Unexpected turns of events in state politics have brought welcome relief from the election drought, with by-elections looming for one seat in New South Wales and two in Queensland. The former of course is Maroubra, the seat that will be vacated with the unheralded retirement of Premier Bob Carr. The Poll Bludger has never "done" a New South Wales election before, but this is how Antony Green characterised the seat prior to the 2003 election:

South-eastern suburbs along Anzac Parade from Kingsford to La Perouse. Includes NSW University, South Coogee, Maroubra Beach, Maroubra Junction, Matraville, Malabar, Chifley and La Perouse. Created in 1950, Maroubra has always been Labor held, with only three MPs, Bob Heffron 1950-68 (Premier 1959-64), former Wran government Minister Bill Haigh 1968-84, and Bob Carr since 1984. It had always been thought that Carr was holding Maroubra until he could take over the Federal seat of Kingsford-Smith from Lionel Bowen. Instead, as the only senior minister remaining after the 1988 election disaster, Carr became Labor leader, and the man who it had always been claimed wanted to be Premier, Laurie Brereton, took over Kingsford-Smith in 1990. The electorate has the state’s third highest proportion of public housing dwellings (13.8%).

The electorate corresponds with the northern coastal part of Kingsford-Smith, which has since passed on to Peter Garrett. Labor’s 23.5 per cent two-party majority in 2003 (3.6 per cent higher than 1999) is wildly out of proportion with the equivalent federal booths, suggesting it is heavily inflated by Carr’s personal vote. Channel Seven News reports that Liberal leader John Brogden deems it "likely" that the party will field a candidate, as you would hope from a party claiming that Carr is exiting a sinking ship. The Poll Bludger has searched in vain for speculation as to who Labor’s candidate might be.

The Queensland by-elections are for the seats of Chatsworth, being vacated by Treasurer Terry Mackenroth, and Redcliffe, home of retiring former Speaker Ray Hollis. These two are particularly intriguing, as they offer a crucial test for the Queensland Liberal Party. The Liberals currently hold five of the Coalition’s 20 seats, which means they offer Brisbane voters the prospect of a government in which their representatives become subordinate to their agrarian coalition partners. No wonder then that the Brisbane voters entrusted them with one seat out of 40 at the last election. The by-elections are an entirely different prospect, since a vote for the Liberals means not only a free swing at a third-term government going through a rough patch, but also a chance to give Brisbane greater leverage within the Opposition. If they can’t make hay with the sun shining that brightly, the Poll Bludger will despair of them forever.

The Courier-Mail has published results of a TNS poll of 300 voters showing the Coalition leading Labor in Redcliffe 35 per cent (including 5 per cent for the Nationals) to 29 per cent on the primary vote, with Liberal ahead 51-49 on two-party preferred. The Liberals are expected to again nominate Terry Rogers, the candidate who cut their margin from 17.6 per cent to 7.1 per cent at last year’s election. Redcliffe has form for the Liberals, having been held by one-time party leader Terry White until 1989. White’s defiance of Joh Bjelke-Petersen in 1983 led to the collapse of the Coalition and an election that allowed Joh’s Nationals to form a majority in their own right. He was unseated by Hollis at the 1989 election that brought Wayne Goss to power, and came within 0.4 per cent of defeat at the 1995 election which ultimately led to Goss’s demise. The only fly in their ointment this time around is that the Nationals are considering fielding a candidate, which one sincerely hopes is a deliberate attempt to sabotage the Liberals since it could otherwise be described only as an act of monstrous stupidity. Monorail booster Rob Mcjannett, who polled 14.3 per cent here as an independent last year, was reportedly saying he would again run as an independent if not give Nationals preselection.

With an existing margin of 11.4 per cent, Chatsworth looks a bigger ask. Labor has held the seat since 1972 and their smallest margin in recent memory was in 1995, when Mackenroth won by 4.2 per cent. Nevertheless, the Liberals have an exceedingly high profile candidate in the form of Michael Caltabiano, state party president and a former party leader on Brisbane City Council. Labor’s preselection hopefuls are Peter Houston, a lively figure on Redcliffe City Council, and ministerial adviser Stella Rey.

Foreword: Most of the following was written before I noticed that pretty much everything in it had already been said by Antony Green.

