The Tally Room

The Electoral Commission of Queensland on Friday released its draft boundaries for the 26 wards covering the City of Brisbane - Australia's biggest local council. The process is similar to processes followed for state, territory and federal electoral redistributions, a number of which are currently...

While New South Wales is currently undergoing a process of considering metropolitan council amalgamations, Western Australia has recently reached the unsuccessful conclusion of a similar process - which ended with a number of overwhelming 'no' votes in local referendums and an abandonment of the...

Local councils across Sydney are currently going through a process of making submissions to the state government's 'Fit For The Future' program, which is aimed at judging councils on a bunch of criteria, seemingly with the goal of consolidating the number of local councils,...

There was a story yesterday about plans by the NSW government to form a "Greater Sydney Commission", which would take charge of planning for development across Sydney, and seemingly also have some kind of responsibility for infrastructure and transport. Apparently the Commission was announced in...

Following up on Wednesday's post about the Northern Territory redistribution, I've now completed my Google Earth map of the electoral boundaries. You can download the map here, and it's embedded below (sorry no stats, just the boundaries). As explained last week, the Alice Springs area effectively...

Amongst many other redistributions, the Northern Territory is redrawing the boundaries of the 25 electorates for the territory's Legislative Assembly. The redistribution map was released yesterday. I'm working on my map of the new electorates, and should have it finished by Monday. In short, the town of...

The Australian Electoral Commission is currently undertaking federal redistributions in New South Wales (which is losing one seat), Western Australia (which is gaining one seat) and the ACT (which should see minor changes on the border between the two seats. Since I last wrote about...

Last month, Nationals MLC Ben Franklin announced that he would seek a parliamentary inquiry into the size of the western NSW electorates of Barwon and Murray, which cover a majority of the New South Wales land mass. Today, according to a tweet from the...

Ireland voted on Friday in a referendum on allowing same-sex marriage, and it passed overwhelmingly. Since I have previously produced a Google map of Ireland's parliamentary constituencies (download it here), I thought I would put together a quick map showing the shape of the vote by...

Two weeks ago I wrote a piece for the Guardian putting the case for reform to the system of Senate group voting tickets, in response to a number of pieces arguing against reform on the basis of who is for the reform, or who...