Gerrymandering and Malapportionment
Australian history has seen very little gerrymandering of electoral boundaries, which have nearly always been drawn up by public servants or independent boundary commissioners. But Australia has seen systematic malapportionment of electorates (the allocation of more or fewer electoral districts to one part of a country or state than its population would merit), and indeed until fairly recently this was considered a perfectly natural and defensible practice in some states.
All the colonial legislatures before Federation, and the federal parliament after it, saw country districts allocated more representation than their populations merited. This was justified on several grounds: that country people had to contend with greater distances and hardships and thus deserved greater representation; that country people (and specifically farmers) produced most of the nation's real wealth, and thus deserved greater representation; and that greater country representation was necessary to balance the radical tendencies of the urban population.
In the 19th century these assertions usually reflected genuinely held beliefs. By the 20th century, and especially after the rise of the Labor Party, they became increasingly self-serving rationalisations by politicians (usually conservatives) who benefitted from the malapportionment. In the later 20th century these arguments were increasingly and usually successfully challenged, and the malapportionment was reduced and finally abolished in all states.
The most conspicuous examples of malapportionment were South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia.
In South Australia, the 1856 Constitution stipulated that there must be two rural constituencies for every urban constituency. By the early 1960s, the urban-rural voter ratio was almost exactly reversed. More than two-thirds of the state's population lived in Adelaide and its suburbs, but the rural areas elected two-thirds of the legislature. This was despite the fact that by this time, rural seats had on average one-quarter the number of voters that urban seats had. This gross distortion came into sharp focus in the 1962 state elections, in which Labor routed the governing Liberal and Country League in the two-party vote, but came up one seat short of a majority. Long time premier Sir Thomas Playford was able to continue in power with the support of two independents. The setup enabled Playford to stay in office from 1938 to 1965, even though from 1947 onward he was defeated by increasing margins in terms of actual votes. Largely because Playford was the main beneficiary, the setup was called "the Playmander," although it was not strictly speaking a gerrymander. The Playmander was not overcome until Labor defeated the LCL in 1965, though it was not abolished until 1968.
In Queensland, the malapportionment initially benefitted the Labor Party, since many small rural constituencies were dominated by workers in provincial cities who were organised into the powerful Australian Workers Union. But after 1957, the Country Party (later renamed the National Party) governments of Sir Frank Nicklin and Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen tweaked the system to give the upper hand to their rural base. In later years, this system made it possible for Bjelke-Petersen to win elections with only a quarter of the first preference votes. Combined with the votes of the Liberals (in Queensland, the National Party had historically been the senior partner in the non-Labor coalition), this was enough to lock Labor out of power even in years when Labor was the biggest single party in the legislature. This "Bjelkemander" was not overcome until the final defeat of the Nationals in 1989.
Western Australia retained a significant malapportionment in the Legislative Assembly until 2008. Under the previous system, votes in the country were worth up to four times the value of votes in Perth, the state's capital city. On 20 May 2005 the state Parliament passed new electoral laws, removing the malapportionment with effect from the following election. Under the new laws, electorates must have a population of 21,343, with a permitted variation of 10%. Electorates with a land area of more than 100,000 km² (40,000 mi²) are permitted to have a variation of 20%, in recognition of the difficulty of representing the sparsely populated north and east of the state. A modified form of malapportionment was, however, retained for the Legislative Council, the state upper house.
Additionally, large districts would be attributed an extra number of notional voters, equal to 1.5% the area of the district in square kilometres, for the purposes of this calculation. This Large District Allowance will permit large rural districts to have many fewer voters than the average district enrolment. The Office of the Electoral Distribution Commissioners gives the following example: Central Kimberley-Pilbara district has 12601 electors and an area of 600038 square kilometres. The average district enrolment for WA is 21343. Central Kimberley-Pilbara thus obtains 9000 notional extra electors, bringing its notional total to 21601, which is acceptably close to the average district enrolment.
Read more about this topic: Electoral System Of Australia