The Victorian Electoral Commission has released its proposed boundaries for the reformed Legislative Council, the political implications of which are discussed by Paul Austin in The Age. Austin reckons it "one of the most remarkable own goals in Victoria’s political history", for two reasons. Firstly, Steve Bracks does not appear to appreciate the likely impact on his party’s fractious state branch of sending 25 sitting members chasing after 20 or so winnable seats. Secondly, he has ensured that Labor "will almost certainly never again have the Legislative Council". The first point is political which makes it Austin’s turn rather than mine, and I do not doubt for a moment that he is correct. But the second is psephological and here I flatter myself to imagine that my assessment might be worth something.

Previously, the Council consisted of 22 provinces each made up of four lower house districts, which were represented by two members elected at alternating elections and serving eight-year terms. Under the reforms, the chamber will consist of eight five-member regions covering 11 lower house districts each, elected by much the same method as the Senate and other mainland state upper houses. The quota for election will be 16.7 per cent, in common with five-seat regions for the Legislative Council in Western Australian and the Legislative Assembly in Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory. Conveniently, no redistribution has been conducted for the lower house, so it can easily be inferred what outcome would have been produced by the results from the last election.

In carving up the pie, the commissioners have predictably aspired to create distinctly metropolitan and rural regions, for which there is room for five and three respectively (despite what the Nationals think - they proposed two non-metropolitan regions in the hope of concentrating their support). Two of the rural electorates largely draw themselves - Western Victoria, from the outskirts between Melbourne and Geelong out to the South Australian border, and Northern Victoria, from Mildura in the west to the line of the Yarra and Great Dividing Range in the east. Eastern Victoria untangles itself from Melbourne a little more messily, sneaking into the southern part of the Mornington Peninsula and absorbing two electorates (Monbulk and Evelyn) that the sprawl is beginning to catch up with.

Moving into the city, the Yarra is an obvious dividing line since it contains 23 districts to the north and 32 to the south, allowing for a neat division after one northern district (Eltham) is conceded to the south. The division of the two northern regions leaves the inner city seats of Melbourne and Richmond at the south-western extremity of the Northern Metropolitan region. South of the river, Southern Metropolitan consists of the Liberal-leaning areas nearest the city, South Eastern Metropolitan covers a more distant stretch of the bayside inland to Narre Warren, and Eastern Metropolitan takes in the electorally volatile mortgage belt from Box Hill west to Kilsyth and Eltham south to Ferntree Gully.

The voting system will be the same as that introduced for the New South Wales Legislative Council for the 2003 election, with voters able to number either a single box above-the-line (as per the Senate and the upper houses of Western Australia and South Australia) or a number of boxes below the line equal to the number of vacancies up for election (also the case for the Tasmanian lower house). One difference in relation to the below-the-line option is that New South Wales elects 15 members from a single statewide electorate whereas Victoria’s regions have five members, meaning below-the-line voters will need to number only a third as many boxes. Even so, the rate of above-the-line voting is unlikely to be dramatically lower than the 98 per cent recorded at the 2003 election in New South Wales. This leaves open the prospect of results determined by the parties’ registered preference tickets, such as that in the five-member Western Australian region of South Metropolitan where the Fremantle Hospital Support Group came within an ace of winning a seat at the recent state election from 1.3 per cent of the vote.

The following table presents the votes in each region based on the results of the 2002 election. Obviously this election was atypical, so I have massaged the data to produce a second set of results in which both parties score an equal share of the statewide major party vote. Another point to consider is that the adjusted figures on the right greatly underestimate the likely "others" vote, which ran at 2.7 per cent at the 2002 state election compared with 11.0 per cent in the Senate last year. The latter might be thought a more reliable guide as there will now be many more candidates, due to the bigger electorates and better prospects for success.

Northern Metropolitan. All parties’ submissions except Labor’s agreed that this region should contain the Greens’ two strongest divisions, Melbourne and Richmond, boosting their vote above 16.7 per cent quota and assuring them of a seat. Labor can be equally sure of three seats since its vote is above 50 per cent on every measure, with the leftover going to the Liberals.

Eastern Metropolitan. The various proposals for this region did not differ dramatically. Labor and Liberal can expect to win two seats each with the fifth going either to the Liberals or the Greens, or possibly Labor if there is a repeat of the 2002 landslide. For reasons explained in the conclusion below, this region looms as the one to watch if Labor is doing particularly well.

Southern Metropolitan. A similar story to Eastern Metropolitan, except that Labor’s chances of a third seat are non-existent rather than slight.

