(UPDATE: I'll leave this post as originally published, but it appears the ABS statistics were published one day too late to be used by the Electoral Commission. The Electoral Act refers to "a period of 12 months after the day of the first meeting of that House" and using statistics published most recently "before the reference day". The current Parliament first met on 28 September 2010, which means by being published on the 29th of September 2011, the latest statistics were one day too late to be used by the Electoral Commissioner. The Commissioner will be using the statistics from last December and published in June. The number of seats per state will be as outlined in this post, but the population numbers will be three months older than those published here. The Commissioner's press release has been issued on 30 September and can be found here.)
Population statistics released today reveal that the number of members elected to the House of Representatives from each state and territory will remain unchanged for the next election.
The release of the Australian Demographics Statistics (Cat. no. 3101.0)for the March quarter 2011 reveals that population shifts between the states have not been sufficient to trigger redistributions in any states.
In the next month the Australian Electoral Commissioner will use these statistics to issue a determination confirming no change in representation is required. It removes a major impediment to any early election.
The need for a redistribution to implement a change in state entitlement would have created a significant administrative difficulty for any early election.
Since the 2010 election a redistribution in Victoria has been finalised and a redistribution in South Australia is now entering its final stages. Both redistributions were triggered by the seven-year rule and did not involve a change in the number of members or electorates. A redistribution under the seven-year rule is due in the ACT in 2013 but will be deferred because of its proximity to the next election.
I published an electoral pendulum taking into account the completed Victorian and close to completion South Australian redistributions in an earlier post.
The rules governing how many members of the House of Representatives each state is entitled to are set out in Section 24 of the Constitution.
Section 24: The House of Representatives shall be composed of members directly chosen by the people of the Commonwealth, and the number of members shall be, as nearly as practicable, twice the number of the senators.
The number of members chosen in the several State shall be in proportion to the respective numbers of their people, and shall, until the Parliament otherwise provides, be determined, whenever necessary, in the following manner:-
(i) A quota shall be ascertained by dividing the number of people of the Commonwealth, as shown by the latest statistics of the Commonwealth, by twice the number of senators:
(ii) The number of members to be chosen in each state shall be determined by dividing the number of people of the state, as shown by the latest statistics of the Commonwealth, by the quota: and if on such division there is a remainder greater than one-half of the quota, one more member shall be chosen in the state.
But not withstanding anything in this section, five members at least shall be chosen in each Original State.
There are two important matters to note here. The first is that seats are allocated to states by population not enrolment, though the redistribution within each state is done on the basis of enrolment. Second, a High Court determination in the 1970s decreed that the quota shall be determined by considering only the population of the states, and dividing by twice the number of state senators.
The Commonwealth Electoral Act also specifies that the entitlement to members from the ACT and the Northern Territory is determined using the same quota as applied to the states. The population of Jervis Bay is included in the ACT total, while the Northern Territory includes the territories of Christmas Island and Cocos (Keeling) Islands.
Using the ABS report, the population of the six states is 21,950,834, and twice the number of state senators is 144, giving a quota of 152,436.3472.
The entitlement to members and similar figures for 2009 are shown in the table below.
|2009 Entitlement||2011 Entitlement|
|New South Wales||6,967,271||48.2175||48||7,287,630||47.8077||48|
* - Tasmania retains five seats in the House of Representatives courtesy of its status as an original state.
The Territory calculations shown above may differ from those eventually published by the Electoral Commissioner. While the formula for the states is defined in the Constitution, the application of the quota to the Territories is defined in the Commonwealth Electoral Act. When the Northern Territory came close to losing its second seat in 2004, the Act was amended to allow an error margin based on the Census undercount to be included in the Territory calculaions. This saved the Territory's second seat in 2004, but including the error margin in estimates has not been required since.
It should be noted that if the current parliament goes full term, then population trends indicate that in the next parliament New South Wales will lose a seat to 47 and Western Australia will gain a 16th seat, the new numbers applying from the election after 2013.