Six Australian states and territories have been due for federal electorate redistributions during the current federal parliamentary term – we’ve already completed the process in Tasmania and the Northern Territory, and the process was well under way in Queensland.
It turns out that the final decision for the Queensland federal redistribution was announced on January 5. The decision appears to be exactly the same as the draft map, which I blogged about in October.
You can download the boundaries file from the maps page, and you can see how the boundaries have changed in the below map.
This redistribution was one of the most subtle in recent years. Twelve out of 30 seats experienced no change, while the other 18 mostly experienced minor changes.
Hi Ben,
I live in Palmwoods in Fairfax currently…. is the redistribution moving us into Fisher?
Without doubt one of the most minimalist redistributions ever conducted. The fragmentation of the North Queensland cities of Cairns and Townsville remains. Wright – despite failing to comply with the relevant sections of the Commonwealth Electoral Act remains unchanged.
See my full objection here:
http://www.aec.gov.au/Electorates/Redistributions/2017/qld/files/objections/qld17-ob0005-jeff-waddell.pdf
I dislike what seems to be an outright refusal to look two divisions ahead when deciding on changes. They ended up with a stupid change to the Blair-Ryan border (with Blair now crossing the river and extending into Brisbane City Council) that was only necessary because they transferred more electors from Brisbane to Ryan than they needed to.
The Brisbane-Ryan boundary is largely arbitrary and there are any number of ways it could be reasonably drawn without anyone being inconvenienced. But because they implemented their perfect boundary there, they ended up with an over-quota Ryan and were forced into a diabolical decision elsewhere.
Now when considering the resulting objections they say they can’t fix it without affecting other divisions. Correct. But even if the required tweaks to Brisbane-Ryan were sub-optimal (and I don’t think they are), the net improvement by fixing the Blair-Ryan abomination would justify it.
I think the issue here might be tied to the one Jeff if complaining about. I think they are employing a conflict-minimisation model that says. (1) Don’t change anything. (2) If you have to change something, make it something that you can say you were forced to change. Hence the minimalist changes and the division-by-division approach so that each change appears to be forced. There is a reluctance to look across a whole swathe of divisions and say “well if I slightly inconvenience this group of electors, I can achieve a much better outcome for six times that many”.
Yes it appears Palmwoods has moved.
To be honest, the most annoying part for me about the Brisbane area (lack of) changes is the Blair-Oxley boundary still being terrible, in particular how it splits Springfield.
Dean – I think you’re onto something regarding their Brisbane/Ryan boundary driving the other changes.
I think we all found that the situation north of Noosa is impossible to resolve satisfactorily without screwing over the Cape York communities, making massive changes to Kennedy, or both.
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