Redistribution Risks Greater Disadvantage to Rural and Indigenous Australians

Australia’s ever-evolving population demands periodic reassessments of its democractic institutions. The country’s primary institution is the House of Representatives within the country’s parliament, where governments are formed. It is traditionally known as the “house of the people,” whereas the Senate is technically meant to represent the interests of the states. Due to shifts in both the numbers and the location of people in the country, the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has recently conducted a redistribution of the seats in the House. However, one aspect of this is proving controversial, and may have significant consequences for some of Australia’s most disadvantaged people.

Unlike Australia’s Westminster system cousin in Canada – who added 30 seats to its lower house in 2015 to accommodate for demographic shifts – Australia is reluctant to expand its lower house beyond the existing 150 seats. Currently the chamber actually has 151 seats, with a previous redistribution in 2018 awarding Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) an extra seat each, while removing one from South Australia. However, the latest redistribution is designed to continue to accommodate Victoria’s growth, but also reduce the chamber back to 150 seats. The AEC is doing this by again providing Victoria with one additional seat, but removing a seat each from Western Australia and the Northern Territory (NT).

With Australia’s population being just over 25 million, all things being equal, each electorate in the country is calculated by the AEC to have roughly 172,000 people. However, the federal nature of Australia creates other factors. The constitution dictates that states are guaranteed a minimum of five seats in the House, which means that Tasmania is permanently over-represented in the parliament. Under these constitutional arrangements, however, territories are only guaranteed one seat. The ACT has three due to its population size, and the NT currently has two.

Under current calculations the NT’s population is worthy of 1.4 seats in the House. That means the territory is currently over-represented with two seats, but were it to have its seats reduced to one, it would be significantly under-represented. Indeed, with a population of 245,000 people, a single NT seat would have the largest constituency in the parliament.

However, the NT also has two unique features that would make reducing its representation down to just one seat a concerning proposition. The first is that the NT has a highly concentrated urban population in Darwin and its satellite city of Palmerston. Currently one of the NT’s two seats – Solomon – covers the urban environment, with its second seat – Lingiari – covering the rest of its 1.4 million square kilometres (that’s double the size of Texas), as well the Indian Ocean territories of Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. Reducing the NT’s representation to just one seat would see this seat become dominated by the urban interests that are currently housed within Solomon. That would disenfranchise the rest of the remote and often service-poor rural areas in the territory.

The second unique feature of the NT is that a quarter of its population are indigenous Australians, a percentage far higher than any other jurisdiction in Australia. Indigenous Australians have outcomes in health, education, economic development, and justice that are considerably poorer than those of other Australians. Reducing their ability to have their interests be heard and considered by the federal parliament would be a step backward in Australia’s attempts to reduce this significant gap in outcomes between its citizens.

Due to these realities, two Labor Party Senators have introduced a bill in the Senate that would amend the Commonwealth Electoral Act of 1918 to guarantee the NT at least two seats. This bill has the support of the National Party, which as a rural party sees it in their own interests to protect as many rural seats as they can in a country that is heavily urbanized. Yet for the bill to be successful it will require the National Party to be able to convince their coalition partners, the Liberal Party, to support the proposed changes in the House.

It would be a sensible balancing of power to allow a disadvantaged region to have a slightly more generous representation than its population warrants, especially within a country where power is so heavily concentrated in just two cities, Melbourne and Sydney. Maintaining two seats in the House for the NT will not unfairly reduce the power of these major population centers, and it might allow a region that is in desperate need of greater federal government attention to have its voice more regularly considered.