NSW 2020: new ward boundaries finalised

By
Ben Raue
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0

Local councils in New South Wales will go to the polls in September this year to elect new councillors for the next four years.

I have just finished putting together my map of ward boundaries for those councils that use wards to elect their members.

49 councils currently have wards, plus Shellharbour council is restoring wards for the first time since the 2004 election.

I have identified new boundaries in seventeen of these councils (plus Shellharbour), and have finished drawing those new boundary maps. I believe that none of the other councils have changed their wards, but I will list those which I have not definitively ruled out at the end of this post.

Annoyingly, there is no central repository of information about local ward redistributions in New South Wales. You have to go to each local council and look for information on exhibition, and look through minutes for official decisions. If a council hasn’t made any change, you might not find anything. This is different to Queensland and Victoria, which coordinate ward redistributions through the state electoral commissions and publish all the information on one website. There’s a whole other story to tell about how problematic it is that ward decisions are made directly by the councillors.

Below the fold I’ll briefly run through the 18 councils with new ward boundaries, and I’ll post a map showing the changes in boundaries.

You can download a Google Earth file with the 2020 ward boundaries (including the existing wards for those councils which haven’t changed) from my maps page, where I also have the ward boundaries from each council election since 2008.

Continue

By-election coming up in Currumbin

By
Ben Raue
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25

There will be a by-election in a marginal LNP seat in Queensland in the next few months after Liberal National MP Jann Stuckey announced her resignation.

Stuckey has held Currumbin since 2004 and won in 2017 by a 3.3% margin. Stuckey announced last week she planned to resign.

The by-election date is yet to be set but it seems quite likely that it will be held on March 28, the same day as Queensland’s local government election.

Currumbin is the seventh-most marginal LNP seat in the state parliament and if Labor were to win it would increase their majority in the parliament in the lead up to the October state election.

Currumbin covers the southern end of the Gold Coast.

You can read my guide to this by-election here.

WA redistribution – final boundaries

By
Ben Raue
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3

I managed to overlook a new electoral development amongst a rush of moving house at the end of last year: the final boundaries for the next Western Australian state election were confirmed at the end of November.

There is very little in the way of changes from the draft boundaries. I tracked down two extremely small changes which don’t appear to have affected any actual voters.

The two real changes were in names of seats. The electorates of Girrawheen and Mirrabooka had been scrambled in the first draft, with the southern seat taking the name “Girrawheen” despite taking in more of Mirrabooka. That has been reversed, with that southern seat now called Mirrabooka. North of this seat was a new seat named Kingsway, a name confusingly similar to a nearby seat called Kingsley. This new seat is now called Landsdale.

Apart from these two name changes, the description of the new boundaries I gave in my August post on this topic is still valid. And you can check out Poll Bludger for the margins. I’m planning to calculate my own margins sometime soon.

Antony Green has also published his own detailed analysis for the WA parliamentary library.

And here is the map showing the boundary changes:

Podcast #32 – The Australian Election Study

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Ben Raue
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0

Ben is joined by the ANU’s Jill Sheppard to discuss the Australian Election Study: the process and some of the findings.

This is the final episode of 2019. If you want to support this podcast to come back in 2020 please consider signing up as a donor via Patreon.


You can subscribe to this podcast using this RSS feed in your podcast app of choice, but should also be able to find this podcast by searching for “the Tally Room”. If you like the show please considering rating and reviewing us on iTunes.

Podcast #31 – Introduction to Brisbane City Council

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Ben Raue
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0

This episode is all about the March 2020 election for Brisbane City Council, the most populous council in Australia. Ben is joined by Alexis Pink from 4ZZZ’s Pineapple Rebellion to discuss the context and some of the key wards.


You can subscribe to this podcast using this RSS feed in your podcast app of choice, but should also be able to find this podcast by searching for “the Tally Room”. If you like the show please considering rating and reviewing us on iTunes.

Guide to Brisbane City Council 2020 – now up

By
Ben Raue
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0

I have just finished my first full seat guide since the federal election, and it covers the Brisbane City Council election, due on March 28.

Brisbane City is the largest council in Australia by quite a long way and in some ways more resembles a small state election than a council election. The guide includes comprehensive guides to all 26 wards as well as the lord mayoral election.

Read the guide now

I will be providing some more coverage of this election, starting with a podcast about the election going up tomorrow.

There’s going to be a bunch of elections held next year, a bunch of them with lower profiles but still important. This includes local government elections along the entire east coast as well as both territories, and finally the state election in Queensland. I plan on doing full guides to the larger NSW councils as well as the territory and state elections. A lot of these elections don’t receive anywhere near as much coverage as they warrant so I hope the work I am doing to prepare for these elections will prove particularly useful.

If you find this work useful, please consider chucking me $5 a month via Patreon.

You can see the map of Brisbane City and navigate to each ward’s guide via the following map.

Australian Election Study released

By
Ben Raue
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0

The results of the Australian Election Study was released yesterday morning with a great deal of information about how and why Australians voted at the recent federal election. The AES is a long-standing study which has been conducted on every federal election since 1987, and gives us an opportunity to ask voters about what motivated their vote, and match that up against demographic characteristics to get a richer sense of why the election went the way it did.

In this post I thought I’d run through a few of the interesting points to emerge.

Continue

Podcast #30 – can our voting system really be “fair”?

By
Ben Raue
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0

Ben is joined by Peter Brent and Stewart Jackson to discuss whether it’s ever possible for a single-member voting system to be “fair” in the context of the final defeat of the South Australian fairness clause, and the relative value of survey, polling and raw voting data in assessing the results of an election.

You can subscribe to this podcast using this RSS feed in your podcast app of choice, but should also be able to find this podcast by searching for “the Tally Room”. If you like the show please considering rating and reviewing us on iTunes.

Podcast #29: Redistribution update

By
Ben Raue
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2

I’m joined by William Bowe from Poll Bludger to run through all of the electoral redistributions which have been conducted while we’ve all been thinking about other things this year: specifically Western Australia, the ACT, the Northern Territory, Brisbane City Council and the likely change in federal seat numbers in 2020.

You can subscribe to this podcast using this RSS feed in your podcast app of choice, but should also be able to find this podcast by searching for “the Tally Room”. If you like the show please considering rating and reviewing us on iTunes.

Podcast #28: Polling after the federal election

By
Ben Raue
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5

This week I’m joined by Kevin Bonham to discuss the failure of Australian polls at the 2019 federal election and the limited improvements in transparency by Australian pollsters since that election.

You can subscribe to this podcast using this RSS feed in your podcast app of choice, but should also be able to find this podcast by searching for “the Tally Room”. If you like the show please considering rating and reviewing us on iTunes.

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