Yesterday the AEC released public feedback on the proposed radical redistribution as previously covered here (Draft Scraps The Franklin Divide). Frankly I thought there might be more complaints than there were, but some of those that there are are pretty punchy. Of the 90 distinct submissions received, exactly half by my count discussed the proposed boundaries at all, and of these I counted 14 as purely supporting the proposal (one or two noting some initial reluctance in doing so) and 31 objecting, nearly all of these proposing something substantially different if they proposed anything at all.
Predictably the most common objections concerned the condition of Lyons and especially the placement of Glenorchy in it. Objectors raised Glenorchy's disconnection from the bulk of Lyons through the inclusion of Brighton in Franklin, argued that neo-Lyons was thematically incoherent, complained about the severing of Glenorchy from Greater Hobart and also objected to rural Tasmania being fragmented into majority urban seats. Submission 34 by Mark James is a good representative of the objections:
"Under the proposed model, rural/regional voters will be outnumbered by city voters in all five electorates. There is no community of interest at all between Glenorchy, Sheffield, and St. Helens. - For a state with a famously decentralised population, in which the majority of the population live outside the capital city, voters in the capital city will form the bulk of three out of five electorates."
