Tasmania Redistribution: The Franklin Renaming Fiasco

In 1984 there was a proposal to rename the electorate that is now called Lyons (and was then called Wilmot) "Truganini".  For a little while this was being reported and discussed in papers, there was widespread opposition and the change was withdrawn.  Wilmot became Lyons instead.  I was twelve years old at the time and I remember this in broad outline.  But I wonder if the Augmented Electoral Commission's corporate memory goes back this far.  

Unfortunately we yet again have had a redistribution proposal for a Tasmanian electorate to have an Aboriginal name where that proposal has been supported out of pretty much nowhere and sparked significant opposition.  Last week's boundary announcement has seen 272 written submissions, most of them opposing the proposed replacement of the name Franklin with Tongerlongeter.

I want to contrast this with the process that led to the replacement of the name Denison with Clark.  By the time this change was made in the 2017 redistribution, there was a very well organised movement to change Denison to Clark.  This proposal had been active in the previous cycle and by the 2017 cycle its adherents included several prominent Tasmanians, judges, current and former politicians and there was even a petition supporting it.  It is true that the new name was not endorsed until the Augmented Electoral Commission stage but by that stage the proposal was so well known that anyone with anything to say had said it, and the change of name attracted only three further objections, I don't think any of them from Tasmanians.  People might have agreed or disagreed with the change but people knew why the change was being proposed, why Clark if there was a new name, and why there were objections to Denison.

Tasmania Redistribution: Announcement Day Live Thread

Today could be a momentous day in the history of Tasmanian electoral boundaries!  Or it could be a nothing-ever-happens.  Around mid-morning today there will be a boundary announcement.  If the announcement is either the same as the draft boundaries or only slightly different then that's it and the new boundaries will be official for federal elections after 8 October.  It usually takes several months for them to then be adopted at state level via legislation, so an early state election before, say, mid-2027 would not necessarily be on the new boundaries.  

Alternatively the Augmented Electoral Commission could recommend substantively different boundaries, which would result in further rounds of consultation.  I have seen no variations from process that would suggest there is any intent to do this so far, but I am not sure if that should be taken as a sign that it's not happening.  

My previous articles are here:

Clark Must Expand But Where?

Draft Scraps The Franklin Divide

The Reaction

Once the announcement is up I will be posting details of what has been decided.  I'm not Ben Raue or William Bowe so please do not expect new margin calculations from this source.  However I will have summaries and comments about the decision, whatever it is.  

Tasmania Redistribution: The Reaction

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."

Tasmania Redistribution: Draft Scraps The Franklin Divide

 

The much-awaited proposal redistribution of Tasmania's federal (and by normal standards, state) electoral boundaries has been published.  I discussed the challenges facing the Redistribution Committee in my piece Clark Must Expand, But Where?  In the draft proposal, the winner is "south".

The Committee (note, it is not correct to refer to the Committee as "the AEC" as two members are AEC and two are not) has proposed one of the more radical options that was considered in the process.  Somewhat against my expectations based on the large movement of electors, they've decided that the further creep of Clark into Kingston, cutting parts further south off from their urban centre, really was unsustainable and it is now time to bite the bullet.  They have recommended the southern boundaries of Clark, Lyons and Franklin as proposed by former Clarence Mayor Doug Chipman (there was a similar proposal by current Clarence Councillor James Walker).  Clark becomes Hobart City, Kingborough and the Huon Valley, Franklin becomes Clarence, Brighton, Sorell and the lower and central east coast and Lyons becomes, well, whatever that is.  In the north they've gone for the orthodox approach of Blackstone Heights and Prospect Vale into Bass, so I don't think anybody got their exact suggestion in full.  

Tasmanian Redistribution: Clark Must Expand, But Where?

I don't usually get involved in redistribution speculation and lobbying (I don't even have the time and skill to draw nice maps) but this one is particularly interesting to me and local.  A federal redistribution for Tasmania has commenced, with the initial suggestions stage closing on 7 November.  

Tasmania currently uses the federal electorate boundaries for its Hare-Clark system state elections, and if this continues (and no one has convinced me that it shouldn't) then the changes will flow on to the next Tasmanian state election, which could well be held before the next federal poll.  The purpose of this article isn't to support any particular option, or to dive into the finer details of which lines to put exactly where (rather beyond my computing skills for the level of time I have right now); it's to raise awareness of what some of the broad options are and some advantages and disadvantages of them.  

Unlike in the other states that may be affected by planned redistributions (SA and Queensland), entitlement changes or possibly expansion, Tasmania's number of divisions clearly won't be changing in this term.  So this Tasmanian redistribution is for keeps.  

The issue is that as populations outside the inner cities of Tasmania have increased while the inner cities have stagnated, Clark has drifted to a lower population than the other four electorates.  Clark is projected to be 10.5% below quota by 2030, Lyons 9.98% above, Bass 4.42% below,  Franklin 3.20% above and Braddon 1.73% above.  At the least the first three need to be brought inside the 3.5% variation from quota (or at least "as far as practicable") and this means that Clark should gain at least 7%, Lyons should lose at least about 6.5%, Bass should gain 1%, and changes could occur in the others.  

