The Australian Electoral Commission today announced the final decisions on boundaries for the NSW federal redistribution. As with the Victorian and Western Australian announcements last week, the AEC is yet to publish maps, digital boundary files or SA1 data. With the council election coming up this weekend, I’m not going to try to produce new estimates until the official determination on October 10, when that other data should become available.
For this post, I’m just going to summarise the small number of changes announced today that deviate from the original proposal. For all other seats, the margin estimates for the draft boundaries shouldn’t have changed.
The changes are very subtle – the commission did not spare North Sydney from abolition, and did not make any changes to Kingsford Smith, as this author urged.
The changes between the draft and final boundaries are:
- Blaxland and Watson swapped areas.
- A small part of Bradfield has been moved into Berowra.
- A small part of Dobell has been moved into Robertson.
There are a few other changes to other seats that don’t involve any electors being moved, but this means that 41 out of 47 seats should have the same margins as in the draft redistribution.
A bit frustrating that none of the 3 redistributions saw anything beyond extremely minimal change from the proposals.
I and others put forward changes that didn’t reinvent the wheel, but tidied up certain boundaries and improved community of interest in specific areas. But basically none of them got up.
Makes you wonder why they bothered with the Objection stage at all…….
This redistribution was pretty disappointing for regional areas.
They seem unwilling to entertain any fixes that involve more than two seats.
Which makes it very difficult to suggest improvements to monstrosities like Kingsford-Smith. Quite how the transport/communication criteria can be fulfilled across the Airport, a river and a freeway, I don’t know.
Victoria wasn’t the only state dudded.
My objection concerned only a change between Mitchell and Parramatta affecting no other divisions, and was in line with other objections but narrower in scope. They didn’t even bother with that.
Ben and Mark, I feel the commission didn’t put as much effort to review the objections this time round compared to previous years. In the 2016 NSW redistribution, I believe they made changes to multiple divisions (as Nicholas mentioned). This was due to objections extending Barton too far north and also placing Drummoyne into Grayndler when it belongs more with places such as Haberfield in Reid.
I can understand that there was too much ‘noise’ from those submitting pointless claims about wanting to keep North Sydney and Higgins compared to previous redistributions that abolished other seats (Stirling for WA 2021, Port Adelaide for SA 2018 and also Charlton for NSW 2016, these had limited or no objections) but surely the other complaints like the awkward split of Epping and Blacktown, combined with other messy boundaries should warrant assessment and some modifications to resolve these issues.
i was one fo the people who proposed extending grayndler to the cooks river and having KS jump into Sans Souci
Yep, in 2016 they did a rotation of the five seats surrounding Watson, leading to much better boundaries compared to the initial proposal and addressing a number of themes in objections at once.
Happy to see the Berowra/Bradfield and Robertson/Dobell changes that were minor and effective were put through.
Really disappointed that no substantial changes were made even when multiple objections put forward sensible changes that would have had significant improvements in community of interests.
Wonder if the imposed time constraints, combined with the noise of North Sydney and Higgins meant they put less focus on objections?
So, I guess next is Tasmania, Queensland, South Australia and ACT, which will all be scheduled to begin within 30 days of Parliament sitting after the election. Unless they expect a change in entitlement.
Fair point Darren, if the rushed timeframe prevented the AEC from assessing the genuine and realistic objections to see how they could be implemented within the numerical constraints.
If the AEC didn’t have the projection issues, perhaps things might have gone better in terms of having more time to assess all suggestions and develop a better set of boundaries in the first place.
I was curious why the change was made to the Dobell/Robertson boundary and so I went looking. From what I can see, there was just one person who suggested the change, and honestly the submission is a masterclass in how to object to an electoral boundary change.
I encourage people to check it out and learn.
https://www.aec.gov.au/redistributions/2023/nsw/files/objections/nsw24-OB0035-lorraine-wilson.pdf
I think they were just lazy you an. With the exception of the horrible choice of oakford district in wa all the state redistributions were by far alot better
Elle makes an excellent point. Changes succeed when they tap into an obvious mistake which bona fide community objectors raise. And it only takes one really good objection to succeed. The Dobell/Robertson change was also explained simply and unemotionally at the Hearings. It was not a political ploy pretending it wasn’t. And it did no harm with its consequential changes.
The Steggall/Tink objection was always going to fail as a self-interested political ploy with consequential changes that clearly involved “harm” – St Ives being put in a northern beaches seat. And their multiple supporting objectors who repeatedly gave the game away just made it worse for them.
Ben Raue’s changes also went nowhere because they were only as strong as their weakest link – the changes at the western end of Hughes. And, despite the psephologists (Raue, Mc Sweeney, Mulcair, etc) hating Cook crossing the Georges River, there were no bona fide community objections at all. Locals are fine with it. A close reading of the Proposals also showed how attached the Commission was to their Cooks River boundary at the southern edge of Grayndler. They were never going to move away from that and change Kingsford-Smith.
The Commission’s first proposal was reasonably strong and the objections had limited merit. That’s why there was no real change.
@Delphi
Even ignoring the Kingsford Smith and Cook issue, the first proposal could not have by any means been strong at all, particulalrly in many Western Sydney areas, most notably Hughes and McMahon.
The lack of submissions from the locals would be more attributable to many people in this area not necessarily knowing there was a redistribution or being time-poor (certainly more than my part of Sydney – I live in the North Sydney/Bradfield area). Not necessarily that the proposal was even mildly good. This left literal outsiders (e.g. me) to do the fixing.
(Note: My solution included a new Western Sydney seat in Blacktown, and expanding Hughes into Revesby instead of Glenfield/Macquarie Fields/Ingleburn. At least on connectivity grounds, my solution could have had no harm beyond a larger elector movement and maybe a slightly odd Barton (but nowhere near as bad as the committee’s final Hughes/McMahon))
I am also mildly annoyed that my inquiry submission of putting Forestville into Bradfield to allow Northbridge to go to Warringah (Northbridge has more transport connections to North Sydney than to Chatswood, despite being in the same LGA as the latter) but I accept that was partly my fault for only realising its merits after the comment on objections and thus leaving it until the inquiry. Unlike a lot of others, I accepted that North Sydney was gone.
@Elle, agree with the Dobell/Robertson assessment. The same applied to the Bradfield/Berowra change. There was one objection – an aged care facility: https://www.aec.gov.au/redistributions/2023/nsw/files/objections/nsw24-OB0508-adventist-aged-care-sydney.pdf – and they made a good point about the local area. I supported both those in my comments on objections.
From history, there is rarely widespread changes between the proposal and the final review, the same people are involved – just augmented with a few more the second time round. I think the Commission see it as really more about tweaking the boundaries, than wholesale change.
@Delphi, I do agree that our suggestions to move Cook south are really a reflection of the weakest elements – but also unless there is a very large contingent of non-partisan suggestions, they’ll likely not make wholesale changes to appease us when it’s clear the community doesn’t care enough or is not engaged enough.
I also wonder if the increased interest in statewide submissions (some from those of us here) with really radical changes and numerous seat renames means that less weight is given to supporting the suggestions. I think maybe we need to reel in some of these suggestions that leave the state unrecoginisable. The Committees have a record of valuing minimal changes – despite the Act saying existing boundaries are given less weight.
By the way, thanks Delphi for calling me a psephologist!
Agree Darren, apart from the large number of objections for the North Sydney abolition there weren’t many objections from community groups unlike the 2016 NSW redistribution where there was strong objection from neighbourhood groups in Wingello and other Wingecaribee Shire towns about not having their communities split up, and they decided to reunite them with Goulburn in Hume instead of with Shellharbour in Whitlam.