Objections to the federal redistribution proposals for Western Australia and Victoria were published last week. Objections to the NSW proposal close this Friday.
The Victorian objections were dominated by a large number of simple objections in opposition to the abolition of Higgins. North Sydney MP Kylea Tink has launched a campaign on her website to encourage local residents to make similar objections to her seat’s abolition, which leads me to assume a similar flooding of the process in NSW.
But I think these campaigns are making a fundamental mistake which means they aren’t likely to find a success.
While there is room for public involvement in the redistribution process, it’s not just a matter of asking for something loudly and en masse. You actually need to propose practical solutions to the dilemmas faced by the mapmakers.
In the case of North Sydney, the committee was required to expand all of the seats on the northern side of the Sydney. Most others who made suggestions agreed that it made most sense to have Mackellar to expand south in Warringah, and then have Warringah expand west into North Sydney. The details could vary, but that was the general principle.
Sophie Scamps proposed changing her seat of Mackellar in a way that fit with this shift, but her teal neighbours instead proposed things that would have minimal impact on their own seats: Zali Steggall suggested her seat should expand both ways into Mackellar and North Sydney, and Tink proposed that North Sydney expand into both Bradfield and Warringah.
Both Steggall’s and Tink’s proposals would have required Mackellar to shift west into Bradfield and the upper north shore. That wouldn’t have been a crazy idea, but they didn’t even address what that would look like.
I understand that proposing changes to a colleague’s seat would have created tension, but without acknowledge knock-on effects, your suggestion has less credibility and is less likely to be adopted.
The one bit of real doubt with North Sydney would have been whether the remainder of North Sydney was combined with southern parts of Bradfield, or would have been split between Bradfield and Bennelong. But Tink instead proposed a third approach for her area that would have had major knock-on effects in other areas that made much less sense.
Tink’s proposal for her electorate effectively was an argument that Mackellar would have to shift significantly into Bradfield, but she didn’t make any case for such a change.
What is even more fascinating is that Tink’s campaign page seems to be continuing to pursue the original strategy of keeping North Sydney entirely intact, rather than aiming to move Lane Cove and Hunters Hill into the Bradfield/North Sydney overlap seat. I can’t see such an approach getting anywhere.
I haven’t paid quite so much attention to the campaign to save Higgins, but many of the submissions made on behalf of Higgins don’t give the mapmakers any alternative plans that would allow Higgins to be saved – they just make an argument that Higgins is too important a seat to be abolished. But that isn’t how the decision is made.
I don’t normally make submissions into redistributions, but the committee’s proposals for Kingsford Smith and Hughes have motivated me to put something in, which I did last night.
Kingsford Smith was expanded past Sydney Airport to take in suburbs along the Botany Bay shoreline in the former Rockdale council area, while Hughes was expanded to take in the northern suburbs of Campbelltown.
But a submission just saying “don’t do that” won’t get anywhere – you need to present an alternative plan that can work instead.
So I decided to limit my proposal to a nine-seat area in the southern half of Sydney, with the goal of making Kingsford Smith, Hughes and (to a lesser extent) Cook cover much more appropriate boundaries.
If you want to read my submission, you can download the PDF here. You can also download a spreadsheet listing how I allocated each SA1 in these nine seats.
I don’t know if it will go anywhere, but I think it’s more likely to be successful when you acknowledge the dilemmas faced by the mapmakers and work with them to fix problems, rather than just insisting that things should stay the same.