The Australian Electoral Commission has officially opened the first round of submissions for the federal redistribution of Queensland. The state will maintain thirty electorates, but the current boundaries, first used at the 2019 federal redistribution, are showing their age and are due for a freshening-up.
This redistribution was due last year, but was postponed due to doubt about whether Queensland could gain a thirty-first seat for the 2028 federal election. That is why this redistribution is only commencing now, while redistributions for federal seats in South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT are almost finished.
Along with the opening of submissions, the AEC has also published detailed enrolment figures for every SA1 block in the state, as well as projections of what they expect enrolment to be in August 2028. This is a shorter projection period than what I’ve seen for past redistributions, and I’ve asked the AEC why this is the case.
The main point of this blog post is to analyse those projected enrolment figures.
Australian federal electoral law allows electorates to be drawn with up to 10% variation in current enrolment, but just 3.5% variation as of the projection period. So those projection numbers end up more important and ensure that fast-growing seats are drawn smaller than slow-growing seats.
This map shows how much each seat deviates from the average on the projected figures. You can click on any seat to see the precise deviation on both metrics for that seat.
There is a very distinct ring wrapping around Brisbane where seats 15%+ over the projected quota: Wright, Blair, Longman and Fisher collectively are projected to have about 73% of a seat in surplus enrolment by 2028.
Seats in Brisbane proper, on the other hand, are mostly well under quota. Ryan, Moreton and Bonner are all at less than 90% of the average. Most other urban seats are all under quota by smaller degrees, although Brisbane and Petrie are above average.
The Gold Coast has some seats over quota and some under quota, but they mostly cancel out. Forde and Fadden have over a quota of surplus voters between them while Bowman, McPherson and Moncrieff are close to quota. Fairfax on the Sunshine Coast is slightly over quota.
Looking further field, just one seat outside of the south-east is over the average: Hinkler in central Queensland is projected to be 2.9% above the average. But none of the seats are as far below the average as Ryan, Moreton and Bonner.
This table groups electorates by region, and then ultimately into urban South-East Queensland and the remainder of the state. When one seat is over quota but it’s neighbour is under quota it is easy enough to adjust both seats by moving a suburb. But when a region systemically is under quota, it forces more significant changes.
The twenty seats of urban South-East Queensland are due to contain surplus voters equivalent to 40.9% of an electorate by August 2028, but that masks significant differences within these seats. The nine seats of Brisbane will only have about eight and a half seats worth of voters, while outlying south-east Queensland and the Sunshine Coast will have over 80% of a surplus seat.
Regional Queensland is significantly under quota, in particular the seats of North Queensland.
I suspect we will see shifts along the coast with seats expanding southward, and that will absorb some of the surplus enrolment on the outskirts of south-east Queensland, but Brisbane electorates will need to expand outward to absorb the remaining growth.
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