Electoral shake-up leaves awkward questions for the teals – and headaches for the major parties
Kylea Tink, the MP for North Sydney. The AEC has proposed abolishing her seat in a federal redistribution. Photograph: Bianca de Marchi/AAP
New South Wales was due to lose a federal seat, and yesterday the axe fell on Liberal turned teal North Sydney with the Australian Electoral Commission’s proposal of new electoral boundaries.
The blue ribbon seat of North Sydney has existed since 1901, and had been held by the Liberal party and its predecessors for all but two terms prior to independent Kylea Tink’s Climate 200-fuelled victory in 2022.
After every election, in the name of equal representation, the AEC determines the appropriate number of electorates in each state.
In 2023, this exercise saw Victoria and New South Wales each lose a seat and Western Australia gain a seat, reducing the size of the House of Representatives to 150.
This triggered redistributions in all three states to ensure the appropriate number of electorates, all of them roughly equal in size.
It was considered almost inevitable that a seat in northern Sydney would be abolished. Once the northern beaches seats of Mackellar and Warringah were topped up to quota, North Sydney had lost about a third of its voters.
This could go two ways at North Sydney – the remainder could be split in half between the neighbouring Liberal seat of Bradfield and Labor seat of Bennelong, as proposed by the Liberals.
Or, as Labor, the Greens and Tink suggested, it could be combined with southern Bradfield, naming it either North Sydney or Bradfield.
The committee decided to go for the first idea, splitting North Sydney into three equal pieces. Bradfield is thus largely intact, even though it has been pulled south.
The local MP, Liberal frontbencher Paul Fletcher, had defeated teal independent candidate Nicolette Boele by a 4.2% margin in 2022.
Generally, the teal independents did better further south in Bradfield, so any movement of Bradfield in a southerly direction makes things harder for Fletcher.
But he should be thankful that he is only absorbing one-third of North Sydney, not two-thirds.
The Liberal party will also be pleased with the changes to Bennelong, which was won by Labor’s Jerome Laxale in 2022 by a margin of just 1.0%.
The new suburbs are not the solid Liberal areas they once were, but they are enough to just narrowly tip the seat over to the Liberal side by 0.1%.
This doesn’t knock out Laxale, who should benefit from a personal vote as an incumbent MP and the absence of a sitting Liberal MP, but it’s not helpful.
This map also sets up an awkward challenge for the teal independents. Nicolette Boele has styled herself the “shadow representative for Bradfield” since her close-run defeat in 2022, and has already been chosen by her local supporters to run again.
But a quarter of the new Bradfield wasn’t part of her seat last time, and an ideologically aligned sitting MP is now left without a seat.
It would make sense for Tink to run in Bradfield, but some of Boele’s supporters may have trouble with such a plan.
Likewise the Liberal party has a number of candidates preselected for seats that no longer exist, such as Higgins and North Sydney.
Do they stick by their preselections for neighbouring seats which have been dramatically redrawn, or do they reopen the question to give their seatless candidates a fair shot?
To adjust for the undersized seats in inner Sydney and the oversized seats in the outer suburbs, a succession of seats have been moved further west.
Independent MP Allegra Spender will benefit from the addition of Potts Point and Darlinghurst, a small area but with a dense population that votes strongly against the Liberal party.
This has then caused on knock-on effects in the Labor seats of Sydney (Tanya Plibersek), Grayndler (Anthony Albanese), Watson (Tony Burke) and Blaxland, to the point that the education minister, Jason Clare’s new Blaxland has sourced almost half of its voters from other seats.
There have been a few strange decisions in some Sydney seats.
Angus Taylor’s seat of Hume had been split between Goulburn and the Macarthur area of south-west Sydney, jumping over the main population centres in the southern highlands.
The new Hume is now most definitely an outer suburban Sydney seat, extending no further than Picton. Taylor will now be representing some of the fastest-growing suburbs in the state, like Leppington.
Overall, these redistributions have largely balanced out.
Labor has lost two seats and gained two others. The Liberal party has lost one and gained one other. One of the 16 crossbench seats has been abolished.
The swing needed for Labor to lose its majority is a bit smaller, as is the swing needed for the Liberal party to win a majority. But these changes are minor.
Overall the redistribution doesn’t have a big impact on who might win government, but in communities, and for members of parliament, it will make a big difference to how their representation works in the future.