mcsw.ee

My submission for the South Australian redistribution can be found on the AEC website here. I was astounded at the number of suggestions, until I quicky realised that most of them were a result of a scare campaign. Mayo was never in danger of being dissolved.

My thoughts were that with a division being abolished, and the need for the country divisions to expand, that it would have to be a suburban division that disappears. Although, on saying that, you could argue that Wakefield is all but unrecogisable from its original self now, becoming entirely urban. This will happen, as Grey has nowhere else to expand into (excepting for going south into Barker, but that won’t happen).

I was keen to abolish the name Port Adelaide, being that it’s a) generic, b) duplicated, c)a location.

I then split the separate parts, with natural divides at Dry Creek going into Wakefield and Mayo; the northern suburbs going into Adelaide and the western part going into Hindmarsh. From there, it was just a matter of rotating everything else to get a bit more space.

I wanted the Noarlunga River to be the boundary between city and country, but it didn’t quite fit. The line along the Hills is a really strong boundary so I couldn’t break there even if I wanted to, so it meant a part of Kingston had to go south.

All up, I think it works quite well.

My latest suggestion, for the ACT can be found here.

This redistribution came as somewhat of a surprise originally, as there was only one finalised 2 years ago.

However, with the extra population figures, finally the ACT get a third division. The issue was then just a matter of working out where to t put it. The obvious answer was in between the two existing divisions, taking bits off them both.

The issue with the ACT is that suburbs are very clearly defined, but not well bordered. There is often not a straight line road or river that separates two suburbs, particularly around the edges of the districts.

That is the other issue. The districts are quite self-contained and really all suburbs in each district should be kept together. This wasn’t possible, with the size of some districts, and the fact that 8 districts are not easily divisible by 3 divisions.

In the end, I went for splitting Gungahlin, keeping Belconnen intact. Some of the reasons I did it that way was that Gungahlin was a newer development, whereas Belconnen has been together for longer. Gungahlin seems less cut off from the city than Belconnen, which is bordered by parkland and open space, not to mention Black Mountain. Also Gungahlin Drive connects nicely to Tuggeranong Parkway, forming a single roadway as a boundary.

As far as new names, I really don’t want to see Namadgi resurrected. It’s been done before, it’s geographic and predictable.

My suggestion last time was Overall for John Overall who was instrumental in creating the modern appearance of Canberra suburb designs. THis time, I opted for Shakespeare after Arthur Shakespeare who created the Canberra Times newspaper, and Capital Television (now 9 Canberra).

Suggestions for the Victorian electoral redistribution have closed. My submission can be found here, although how they managed to turn it into a 90MB file I don’t know!

I wasn’t entirely happy with the final product – but then I never am.

I had the south of the Yarra divisions worked out within days of the figures going out, and the country divisions were pretty easy to get too. I had a lot of trouble working out the north western suburbs. Almost all permutations I tried ended up with most divisions very close to the top, but to get the boundaries right would be too many, or too few.

As it turns out, I didn’t mind it, although I would have liked to excise Craigieburn from McEwan altogether, but the numbers just weren’t there.

The other part I wasn’t too keen on was Maribyrnong stretching all the way from Flemington Racecourse to Melbourne Airport, although it is a contiguous division, it’s very elongated.

It will be interesting to see what the committee decide do.  At least they’ll need to make some decisions, there’s a whole new division to add in.

Here are the links to my submissions in previous redistributions:

Federal

WA 2014

ACT 2014

NSW 2014

NT 2015

TAS 2016

QLD 2017

State/Territory:

VIC 2013

ACT 2015