• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Max's election maps and assorted others

Melbourne 1922-1946
  • I'd like to get to a point where I can map old federal elections too, but based on what I can find online, that point's not in the near future. That said, I did manage to find maps of the 1937 redistribution in Victoria (one for the state and one for Melbourne) showing both the old and new boundaries, which means I can make insets for Melbourne for virtually all the interwar elections.

    Melbourne, federal elections, 1922-1946
    val-au-melb-iw.png

    These are, of course, extremely dull (aside from 1931), but they do help us see how the new blues look side-by-side with the old ones. I think my initial impression of "they can be combined with one another, but not with the old shades" was accurate.
     
    NSW 2019
  • I wrote an actual description for something! Read it here.

    New South Wales 2019
    ddzbsan-9c6ac68c-0b64-4151-8394-db9021b959bf.png
     
    NSW 2013 (K)
  • And the equivalent LGA map.

    New South Wales, municipalities, 2013
    nsw-lga-2013.png

    Now, these boundaries are as depicted in the maps for the 2013 redistribution. The Liberal government that was fairly new at the time would carry out quite a few mergers and boundary reviews, with the result that the map - especially in Sydney - looks quite different today. I might attempt to update it at some point to reflect this.

    And, of course, the map is drawn to scale with Victoria, which gives us the following combined map:

    aus-lga.png

    (and yes, South Australia's border really does have that weird skip in it, I double-checked that when aligning the two state maps)
     
    Sydney 1922-1946
  • Quick disclaimer: I'm not actually sure if these are the 1922 or 1934 boundaries. The map was printed in 1930 according to metadata, but it also shows the Division of Watson rather than South Sydney, a name change that only came in with the 1934 redistribution, so... take it all with a grain of salt.
    Update: they were, in fact, the 1934 set. I also found a map of the 1922 set, so here we go again.

    Sydney, federal elections, 1922-1946
    val-au-sydney-iw.png
     
    NSW 1943 (K)
  • nsw-lga-1943.png

    Here's a historical LGA map for NSW. The metadata says it's from 1943, and this seems to be accurate judging from the content - Hillston was folded back into Carrathool Shire in November 1943, while 1944 saw a big reorganisation in the Hunter region that this map predates.

    You can see how the Western District was much, much bigger at the time, covering essentially the whole Darling Basin. Outside the five urban municipalities (of which Broken Hill had city status as one of four municipalities in the state, don't ask me why), services in this area were provided directly by the state government. Not that there were very many council services to provide in the bush - the shires basically only did road maintenance and bin collection, and neither would've really been possible to sustain on the local tax base. In the 50s, they created shire councils for basically the entire region, but an area the size of Hungary along the western border remains unincorporated to this day.

    I'm going to have to sort out a key for Sydney at some point, but dear God, is it not a task that fills me with eagerness.
     
    Last edited:
    Queensland 1977/1980
  • I realise that Toowoomba is almost completely impossible to make out, but I want to be consistent with the insets, and if I had one for Toowoomba I'd have to add one for Townsville too, which I don't have a closer map of. So they both go without.

    Queensland 1977 and 1980

    val-au-qld-1977.pngval-au-qld-1980.png
     
    Last edited:
    Melbourne 1949-1966
  • Some more Melbourne, made possible by the convenient fact that the Victorian state parliament was elected from districts created by splitting federal electorates in half for most of this period. As before, it's about as interesting as watching paint dry, but at least we can see the DLP wreak a bit of havoc in 1955 and continue to prop up the Liberal MP in Maribyrnong for longer than that should've been logically possible.

    val-au-melb-1949-66.png
     
    Queensland 1983/1986/1989
  • In August 1983, some Liberal MLAs decided they'd had enough of Bjelke-Petersen's shit and voted against the Government on an accountability motion. They were fired from Cabinet for this, and decided to pre-emptively coup the Liberal leadership rather than get expelled from the party. Bjelke-Petersen proclaimed the Coalition dead, and to prevent the now-independent Liberals being able to force a snap election, he prorogued Parliament for the nine weeks remaining until the October 1983 general election. It had been in session for fifteen days.

    The result of the Liberals trying to go it alone was an utter bloodbath, as the National campaign machine set about ratfucking all sitting Liberal MLAs and the ones who had toppled the Coalition in particular. As it turned out, Brisbane was quite willing to vote for National candidates if the Liberals had proven themselves willing to work with Labor, and when it was all said and done, only eight Liberals were left standing. Bjelke-Petersen was still one seat short of a majority, so he invited Liberal MLAs to cross the floor and join the National party room. Two did, and the result was the first National majority government in Australian history.

    val-au-qld-1983.png

    Given essentially unlimited power (Queensland, unlike every other Australian state, has a unicameral legislature), Bjelke-Petersen set about once again reshaping Queensland in his own image. He started by giving himself a knighthood "for services to parliamentary democracy" - ironically, his next big act would be to pervert the course of parliamentary democracy by making electoral malapportionment even worse than it had been. The Assembly was expanded from 82 to 89 seats, most of which went to serve population growth in the deeply conservative Gold and Sunshine Coasts, and a new western zone was introduced with an even lower electoral quota than the country zone.

    By 1986, as the federal Liberal Party continued to fight among themselves in opposition, Bjelke-Petersen and his hard-right real estate developer friends (the "white shoe brigade", as they were called) got it into their heads that he, the Premier of fifteen years standing who crushed all enemies in his path, be they teenagers protesting apartheid or beleaguered Liberal backbenchers, would make a far better Prime Minister than any of his Liberal counterparts. The "Joh for PM" campaign, soon renamed "Joh for Canberra" as its boosters began to realise that Bjelke-Petersen's approval rating outside Queensland was close to zero, rested on a flat income tax with indirect taxation to replace lost revenue, tougher measures against unions, protesters and Aboriginals, and restricting the power of the federal government.

