Redistribution Archive

A substantial amount of analysis was produced yesterday about the draft boundaries for the NSW redistribution.

You can look at the maps here.

Antony Green has posted his estimated margins for each electorate.

He estimates that the ALP has lost two seats net to the Liberal Party. A Nationals seat was abolished in Western Sydney, while the new seat of Newtown was created, and is considered to be notionally Green.

As expected, there was a significant knock-on effect through southwestern Sydney and southwestern NSW.

This knock-on effect sees the seat of Goulburn changed dramatically. The town that gives the seat its name is now at the eastern edge of the seat, while Goulburn has gained large parts of Burrinjuck, including Yass.

The remainder of Burrinjuck has been merged with eastern parts of Murrumbidgee as the new seat of Cootamundra.

The three seats of Goulburn, Burrinjuck and Murrumbidgee are all held by ministers: Pru Goward, Katrina Hodgkinson and Adrian Piccoli. These three seats have been reduced to two, and this could see a clash between ministers, or force one of them to grab a seat off a neighbouring MP.

The seat of Murray-Darling has been renamed to Murray with the loss of Broken Hill, while Barwon has grown even larger to cover the sparsely populated north-west of the state.

Bathurst has been largely left alone, while Dubbo and Orange have swapped quite a bit of territory, shifting from a north-south axis to an east-west axis.

Changes were relatively mild in other parts of regional New South Wales.

In Sydney, the north shore has been left alone with only minor changes. The biggest changes start with the creation of the seat of Newtown, which has absorbed most of the excess quota from Heffron and Sydney and allowed those two seats to largely remain intact.

Antony Green estimates that Newtown is a notional Greens seat. I haven’t had a chance to crunch numbers myself, but this makes sense. The Greens seat of Balmain has largely been left intact, except for the loss of the suburb of Haberfield, which is considerably more conservative than the rest of the seat.

The ALP should have less trouble holding the new seat of Summer Hill than its predecessor of Marrickville, although the seat is still likely to be strong for the Greens.

Quite a few more seats are reshuffled throughout south-western and north-western Sydney. The seats of Menai and Smithfield have been renamed as Holsworthy and Prospect respectively. The ALP seat of Macquarie Fields has shifted south, gaining areas in the seat of Campbelltown which swung much more strongly to the Liberal Party. This is enough to switch the seat from notional Labor to Liberal.

Former Premier Nathan Rees’ seat of Toongabbie has shifted significantly and has been renamed Seven Hills, and his margin of 0.3% has become a Liberal margin of 8.5%.

2011 was a terrible result for Labor, and it’s probably not worth focusing too much on seats right at the bottom of the pendulum. Labor will presumably gain at least some swing back to them, and if there was to be a competitive election, the seats on current margins from 10% to 20% that would prove decisive.

So far, the boundaries seem very sensible, and a good attempt at dealing with all of the contradictions and demands that come with electoral redistributions.

I have started work on my Google Earth map of the new boundaries, but won’t have it finished until later this week. I will come back with those when they have been completed.

The NSW Electoral Commission has released the draft boundaries for the NSW state redistribution this morning.

I’m at work today so won’t be able to do any in-depth analysis until later. I’m sure Antony Green will post his analysis today, and in the meantime you can post your comments about what this means in the comments section below.

Some quick thoughts:

• Marrickville has effectively been split into two seats: Summer Hill and Newtown. Newtown stretches from Petersham to Redfern and Surry Hills and is likely to be very strong for the Greens.
• Balmain has been largely left alone – losing Haberfield and gaining a bit of Ultimo.
• Sydney has lost part of Ultimo and all of Surry Hills.
• Summer Hill covers all of the suburb of Marrickville, most of Lewisham, all of Dulwich Hill and most of Ashfield LGA.

Please have a look at the maps and post interesting information you find below.

I have the day off on Wednesday, so I hope that by the end of Wednesday I can complete a new Google Earth map of the boundaries.

Last week, the first round of suggestions for the NSW state electoral redistribution were released.

From here, there will be a chance to lodge a comment on these suggestions by Wednesday, March 20, and then the Commissioners will produce a draft map of the state. Following this stage there will be an opportunity for objections and comments on those objections before a final map is produced.

In this blog post I’m going to focus on the submissions from the four main political parties: Labor, Liberal, National and Greens. I should disclose that I played a large role in drawing up the Greens map.

These four parties all submitted a submission, covering the entire state, including a Mapinfo file map of the whole state. The ALP, Liberal Party and Greens provided static maps of varying quality, unfortunately the National Party provided no maps that could be viewed without Mapinfo. I’ve converted each party’s submission to Google Earth format, and you can download them, along with the spreadsheet I’ve used to analyse the results, at the end of this post.

In summary, across the state, the Greens have made changes to the smallest number of seats, leaving 22 out of 93 seats with no changes at all. The Labor submission is close behind, leaving 18 seats unchanged. The Liberal Party changed all but six seats, and the Nationals changed all but five.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have an article in New Matilda today about the upcoming NSW state redistribution and I wanted to post some additional information here at the Tally Room.

The NSWEC has posted the enrolment data for December 2012 on the redistribution website. The following table breaks the enrolment data down by region, giving a sense of how much each region is above or below quota.

Overall there are large over quotas in Western Sydney and Central Sydney. The over quota in Western Sydney (largely due to a massive over quota in Riverstone) will partly be used to bring the seats in Northern Sydney up to quota, while the surplus in the centre of Sydney will need to be shifted through South-West Sydney to make up for the shortfall in Western NSW.

Western NSW is 34% below its eleventh quota, and this will likely see Barwon and Murray-Darling take on territory from their neighbours and pretty major changes around Burrinjuck and Goulburn.

Most seats will change in minor ways, but the major changes will likely take place along a chain from Sydney to Burrinjuck.

The following maps show (in red) which seats are likely to have major changes as a chain reaction. As an example, Canterbury and Strathfield are likely to gain quite a lot of extra territory to absorb the excess quota in Marrickville, Balmain, Sydney and Heffron. This would result in even more territory having to be transferred to the next group of seats.

In terms of individual seats, Antony Green produced a map a few months ago showing which seats are above or below the quota.

The first round of submissions will close in early March, and I’ll return to the issue then.