The Australian Electoral Commission today announced the final decisions on boundaries for the NSW federal redistribution. As with the Victorian and Western Australian announcements last week, the AEC is yet to publish maps, digital boundary files or SA1 data. With the council election coming up this weekend, I’m not going to try to produce new estimates until the official determination on October 10, when that other data should become available.
For this post, I’m just going to summarise the small number of changes announced today that deviate from the original proposal. For all other seats, the margin estimates for the draft boundaries shouldn’t have changed.
The changes are very subtle – the commission did not spare North Sydney from abolition, and did not make any changes to Kingsford Smith, as this author urged.
The changes between the draft and final boundaries are:
- Blaxland and Watson swapped areas.
- A small part of Bradfield has been moved into Berowra.
- A small part of Dobell has been moved into Robertson.
There are a few other changes to other seats that don’t involve any electors being moved, but this means that 41 out of 47 seats should have the same margins as in the draft redistribution.