How optional preferential voting affects Brisbane City elections

In cases where members are elected to represent single-member wards, or divisions, Queensland councils use the optional preferential voting (OPV) electoral system to elect members. This covers all mayoral elections, as well as council seats in most urban south-east Queensland councils. Under OPV, voters are...

The decline of the two-party system in Brisbane

Brisbane City's single-member wards lend themselves to two-party competition, but in recent decades we've seen the rise of the Greens, first by just contesting wards that had previously been two-candidate contests, and eventually by winning their first ward and increasing their vote citywide. This post...

Check out my newsletter for donors

I've been thinking for a while of publishing a regular newsletter which would have a bit of a different style to my usual blog posts, where I can discuss topics I've found interesting recently. For the last month I've started publishing such a newsletter via...

Dunkley by-election live

11:12 - Alright I think that's it for tonight. I won't be putting up another blog post analysing these results, but I'm going to be looking into the way the by-election has been spun in my Patreon newsletter on Monday. If you want to read...

Tasmanian ballot papers hit record size

Nominations were announced today for the Tasmanian state election, as well as the Dunstan by-election in South Australia. I will get the full candidate lists up later tonight, but for now I wanted to dwell on some overall numbers showing how much bigger the ballot...

Brisbane City and party appointments

I often compare the City of Brisbane to a small state parliament. With its single-member wards dominated by parties and its large size, it often resembles a state election more so than a local council. But one of the main differences between the City...

NT redistribution commences

The AEC last week officially commenced a redistribution of the Northern Territory's two federal electorates. I'll keep this blog post short and sweet. I won't bother with a map, since there are only two seats, making the equation simple. Antony Green's blog post from early February...

Podcast #113: Let’s go back to Tasmania

Ben was joined by Stewart Jackson from the University of Sydney and Tasmanian political scientist Mike Lester to preview next month's Tasmanian state election. We discuss the widening field of independent candidates, political events in the last term and the issues around the 25-member House...

Tas 2024 – surge in independent numbers point to larger ballots

Nominations will close next Thursday for the Tasmanian state election, and we've seen a surge in candidate announcements in the last few days. I've just finished updating my candidate lists, and they show that there is a real increase in independent candidates compared to...

Victorian ward boundaries published

The Victorian state government last week announced the final ward boundaries for 39 councils for this October's council elections. I've been compiling those ward boundaries as a shapefile and that's now finished. The VEC published KML files for every proposed set of ward boundaries. Unfortunately these...