in the suburb of Annandale from Grayndler while Grayndler gain the remainder of the suburb of Lilyfield from Sydney (similar to Sydney’s boundary between 2009 and 2016).

    To fix the mess around Barton/Cook/Kingsford Smith, I suggest Banks shed all areas north of the South Western Motorway to Watson and gain part of Barton south of the South Western Motorway, Barton take in the “tail” area from Kingsford Smith, Kingsford Smith take in part of Sydney, Sydney take in the suburb of Annandale from Grayndler, Grayndler gain the remainder of the suburb of Lilyfield from Sydney and also part of Canterbury and Campsie from Watson.

46. Ben, why my comments are stuck in the moderation queue?

47. I’m not sure but I’ve approved them all now.

48. I say this a little bit flippantly but also not completely.

    Why not use a combination of SA4’s and SA3’s as the starting basis for divisions. As required, incoporate SA2’s. The aim is that you try and keep as close to the largest physical SA area as you can, while fulfilling quotas.

    https://maps.abs.gov.au/ shows all the SA’s.

    From a map perspective, I was looking at the SA3 map around the KS awkward strip and there’s some very decent looking starting points for initial boundaries.

    Maybe SA4’s and then SA3’s are the best starting point for large area divisions. Maybe SA3’s and then SA2’s are the best starting point for smaller-medium area divisions. For the most part, why can’t we just avoid SA1’s unless completely unavoidable?

49. https://ibb.co/0nJznwZ

    Not the greatest of maps, but I’m uploading it just it in case anyone wants to see how the SA1s are distributed across the metropolitan divisions.

50. Thanks for the map Angas, as someone that uses the ABS Stats map tool a lot, really like seeing the data presented like this. Really does show how Hughes is really just 3 distinct communities that are all pretty seperated from one another. Same for Kingsford Smith and it’s two seperate halves that are barely connected.

    I’ll try the numbers later but maybe you could do something like put that section into Barton, have Kingsford Smith go into Sydney, Sydney take Annandale and then Grayndler take parts of Barton. Maybe give Fowler’s section of Chipping Norton to Hughes.

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