Showing posts with label federal electorates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label federal electorates. Show all posts

Thursday, January 22, 2026

What's the most federal electorates you have been to in a day?

A trip from Brisbane to Sydney in one day takes you through about 24 federal divisions.

This is a sequel to How many federal electorates have you visited?  The rules of that article don't count electorates one is just passing through for purely travel purposes, because you're not really visiting them as such.  This one is different.

For this article the challenge is to work out the most electorates you have ever been in in one day, excluding flying.  Any form of being effectively on the ground (or water) counts - driving, rail, walking, cycling, bus, boat if you are sailing through electorates with water boundaries and so on.  Flying doesn't count because flying over 14 extra seats in Sydney because your plane had to go around is just not interesting and unless you're paying insanely close attention to the flight tracker on a flight that has one you won't know which 14 anyway.  However, being on a plane that's on the ground for a stop en route is fine.  I also suggest defining "day" as a calendar day based on the current time in each electorate when passed through, but we could also count continuous trips within a 24 hour time period that don't include any overnight stopping.  

Thursday, January 12, 2017

How many federal electorates have you visited?




Map update as of Jan 2026


Scroll down to bottom of page for my current tally

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When I travel outside my home state I like to pay attention to which federal electorates I'm in at the time.  A few months back I thought it might be fun to try to work out how many federal divisions I had actually visited.  Because I live in Tasmania and do not drive, my score is not as high as it might otherwise be - indeed for a nine-year period covering most of the 1990s I didn't leave Tasmania at all.

For this task I set a couple of ground rules.

Firstly I imposed an age limit - anywhere I went before I turned fifteen doesn't count.  15 is the age from which my travel decisions were generally independent.  Before age ten I travelled around Brisbane and up and down the eastern seaboard with my family a lot, which would add many electorates to this list, but there's no hope of me remembering everywhere I went.  

Secondly, I exclude any electorate I was just passing through (or over) for travel purposes between points outside that electorate and without staying overnight in the process.  Last year I spent three hours in Moscow airport because flying from Baku to Dubai via Moscow was much cheaper than flying there direct and didn't get me home any later, but that doesn't really count as having "been to Russia".