Tasmania

House of Assembly

Specific Elections: 2002 – 2006 – 2010 – 2014 – 2018

Background

Tasmania has a bicameral Parliament of which the lower house is the House of Assembly, an assembly of 25 members.

Responsible government, and the elected House of Assembly, were established in the then colony in 1856. Tasmania was the first parliamentary jurisdiction in the world to adopt the single transferable vote (STV) voting method, initially trialling the approach in Hobart and Launceston in 1899 before adopting it statewide and permanently from 1906.

House of Assembly members are directly elected in 5 electoral divisions each electing 5 members by the STV method, with features including the use of Robson Rotation of ballot papers and the inclusive Gregory method of surplus distribution. From 1906 the numbers of members in each division was initially six, but this was increased in 1959 to seven, and then decreased in 1998 to five.

Commentary and analysis

–

Elections

Overview

[recent redistricting]

Inequality in the effective influence of voters caused by variations in Legislative Assembly division enrolments is extraordinarily low, with the variations in recent years being 1.0% in 2010, 1.4% in 2014 and X.X% in 2016. These are among the most equal results in the world and result from careful boundary-drawing by the state’s independent commissioners. The same boundaries are used for the elections of five members of the national House of Representatives, for which purpose under national law they must be reviewed no less often than every 7 years.

[nomination openness – party configurations]

[summary of results]

[inequality by margins]

Specific elections

2002 – 2006 – 2010 – 2014 – 2018

Data

Sources

[data source – data completeness – anomalous contests – augmentation]

Dataset

[Dataset not yet published]

• OnElections election data AU-Tas-2002-16.xls