The Draft Boundaries Would Not Put Labor On The Edge Of Minority

The current round of draft redistributions is complete with the release of the NSW proposal today, following the Victorian and WA proposals two weeks ago.  While the Victorian redistribution led to an outbreak of unsound psephology with false claims that the Kooyong redistribution greatly favoured the Liberal Party (I wrote about this for Crikey), the NSW washup has been pretty sensible, for the first day at least.  One thing I have seen that seems hard to credit is the idea that Kylea Tink, whose seat is proposed to be abolished, would win the now even more marginal Bennelong off two major parties fighting tooth and nail for it.  This is a general article about the impact of the draft changes.  A note that I am not a primary source for redistribution margin estimates, and am here largely relying on the work of Ben Raue, William Bowe and Antony Green for those.

The Victorian draft proposes that part of the boundary of Kooyong expands to take in part of Higgins.  The key issue in the shortlived Frydenberg-comeback debacle was that there's no obvious way to project how an independent would have done if their seat is expanded into an area they didn't previously run in.  One can use the 2022 preference flows from the present Kooyong to distribute votes for Labor and the Greens et al between the Liberals and Monique Ryan (IND) as if Ryan had been running in the new bits, but that means assigning Ryan a primary vote of zero in the new part.  It's saying that voters who would vote 1 Ryan 2 Liberal, for instance, don't exist in the new bit, but we know they do exist in the old bit, or she would not have won the seat.

Victorian Lower House 2022: Labor Well On Track Despite Federal Drag

Yesterday saw the release of the first Newspoll for Victorian state voting intention this year.  This is the first new public polling voting intention data for the state for over four months with the exception of a couple of Morgan SMS offerings, on which I can't place a lot of weight.  The release of a Newspoll with about three months til the election is a good time to launch my coverage of the Victorian lower house election, having not covered the Victorian lower house contest since the last Newspoll late last year.

The new Newspoll estimates Labor leading 56-44 (an effective 1.6% swing from the last election after accounting for the Liberals not contesting Richmond in 2018) off primary votes of Labor 41 Coalition 36 Greens 13 others 10.  These results are not wildly different to the 2018 election, with Labor down 1.9%, the Greens up 2.3% and the Coalition up negligibly.  For all the hype from some on the right about how hated he supposedly is, Daniel Andrews polls a rather strong +13 net rating (54-41) with the artist now known as Matt Guy on a not so flashy -17 (32-49).  A modest Better Premier lead for Andrews given the other scores and the way preferred leader scores skew to incumbents (51-34) does provide some support for the idea that Andrews is a polarising figure and the minority who dislike him tend to do so strongly.

Seat Model

What might this poll look like if realised on election day?  By uniform swing Labor would drop four of its 58 notional seats to the Liberals and Northcote (just) to the Greens, coming out just two down on its 2018 election result, but the uniform swing model is if anything potentially unkind to Labor's chances vs the Liberals in the 2PP seats.  There are two major reasons for this: firstly, personal vote effects from the 2018 massacre will make it hard for the Liberals to pick off Labor marginals, and secondly the Liberals have a lot of ultramarginals that are at risk from random variation unless they can get a more substantial swing.  They have nine seats on 1.5% or less (including occupied notional Labor seats) to Labor's four.  

Legislative Council 2019: Montgomery

Montgomery (Lib vs IND 5.49% - pre-redistribution margin)
Incumbent: Leonie Hiscutt (Liberal)

Welcome to the third of my three Legislative Council guide pages this year.  The one for the most interesting-looking contest, the Nelson vacancy, has been doing business for some time, and Pembroke was posted a few days back.  I will be updating my voting patterns assessment as well but am waiting for the upcoming session to complete in view of the lack of data in the last 12 months so far, so I expect to do that update in the third week of April. [EDIT: I ran out of time to do this before the election!]

And there will be live coverage here of all three seats on the night of the election,  Saturday May 4th.

This piece will be edited through the campaign from time to time for updates, campaign information, added candidates and changed assessments.

(Note: candidates may contact me once only to request a change to the link their name goes to, or additional links which will be added, or not, at my discretion.  No other changes will be made on request except to correct clear factual errors.  Candidates are welcome to comment in the comment section. Differences in the length of different candidate sections reflect differences in amount of available/(in my view) interesting material.)

SA State Election March 15

South Australia goes to the polls on March 15, the same day as Tasmania. Tasmanian readers should not be cross with SA for this; after all, they were certainly there first, and no-one has advanced any really good reason why Tasmania had to follow suit.  An unfortunate impact of this is that election analysis resources around the country will be strained, and I especially will be too busy with the Tasmanian poll to devote much attention to the South Australian situation.  But I do think SA is interesting too, and here are my comments on the SA election generally and especially one quirk of the SA electoral system.

South Australia loosely parallels Tasmania in that both see ancient Labor governments looking to the presence of a new Liberal government in Canberra as their primary hope to escape a drubbing.  Both are perceived as having won one election too many (in SA's case despite losing the 2PP vote by an embarrassing 48.4%:51.6% two-party margin).  But the problems in Tasmania run much deeper, as the age of the government is even greater and it has spent the last four years in a widely disliked coalition with the Greens.  The SA government has at least enjoyed an outright majority, with 26 of the 47 seats to 18 for the Liberals and three independents.