Swings in the Australian 2016 federal election


Mapping anything to do with Australian federal elections is a problem because of the disparity in electorate sizes. Some individual electorates are larger than some whole states.

I made this map a while ago, to show the swings (on a two-party preferred basis) in the 2016 federal election. This was the election where the Liberal/National coalition led by Malcolm Turnbull lost a swag of seats to the ALP, but picked up a single seat in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, scraping home by the barest one-seat majority.

The map succeeds in showing the disparity in swings across the country, and the comparatively stronger performance of the conservative coalition in Melbourne and other parts of Victoria. But the sea of red in the less-populated parts of the country overshadows everything else, so I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the result.

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