Western Metropolitan. Labor would have the latte left divisions of Melbourne and Richmond located here rather than Northern Metropolitan, although they clearly share a closer community of interest with Northcote and Brunswick than Footscray and Essendon. Labor would presumably like a thinner spread of the Greens vote, although if they had their way they might well win seats in both regions. Significantly, the Liberals wanted to be stronger in this region by having it extend far beyond Labor’s western suburbs heartland to Geelong. This would have given them a much better chance of winning a second seat, which would have loomed large in their scenarios for a potential upper houes majority. As things stand, it’s a certain three seats to Labor and one to Liberal, with Liberal and the Greens battling it out for fifth spot. P.S.: Antony Green wisely notes "the odd chance of a minor party winning Labor’s third seat on Liberal preferences". The Greens’ vote is low enough that a fringe player could conceivably get ahead of them, while Labor have easily enough votes for three seats but not enough for four. If Glenn Druery’s out there, he might care to give this one a bash.

South Eastern Metropolitan. All proposals had this as the least Greens-friendly region in the metropolitan area. Labor would usually win three seats and the Liberals two, although this would sometimes be reversed.

Northern Victoria. The quirkiest aspect of the Liberals’ submission was their recommendation that this region encroach upon the metropolitan area to take in Broadmeadows, this being a necessary consequence of their scheme for Western Metropolitan outlined above. This would have come at the expense of a certain third Coalition seat here, the victims of which have been the Nationals rather than the Liberals. As it stands, it’s hard to conceive of an outcome here other than two Labor, two Liberal and one Nationals. P.S.: Antony Green reckons the Liberals and Nationals would compete for the final seat, correctly calculating that a normal result would give the Liberals a substantial surplus over their second quota.

Western Victoria. The Liberals wanted this region to be stronger for the Coalition by including the locality of Bendigo rather than Geelong. Instead, the Coalition will have a fight on their hands to win a third seat. The Greens are not without a chance, but it will usually be a race to see if Labor can get enough preferences from them to pip the Coalition. The urban territory means that a third Coalition seat would be unlikely to go to the Nationals. P.S.: Antony Green says the Nationals are an outside chance if Labor polls poorly and gives them preferences ahead of the Liberals.

Eastern Victoria. The VEC’s proposal for this region is the same as Labor’s submission, while the Liberals’ differs by two seats. The Liberals’ proposal would have increased the chance of a third Coalition seat going to to the Nationals rather than the Liberals, although a Nationals win would still have been more likely. In any case, an outcome of three Coalition and two Labor is almost guaranteed.

Tally all that together, and a landslide could see Labor win an absolute majority of 21 seats, especially if they get the wind in their sails in Eastern Metropolitan. The Coalition faces a bigger challenge in that there are two regions where they can normally expect to win only one seat. Any scenario for 21 seats requires that they win two in either Northern Metropolitan or Western Metropolitan, the latter looking more likely. The Nationals can expect only two seats rather than their current four - as Paul Austin notes, this gives them little hope of maintaining the 10 seats required for party status, unless they can dislodge those pesky lower house independents (it should be noted that one-vote one-value legislation has left their Western Australian counterparts similarly placed). The Greens are likely to secure a permanent home in Northern Metropolitan, but beyond that their prospects are hard to call. They could conceivably win as many as five seats, but two would be more typical. Along with the odd independent or micro-party member, there is little doubt that they will hold the balance of power more often than not.

The CLP has launched a challenge against the June 18 Northern Territory election result for the seat of Goyder, won by Labor with a margin of 124 votes (1.6 per cent). The party purports to be concerned that the seal on a package of votes was broken en route to Darwin after the polling booth officer was asked to check that the bundles were sorted correctly, leaving open the very unlikely possibility of vote tampering. Frivolous as the complaint may be, the Poll Bludger has three reasons for hoping it gets up. Firstly, a CLP win would bring his predicted outcome one seat closer to accuracy. Secondly, Labor’s success in winning 19 seats to the CLP’s four was (all together now) bad for democracy. Thirdly, and relatedly, it would be interesting to see how the dynamics of the by-election would play out.

