This area covers ten electorates, stretching from two seats in the New England region down to Murray and Albury on the Victorian border.
It’s quite possibly the most interesting region in the election. On a two-party-preferred basis, not a single one of these seats is close to being marginal. But if you factor in the role of independents and the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party, a majority of this region could be in play.
We’re now just over two weeks out from the NSW state election, and probably ten weeks away from the federal election, and this website is kicking up a gear. I’m posting fortnightly podcasts, I’ve started doing regular blog posts every couple of days, and maintaining over 250 separate comments threads under state and federal seat guides.
When I was analysing the list of candidates running in the state election yesterday, I was a bit surprised by which minor parties were running the largest number of Legislative Assembly candidates.
Nominations closed yesterday for the 2019 NSW state election, with an increase in lower house candidates but a decrease in upper house candidates compared to the 2015 election.
568 candidates nominated for the Legislative Assembly. This is an increase from 540 in 2015 and 498 in 2011, but this is less than the record nomination numbers of 732 in 1999 and 661 in 2003.
At the upcoming NSW state election, we should expect more people than ever before to cast their votes early, while others will use online voting, making ordinary election-day voting a relatively smaller proportion of the total vote.
Ben is joined by Stewart Jackson and Geoff Robinson to discuss the NSW state election, specifically the Greens, the moving apart of the NSW party system, and historical parallels.
Thanks to 2SER radio in Sydney for the use of their studio.
There are eight seats covering the north coast of New South Wales, stretching from Myall Lakes to Tweed.
Seven of these seats are held by the Nationals, while the eighth seat was won off the Nationals by the Greens in 2015.
NSW state politics appears to be shifting away from a conventional Labor-Coalition contest, with different kinds of contests dominating in different regions.
While there has been a general trend in Australian politics away from conventional Labor-Coalition contests and towards races which feature an independent or minor party in the final count (what the Australian Electoral Commission calls “non-classic”), NSW has led the crowd.
Over the next few weeks I will be running regular blog posts analysing various parts of the NSW state election. This will include summaries of the race in six geographic regions, starting today with the western half of Sydney.
Western Sydney has become a cliche when it comes to Australian elections. The mythical home of the swing voter, where major parties look to decide their key policies.
I’ve added a new dataset to my data repository, as an exclusive for website donors, with the results of the 2011 NSW state election.
This dataset covers both the lower house and upper house, including the full list of polling places (with latitudes, longitudes and addresses) and the full list of candidates, as well as voting figures at the booth and seat level.