    "Joh for PM" would turn out a spectacular failure, likened by observers to Napoleon's invasion of Russia, but just as Napoleon remained popular in France, Bjelke-Petersen still had great clout in Queensland. Although Labor won the popular vote in 1986, as they had in 1983, the new electoral map allowed the Nationals to expand their majority to a comfortable nine-seat margin.

    val-au-qld-1986.png

    The wheels began to come off the National train in May 1987, when the Courier-Mail (Brisbane's newspaper of record) and the ABC unveiled a sprawling web of prostitution and illegal gambling in and around Brisbane, enabled by a corrupt state police. This wasn't anything new by itself, journalists tended to expose similar webs of corruption every now and then only to get sued for libel by the infamously litigious Bjelke-Petersen. This time though, Bjelke-Petersen was out of state campaigning to be made Prime Minister-candidate, and his more principled deputy leader ordered a full independent inquiry in a Cabinet meeting the day after the ABC's tell-all documentary aired.

    The resulting Fitzgerald Inquiry saw three Cabinet ministers jailed, the state police commissioner jailed and stripped of his knighthood, and an irreparable rift in the National Party between those who wanted the inquiry carried to term and those who believed it was a politically-motivated attack on the Government. Three guesses which side Bjelke-Petersen fell on.

    After a long and confusing struggle against his erstwhile deputies, Bjelke-Petersen finally threw in the towel in November 1987. He'd tried to stay on as Premier even after the National party room voted him out as leader, but this was clearly insane, and the Governor eventually forced him to retire from politics altogether. In the ensuing by-election, he backed the LaRouchite candidate against his nominated successor (future federal National leader Warren Truss), and the former won in a major upset. Bjelke-Petersen would spend most of 1988 giving evidence to the inquiry, for which he was later tried for perjury and acquitted by a hung jury (later found to have been led by a Young National).

    The new Premier, former Health Minister Mike Ahern, tried to be a more reasonable, consensual leader than his predecessor, but his efforts would come to nought when he was toppled by the party room, who felt he wasn't upholding National values. The new new Premier, former Police Minister Russell Cooper, decided the best course was to stoke an American-style culture war, running ads that argued decriminalising homosexuality would lead to "a flood of gays" crossing the border from NSW. It didn't really stick, and the Nationals would, in fact, lose the 1989 general election in about as big a landslide as the electoral law permitted.

    val-au-qld-1989.png
     
    Last edited:
    Queensland 1992
  • The new Labor Government under Wayne Goss immediately set about dismantling the "Bjelkemander". The result of the 1991 redistribution (which is also the first one featured on the Queensland Electoral Commission's website, so hooray, regional town insets) was that all electoral districts ended up within a 10% population variance, with the exception of the outback ones which were allowed an additional variance of 2% of their surface area in square kilometres. Despite this, the 1992 general election saw no net change in seats between government and opposition, and only one National seat went to the Liberals. Goss was able to carry on as Premier for three more years, but in a sign of things to come, the Coalition was reformed shortly after the election. No longer could the Government count on a divided opposition...

    val-au-qld-1992.png
     
    Queensland 1995/1998
  • The 1995 general election saw the Goss ministry reduced to the narrowest possible majority, suffering losses in Brisbane as a result of unpopular transport projects that led the Greens to withhold their preferences from Labor for the first time ever. The so-called "Koala Belt" in southeastern Brisbane, where the Government planned to clear rights-of-way for a new motorway, saw five seats flip from Labor to the Coalition, mainly the now-suddenly-a-thing-again Liberals, and along with two seats in north Queensland and an independent winning Gladstone, the threat of a hung parliament loomed.

    Then, the Court of Disputed Returns threw out the Labor win in Mundingburra.

    val-au-qld-1995.png

    The resulting by-election saw the seat (in southern Townsville) flip to the Liberals, and the result was a Coalition minority government led by National leader Rob Borbidge. The Borbidge ministry served through some of the most tumultuous years in recent Australian history, with a change of government at the federal level closely followed by the Port Arthur massacre and the resulting passage of sweeping gun control legislation. Gun control getting passed by a Coalition federal government posed a massive headache to the Queensland Nationals, who had traditionally been the party of guns, land (for white people) and freedom (again, for white people). Against this backdrop came Pauline Hanson, a chippy owner from Ipswich (just west of Brisbane) who won the traditional Labor safe seat of Oxley in 1996 despite having been disendorsed by the Liberals for making racist comments about the Aboriginal welfare system (which she argued was racist against white people, in an ironically racist line of thinking). Hanson initially sat as an independent in the House of Representatives, but in 1997 she formed the One Nation party, which promised to stand up for "traditional Australian values" (such as racism against Asians, racism against Muslims, racism against Aboriginals, and the right to own guns to keep wildlife and Aboriginals off your property).

    One Nation polled as high as 15%, which had the state Nationals running scared for the first time in their lives - here was someone who could challenge them in their heartland. In the end, One Nation would outperform the most optimistic polls, scoring 22.7% of the vote, but their vote was more spread out than feared, and also Queensland has preferential voting, so they only ended up winning eleven seats. It was enough, though, to knock the Coalition down a peg or two, whereas Labor essentially stayed put in its mostly-urban support base. Wayne Goss stood down in this elections, and so it was Peter Beattie who would lead Queensland into the new millennium. Beattie had previously led the oversight committee for the ongoing crime and corruption investigations, in which he became popular for siding against his own party on matters of principle, and it was easy enough for him to get one independent on side and inaugurate a narrowest-possible-majority government.

    val-au-qld-1998.png
     
    Back
    Top