Normally voters who are dragged to the polls outside of a general election are prone to react violently against the initiating party. An obvious example is the by-election for Lindsay that came six months after Jackie Kelly’s shock win at the 1996 federal election that dumped the Keating government. Labor couldn’t believe that the voters had meant to wield the baseball bat quite so forcefully, and launched a challenge against the result on the grounds that Kelly, as an RAAF officer, held an "office of profit under the crown" that disqualified her from taking her seat. The High Court agreed and the voters of Lindsay, an electorate overflowing with young families, had their Saturday interrupted for a second time. Nobody should have been surprised when Labor’s Ross Free suffered the insult of a 5.0 per cent swing to add to the 11.9 per cent injury he sustained at the general election. Moreover, the seat has stayed Liberal ever since. It would be interesting to see if the same scenario would play out in the face of Clare Martin’s bloated majority.

In other news, the report of the Electoral Boundaries Commission proposing boundaries for the newly reformed Victorian Legislative Council is released today. The Poll Bludger will need time to get his head around it before commenting, but Charles Richardson at Crikey tells us that the commissioners have ignored the major parties and "followed almost exactly the submission made by the Greens, with only three of the 88 districts (all in the eastern suburbs) allocated differently".

If you’re one of the few thousand Canberra voters who are directly affected, you probably don’t much care about the Electoral Commission’s current proposal to alter the boundary between the safe Labor electorates of Canberra and Fraser. If you’re not, you probably don’t care at all. But the Poll Bludger fancies itself as Australia’s online psephological journal of record, and accordingly feels compelled to make note of the event.

The Electoral Act requires that redistributions within a state and territory take place every seven years, unless one is required at an earlier time due to changes in the spread of population or the number of seats allocated to the state or territory. This one is happening for the former reason, 1997 being the year in which the ACT’s brief hold on a third electorate came to an end. Charles Richardson at Crikey explains the proposed boundary adjustment thus:

The current boundary between them mostly follows the Molonglo River and Lake Burley Griffin, but to even up enrolments between them it deviates south to include the suburbs of Barton, Griffith, Kingston and Narrabundah in the northern seat (Fraser). In recent years, however, population growth has been stronger in the north, so it’s now possible to move the boundary to follow the lake and the river the whole way, and that is what the committee proposes. Simple (although they take 17 pages to explain it).

The affected area is slightly more Liberal-leaning than the Canberra average, such that Annette Ellis might find her current margin of 9.5 per cent slightly garnished while Bob McMullan will get more padding on his existing 13.3 per cent. Lest the significance of this be dismissed too lightly, be it noted that a 16.2 per cent swing saw the Liberals comfortably win Canberra at a by-election on 25 March 1995 following Ros "Whiteboard" Kelly’s self-indulgent mid-term retirement (the victor being current ACT Opposition Leader Brendan Smyth). That complication aside, redistribution fans will find greater excitement in the following revelations of Malcolm Mackerras in the Canberra Times:

Some time in December this year the new Electoral Commissioner, Ian Campbell, will ascertain the populations of the states and territories for the purpose of determining the number of members to which each state and territory will be entitled in the next (42nd) Parliament. It is very probable that NSW will lose a seat while Queensland will gain one. Thus will be set in train next year the second (for NSW) and third (for Queensland) federal redistributions of the current (41st) Parliament. How do I know that?

Do tell, Professor M.

The answer is that I have done calculations estimating the entitlements of the states and territories for the 2007 election for the 42nd Parliament … There is no point in speculating what next year’s maps for those states will do. However, it is worth noting that one seat will be watched very closely - John Howard’s marginal seat of Bennelong in Sydney’s north western suburbs, covering Epping, Eastwood, Gladesville Marsfield, Meadowbank, Putney and Ryde. Bennelong will need to increase the number of its electors from the present 86,000 to about 91,000. The swing required for Bennelong to fall to Labor is presently a mere 4.4 per cent. Of the 12 seats in metropolitan Sydney held by the Liberal Party, Bennelong is the second most marginal, next only to Greenway which was a Labor seat until the 2004 election when it was gained by the Liberal Party.

Mackerras is no doubt right when he says there is "no point speculating" what the redrawn boundaries might look like. But it’s tempting to conclude that Bennelong, if not abolished entirely, would move westwards, since the electorates between it and the Pacific Ocean would need to enlarge also. That would involve an incursion into the newly Labor electorate of Parramatta (albeit into its more Liberal-leaning eastern parts) and a further softening of the Prime Minister’s precarious 4.3 per cent margin. On a less speculative note, if Mackerras is correct a seat will be transferred from the relatively strong Labor state of New South Wales (where it holds 42 per cent of the seats) to the extremely weak one of Queensland (21.4 per cent).