The South Australian Electoral Districts Boundaries Commission (EDBC) has this morning released its draft version of new state electoral boundaries. The draft boundaries are open for comment and will be finalised later this year.
The EDBC’s home page for the redistribution can be found here.
I’m a bit busy with Northern Territory election preparation so don’t have much time to offer comment. Helpfully the EDBC is the only redistribution authority in Australia that releases estimated margins for new seats.
Here’s what I find the most noteworthy points in the EDBC report.
- The Commission managed to find enough voters in the state’s empty north to keep Flinders within quota, and allow the rest of Port August to be combined with Whyalla in the re-drawn seat of Giles. The Labor margin for Giles declines from 21.1% to a still healthy 17.4%.
- Losing the rest of Port Augusta has an impact on Stuart, won by Independent Geoff Brock in 2022. He is helped by parts of his former seat of Frome being added to Stuart, though whether he will contest the seat in 2026 is not known. The EDBC report does not provide an estimated two-candidate margin from Stuart, but does estimate the underlying 2-party preferred margin for the seat shifts from Labor 1.0% to Liberal 0.5%, so it is a notional Liberal seat but doesn’t reduce the challenge the Liberal Party needs to win the next election.
- The marginal Labor seat of King in Adelaide’s north-east is strengthened for Labor, rising from 3.0% to 5.7% as population growth on Adelaide’s northern fringe re-arranges a number of seats.
- Black in Adelaide’s south, the seat of just departed Liberal Leader David Spiers, has its Liberal margin cut from 2.8% to 1.0%.
- Most other seats undergo nudges that shouldn’t have an overall impact on results.
- On current boundaries, Labor holds only four seats on margins under 5% and three between 5% and 10%. On the new boundaries there are only three under 5% but the number between 5% and 10% increases to five. With several Liberal seats in the hands of Independents, the Liberal Party and its new leader Vincent Tarzia have a mountain to climb to win the next election.
- South Australia no longer has an overall fairness provision that takes swings to win and lose into account in drawing boundaries. As it was once a required factor in drawing boundaries, the EDBC still allows it to be considered.
- A uniform swing of 5.1% would deliver the Liberal Party victory on these boundaries, so it appears to have been taken into account.
- However, getting a uniform swing in South Australia was always the biggest problem in applying the fairness provision.
- The South Australian Labor Party has always been expert at hanging on to key marginal seats to win elections, and the Liberal Party has had a chronic problem with losing underlying Liberal seats to Independents, usually by defection but also to new independents such as Geoff Brock.
- The new electoral pendulum is so lopsided that even if things went wrong for the Malinauskas government between now and 2026, there could be a repeat of Labor’s 2010 win when the party shed a huge number of votes in its safe seats while clinging on to the marginals. Labor has 20 seats on margins above 10%. You need 24 seats for majority government in the SA House of Assembly.
- A note on the seat of Mawson, a seat that has constantly shown the problem with trying to draw boundaries based on past results. Ahead of the 2018 election, the EDBC largely pulled the seat out of the metropolitan area and extended it south into rural areas and added Kangaroo Island. Sitting Labor MHA Leon Bignell defied the boundary drawers by winning Mawson even as the Wetherill government was defeated. In 2022 he got another huge swing in his favour and the EDBC list 14.2% as the margin for the new Mawson. Whether Labor can find a new candidate to match Bignell’s giant killing efforts in holding Mawson is open to doubt.
- In 2016 the EDBC allowed greater variance in enrolment between districts in an effort to meet the fairness criteria. Many rural seats were drawn below quota, though above 10% below quota as required by law. At the 2020 redistribution after the abolition of the fairness criteria, the EDBC produced draft boundaries that were much closer to quota, well within the 10% permitted variation. The final boundaries in 2020 increased the variation between seats.
- These draft boundaries have again gone for a narrow variation from quota. It will be interesting to see whether this also applies to the final boundaries.
- In 2020 there was a Liberal government that at the review stage argued for the EDBC to make greater use of the 10% variation limit, in particular to avoid the rural seat of Schubert contracting into Gawler, once a rural service town but increasingly a northern suburb of Adelaide. The final report in 2020 made greater use of the 10% variation, with Gawler restored to the urban seat of Light.
- In 2016, the Labor government took the EDBC to court over drawing more seats close to 10% under quota to achieve fairness. The government lost which led to the Weatherill government repealing the fairness provision before it lost office in 2018. I would expect Labor to oppose any argument before Commission to repeat its 2020 final stage decision to draw more rural seats below quota.
Link – Here’s my 2020 post on the variation from quota issue at the 2020 redistribution.