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 included a useful chart which compared enrolment for the two divisions of Lingiari and Solomon since 2017.
The two electorates had roughly equal enrolment in mid-2019, but Lingiari has tended to have higher enrolment since then.
Lingiari has had three moments where it’s enrolment jumped further ahead of Solomon – the 2019 election, the 2022 election and 2023 Voice referendum. This is because Lingiari has a larger eligible voter population, but has tended to have lower rates of enrolment. As the AEC has been catching up with enrolment in remote communities, this has pushed Lingiari’s roll size ahead of Solomon.
Lingiari had almost 9,000 more electors on the roll as of December 2023. The gap between the two seats had continued to widen throughout 2023, so I suspect the gap would be even wider now. This means Lingiari had 5.8% more electors than the average enrolment.
Solomon will thus need to expand in territory. The most obvious place for this expansion is in the Palmerston area. This satellite city of Darwin is currently divided between Solomon and Lingiari, but had been completely contained in Solomon prior to the last redistribution (which was implemented not long after the 2016 election).
Antony has calculated that returning this area to Solomon, and thus unifying Palmerston in the urban electorate, would bring the two seats roughly in parity with each other. So I suspect that’s what they’ll do, and there won’t be much room for alternative proposals.
I’ve had some requests for a post on this topic, so here you have it.
thats what i was looking to do. orignally i would have c\moved cocos and christmas islands but the gap has widened since then