The Australian Electoral Commission has announced proposed new boundaries for federal electorates in Victoria and Western Australia to be used at the next election.
A number of seats have been changed dramatically, with one seat abolished – the electorate of Higgins in Victoria – and a new one created.
The number of federal seats allocated to each state is determined after each election to ensure equal electorate size. Western Australia will regain its sixteenth seat, while New South Wales and Victoria will each lose one seat.
The AEC has already conducted two rounds of public submissions in each state and will do two more rounds to consider the proposed changes before making a final decision before the end of this year.
Enrolment in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs had fallen below the average, and thus it was clear that a seat in this area would need to be abolished. The committee chose to abolish Higgins, a former blue-ribbon Liberal seat held by two prime ministers but won in 2022 by Labor candidate Michelle Ananda-Rajah.
The abolition of Higgins causes knock-on effects throughout the eastern suburbs, weakening Labor in Chisholm, Bruce and Hotham, but strengthening the party in Isaacs.
The Liberal party did poorly in the eastern suburbs in 2022, narrowly holding on to Deakin and Menzies while losing four other seats. Menzies has flipped from a Liberal seat to a notional Labor seat with a 0.4% margin, while the Liberal margin in Deakin has been cut down to almost nothing.
Changes were more modest in other parts of Victoria, with seats in the western suburbs and regional Victoria left mostly intact. But alterations in the inner city have likely helped the Greens.
Greens leader Adam Bandt’s seat of Melbourne has been pulled south to take in suburbs south of the Yarra River, making it slightly less safe but freeing up strong Greens areas at the northern end of his electorate to be added to seats to the north.
These effects are felt most strongly in Wills, where the former Greens state leader Samantha Ratnam will run against Labor’s Peter Khalil. Wills has been pulled south, losing strong Labor areas and picking up Greens heartland suburbs, cutting Khalil’s margin in half.
In Western Australia, a new seat of Bullwinkel has been proposed for the outer eastern suburbs. The seat has a slim notional Labor margin, but would probably fall to the Liberal party if Labor’s sky-high vote in WA returns to earth in 2025.
Changes to most other seats are relatively modest, but the neighbouring seat of Hasluck has become much safer for Labor. The electorate had previously straddled the north and south of Perth, but has now been clearly pushed into the north.
Overall, these boundaries represent a net gain of one seat for Labor and a loss of one seat for the Liberal party, thanks to the creation of Bullwinkel, the abolition of Higgins and the redrawing of Menzies into a notional Labor seat. But there are many other seats which have been changed, in subtle ways that could be important.
The commission will also be publishing proposals for New South Wales in the next few weeks. At least one seat in the eastern half of Sydney will likely be abolished, with potential for a second to be removed in favour of a new seat in Western Sydney.
A lot of attention will be focused on northern Sydney. There are three independent MPs representing this area, and all of their seats are well below the average population size. It seems almost certain that at least one of their seats will be redrawn into a contest against neighbouring Liberal MP Paul Fletcher.
