How politicians harness people power

Sitting behind politicians’ policies and promises is a demographic apparatus that most surely helps to shape outcomes.

Sitting behind politicians’ policies and promises is a demographic apparatus that most surely helps to shape outcomes, writes Bernard Salt. Picture: AFP

The rise and fall of political parties, as well as the careers of politicians, are ultimately determined by the will of the Australian people. But sitting behind politicians’ policies and promises is a demographic apparatus that most surely helps to shape outcomes.

These are the 151 federal electorates that corral Australian voters into blocs of roughly equal voting power (see electorate pendulum based on population).

In aggregate, these electorates service more than 17 million registered voters within a current resident population of close to 26 million. Elections are like censuses: they require civic co-operation; their results speak to the diversity of the Australian people.

Federal electorates are the demographic building blocks of the Australian polity, each accommodating around 113,000 registered voters within a wider (ie, includes ages 0-17) population base of 172,000.

Although, technically, Australia’s resident population includes long-term residents (ie, this excludes short-stay tourists and backpackers) such as expat workers and foreign students based in Australia for 12 months or more.

And it kinda makes sense. If you are living in Australia for a year or more then you are contributing to the need for road, water, sewerage, housing and the like. And possibly paying taxes. We need to understand the population pressures on the supply of services collectively and within each electorate.

In addition, because Australia is an immigrant nation our overall number, including the number of registered voters, is continually growing. Plus we’re a shifty lot: we move from place to place, generally towards the sunbelt, to big cities from sparsely settled regions and, later in life, to the seachange coast. Every so often boundaries are adjusted to ensure voter balance between electorates. Which is why censuses are so important.

And now to the electorates.

The largest, WA’s Durack (which includes Karratha), could accommodate the state of Victoria four times over. And its resident population according to the 2021 census? That would be 201,446 (see electorate map of Australia).

Seven of the 10 most populous electorates are located in NSW, including Macarthur (including Campbelltown) with 205,497 residents (see map of Sydney and Melbourne).

Sydney’s Grayndler (inc Balmain) and Wentworth (inc Double Bay) are jointly the smallest electorates in area, each with 28sq km. (Should make campaigning easier, I imagine.)

The seven smallest electorates in resident population are in either Tasmania or the Top End. Tassie’s Braddon (inc Burnie), for example, is home to 109,555 residents, which is just over half the population in Macarthur.

Of course the resident population doesn’t equate to registered voters as it includes (non-voting) kids and teenagers as well as non-citizen residents. In the electorate of Sydney (inc Ultimo), for example, the resident population is 204,214 with 91 per cent aged 18+ (largely students). The CBD-focused electorates of Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane are similarly configured.

This and other census information helps inform local members of matters likely to be important to local constituents such as, for example, the post-Covid recovery of the foreign-student market. Rising interest rates are likely to be top of mind in outer-suburban electorates such as Perth’s Pearce (inc Alkimos) and Brisbane’s Longman (inc Caboolture).

The 2021 census shows the median personal weekly income in Australia was $805, up 22 per cent on the 2016 figure.

Generally above-average income electorates cluster in capital cities, in mining communities in the Pilbara (eg, Durack) and the Bowen Basin (eg, Capricornia, including Moranbah), and in lifestyle zones attached to Sydney (eg, Whitlam, inc Bowral), Melbourne (eg, Corangamite, inc Torquay), Canberra (eg, Eden-Monaro, inc Googong) and Brisbane (eg, Moncrieff, inc Main Beach).

Electorates in Sydney and Melbourne especially, but also in other capitals, are rigidly divided by personal income. In Sydney there is an “island” of below-average-income electorates in the southwest (eg, Werriwa, inc Hoxton Park) whereas for Melbourne, personal income levels tend to be above average in the inner city and bayside and below average in middle suburbia (eg, Aston, inc Knox).

The demographic diversity of federal electorates is illustrated in a comparison of the age profile of the electorates of Melbourne (inc Carlton) and Lyne (inc Forster-Tuncurry).

Victoria’s 20-something and 30-something cohorts clearly gravitate to the job opportunities, education, training and perhaps to the bright lights of the electorate of (central) Melbourne.

In Lyne, on the other hand, the emphasis is on the retirement age group of 60-79. Which raises an important issue in Australia’s (expanding) retirement electorates: Is there the tax base (eg, local council rates), and workforce to deliver the range of services required in these communities?

Each electorate has its own story to tell at every election and at every census.

In Riverina (inc Junee), in Sydney’s Cook (inc Miranda), in Parkes (inc Bourke), in Hume (inc Goulburn) and in Maranoa (inc Roma) more than 63 per cent of the resident population are believers in a God of some sort.

Here is, according to the census, our nation’s faith heartland.

On the other hand, in the electorates of Melbourne (including CBD), in Adelaide’s Mayo (including Adelaide Hills) and Kingston (including Happy Valley), in Sydney (including Ultimo) and in Melbourne’s Casey (including Belgrave) it’s a different story: at least 57 per cent are non-believers.

And this is why, and how, the electorate system encapsulates the demographic diversity of the nation. Each electorate is different, each is entitled to representation. Each is also subjected to swirling, roiling demographic forces with voters coming and going or simply ageing in situ.

No other nation compares with the vibrancy, let alone the diversity, of Australia’s demography: population growth, new immigrants, built-in ageing, internal migration all scattered across and clustered within a single vast continent.

And yet despite Australia’s ever-changing demographics there is one city that stands apart as the most diverse, the most extreme, the most “Manhattanesque” in its social and demographic structure. And that is Sydney.

This city has the nation’s richest electorate (Wentworth) and the poorest (Fowler, inc Cabramatta): the spread of median personal weekly income in 2021 ranges from $1517 in the former to $521 in the latter. The distance between the two places is 37km.

Sydney is also home to the most populous electorate (Macarthur) and the electorate with the highest proportion of residents born overseas: Parramatta with 59 per cent.

It’s almost as if, in a demographics sense, Sydney and to a lesser extent Melbourne act as the portal through which Australia connects with the rest of the world.

Electorates in other cities occasionally surface in national demographic metrics, but not often. A groundswell of popular thinking within a rural, let alone a remote, community might shift a seat or two.

But it is Sydney, with its density, its demographic eclecticism, its critical mass of seats, its flooded-river-valley topography that creates a series of loosely connected but discrete communities, that delivers the best opportunity to shift national thinking one way or the other.

In comparison, Melbourne offers uninterrupted sprawl in every direction, where the demography blends from place to place. Brisbane is stretched across a Southeast Queensland canvas extending between Noosa and Coolangatta (and probably through to Kingscliff). Perth too is an elongated, largely car-based city. Adelaide is squeezed between the hills and the coast, pushing the city to the north and south.

The demographic structure of each city is shaped by topography, by the era in which the city developed, and by the positioning of the CBD and other centres within the greater urban mass. All these forces come together in creating the unique communities of each electorate.

In one sense the demographic structure of electorates within the cities and regions of Australia is little more than an academic curiosity. But in another sense, it is vital for leaders of all persuasions both within and beyond politics to better understand the grassroots needs and the aspirations of the Australian people on a place-by-place basis.

Bernard Salt is founder and executive director of The Demographics Group; research and data by Hari Hara Priya Kannan.