The current voting system for the Western Australian upper house is set to be overhauled after the WA state government accepted the recommendations of its expert panel earlier today. The panel has recommended the abolition of all regions used to elect the upper house, with 37 members1 to be elected by one statewide electorate, thus abolishing the severe malapportionment that has given far more power to rural voters.
Papua New Guinea’s parliament is elected from single-member electorates which are meant to be regularly reviewed and redrawn, as they are in Australia. Yet the current boundaries have not been significantly changed since the 1977 election. The Boundaries Commission is having another go now, but the proposed changes have limited relationship to the actual population imbalances.
I’ve now completed my guide to the South Australian state election, due on March 19 next year.
The guide features profiles of all 47 House of Assembly electorates, as well as the Legislative Council contest.
I have now published a guide to the by-election in the Northern Territory seat of Daly, which will be held on the 11th of September. Daly is a very marginal Country Liberal seat and may well be in play. There aren’t really enough election-day booths in rural NT electorates to do my typical booth maps, so I’ve tried a different format which also includes pre-poll booths.
The final electoral boundaries to be used at the 2023 New South Wales state election were released on Thursday, and I have now finished my new electoral map, along with estimates of margins.
I have now finished all of the remaining profiles for the guide to the next Australian federal election. I published the 97 seats unaffected by redistribution back in June, but I’ve now also published the 54 seats in Western Australia and Victoria, as well as profiles of the eight Senate races.
The Australian Electoral Commission this afternoon published the maps and data for the final redistribution of Western Australia’s federal electoral boundaries. This follows the same publication for the Victorian redistribution last Monday.
As the lockdown in Sydney drags on, I’ve decided to release a few more profiles from my guide to the next federal election. This is on top of the other five that I released a few weeks ago.
There is a by-election coming up this Saturday in the Queensland state seat of Stretton, following the death of Labor MP Duncan Pegg in early June.
The seat covers the southern fringe of the City of Brisbane, close to the border with Logan. Pegg held the seat by a 14.8% margin in 2020.
It seems very likely that Labor will retain the seat.
My hiatus over the last few weeks has delayed the production of a seat guide but it is now available. Check it out.
I will firstly acknowledge that I am very late in publishing these figures. I’ve just finished moving house during the first two weeks of lockdown and it has pushed back my timelines.
Anyway, this post contains my estimates of the two-candidate-preferred margins, the primary vote for the main parties, and my estimate of the figures for the Legislative Council regions. In particular the Labor vote has changed significantly in the renamed North-Eastern Metropolitan region.