The redistribution of Queensland’s federal electorates is slowly getting into motion, and I’ll be writing a submission for PPAU. Right now, I’m mostly waiting for the enrolment statistics to come out, but in the meantime I’d appreciate input from Pirates in Queensland (or who used to live here) about your existing electorate boundaries:
if there’s anything particularly weird about them
your opinion on how communities of interest have been kept together or not
As a Brisbane boy, I’d especially appreciate input from those who have lived in regional Queensland in the past 20 years.
Well, it’s quite a while later and they still haven’t published so much as population figures, but we have something else to keep us interested - the State level draft boundaries have been released!
Submissions have now opened. Thankfully, they’ve also finally released the population figures.
First look: the 2009 commission did a pretty darn good job from a numbers perspective. More than half of the electorates in isolation could not change anything and still be within tolerance in 2021.
Let’s look at this by ‘regions’ (any resemblance to actual regions strictly coincidental):
The North: Leichhardt, Kennedy, Herbert, Dawson, Capricornia and Flynn. The big rural electorates creep north slightly as Kennedy takes another bite out of Leichhardt. Meanwhile Townsville gives up another exurb.
The central coast: Hinkler and Wide Bay expand south a little to take a bit out of Fairfax.
Metro north: Fisher expands south a little and other electorates shift slightly to ‘pass the growth’ northwards from Lilley and Brisbane.
Metro south: Griffith contracts a little to shift population to Oxley and Moreton. Other electorates don’t need tweaking, but potentially could be.
Fadden on the northern Gold Coast needs to lose some population. Ideally we could pass this to the north, but Fadden’s northern boundary is very strong. It will suffice to pass it south though and average it across the older, more established areas.
The western electorates are all within quota (albeit under).
I’m about halfway through. You can see what I’m up to here:
If you have comments or suggestions, please post them in this thread or via forum PM - I don’t actually have access to the email listed on the first page!
This isn’t the sort of thing I have ever thought of doing because it isn’t something I particularly pay attention to, the actual politics bit keeps me going. This raises a couple of questions.
What do you think specifically needs addressing?
What are you hoping to achieve?
I’m not entirely sure how to respond to the question. It’s a redistribution: electorates get out of whack population-wise and interested people make proposals to fix it.
Why make a submission? This is admittedly a bit of a side project, and I’m doing it mostly for the sake of the exercise; I’ll be particularly interested to see what other people come up with and their reactions.
Remember, the original pitch was “I’ll be making a submission to this, would NC be interested in having it be a PPAU thing?” NC said “OK” and here we are.
With regard to specific outcomes, I tried to really mess with the Dickson boundaries (Peter Dutton’s electorate). It would’ve been justifiable, but the numbers didn’t quite support it.
I’m not doing hardcore voting-intention analysis to construct these boundaries, if anyone’s wondering — I don’t yet have the toolchain for that and it’d be fairly orthogonal to PPAU’s interests right now anyway.
On current form, we’ll have a more comprehensive submission on this than the Greens and any other minor party will, except (probably) KAP. I call that a win
I messed up by forgetting to remove the ‘DRAFT’ watermark, but other than that I’m pretty happy with the submission.
Other parties: Katter only covered his local area (and I think the changes he proposed are very similar to ones in ours). Greens made a full submission this time. Labor and LNP have presumably made their usual comprehensive submissions. I’ll have more analysis on the other submissions in the coming week.
I’m writing up comments as I go - take a look here:
Edit 1: I’ve covered all the local-area-focused submissions, including Katter’s, and those from the LNP, Greens and ALP. Now onto the statewide independent submissions.
Two down, six left. I aim to get it all done by sunrise on Wednesday, for more leisurely proofreading and error-catching.
There’s a proposal in one of the submissions to name a Division ‘Bjelke-Petersen’. I’m countering, in what I hope will enter the ranks of classic PPAU submission trolling, with “sure, but we’re naming it after Florence, and she’s still alive so not this time anyway.”
All comments on suggestions have been published. I don’t think we got flamed for anything too badly. Where we did get criticised was the result of deliberate decisions (which at least one other submission agreed on in each case). All in all, a decent outcome I think.
Most amusing comment: expectation of much more radical change given we’re an “anti-system party”.
Oddly enough people who criticise us have no idea what we actually stand for. I have a story of handing out HTVs at the Griffith by-election, one of the Labor volunteers took a HTV to check it was correct… came back telling me she really liked our policies.
Seems a shame that level-headed policies are such an “outlier” in modern politics, but thats off-topic… Awesome work as always Alex!
