New Zealand will go to the polls next year at their next general election, and the electoral map of New Zealand has been redrawn in advance of that election.
New Zealand’s parliament is elected via mixed member proportional, with a majority of MPs elected to represent single-member electorates using first-past-the-post, and the remainder elected from party lists as top-ups to ensure overall proportionality.
A state by-election will be held in the north Queensland seat of Hinchinbrook at some point near the end of this year or early in 2026, following local MP Nick Dametto’s announcement that he will contest the mayoralty of the City of Townsville at a by-election next month.
Today’s blog post is inspired by a strange opinion piece in the Nine papers yesterday by former federal Liberal Attorney-General George Brandis.
We rely on independent mapmakers to draw electoral boundaries at each redistribution. There is an extensive process of public consultation, and there are rules about how seats can be drawn, but ultimately the mapmakers have quite a lot of discretion about how they apply guidelines, and where they draw the lines.
The Tasmanian government has announced plans to “reform” Tasmanian local government by slashing the number of councillors across the state. The government has put up a discussion paper on the topic, but in short it would reduce the number of elected officials on councils to five, seven or nine members.
6:00 – Polls have just closed in the Kiama by-election. This state seat is on the south coast of New South Wales, and was vacated by Gareth Ward shortly before he was expected to be expelled from the Legislative Assembly after his conviction and expected sentencing.
Results should start to come in before 7pm tonight. I’ll be live-blogging here. In the meantime, you can read my guide to the by-election here.
Ben was joined by Matt Dennien from the Brisbane Times to discuss the Queensland state redistribution, specifically the first round of submissions. The conversation focuses on the Labor and LNP submissions, and also run through some of the other public submissions.
The first round of public submissions for the Queensland state redistribution were published last week – about three weeks after they were submitted to the Commission. So I thought it would be useful to examine what they say, with a particular focus on the major party submissions.
There are four rounds of submissions:
There’s been a lot of talk about expanding the size of Australia’s federal parliament in the last few years. Some of us have been talking about this for a lot longer, but it has seemed feasible since Labor took power in 2022.
We now have a quiet period following the federal election and the Tasmanian election, and I’m using it as an opportunity to complete my election guides for the elections next in the queue.
The South Australian election guide has already been published for some time, but today I’ve published my Victorian election guide.