The regional and Brisbane constituencies where votes are actually worth more than in other

A key aspect of this regionalism is the legal reluctance to merge some of the huge electorates in the north and west. And that's without even getting into the debates about statehood for North Queensland.

This sentiment was partly the reason for the 2016 decision to increase the number of seats in Parliament from 89 (since 1986) to 93. Another factor? The number of voters in the state doubled during this period.

This average of almost 33,500 voters in each constituency before the 2015 election has now risen to over 39,500.

The aim of redistributing seats through regular redistributions – the next one will begin just over a year before the 2028 elections – is to keep the number of votes in each constituency within 10 percent of the average and to ensure the greatest possible equality among all votes.

However, for constituencies with an area of ​​over 100,000 square kilometres (Cook, Traeger, Gregory and Warrego), two percent of this land mass is considered as “notional” voters, which in Gregory's case corresponds to 9,000.

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Population growth like that in the South East since the last redistribution in 2017 can mean that some constituencies have thousands more residents than the average – in the case of Coomera, 14,000. Yet they still elect only one MP.

The balancing act at both ends of the spectrum, says Mickel, is that some MPs need resources to cover huge areas, while others can offer the same democratic representation to a much larger number of voters.

Election analyst Ben Raue said the result of the additional votes awarded to large constituencies was “a thumbs up, effectively meaning one seat less in Brisbane and one seat more in the regions”.

One way to prevent more voters moving to the south-east constituencies would be to increase the size of Parliament. The idea of ​​more politicians is probably more unpopular with some voters than pay rises for MPs.

“That would be a more democratic way of dealing with this problem,” says Raue, pointing out that Queensland's parliament, which is unique in Australia in not having an upper house, already pays politicians far less, which ultimately represents a “minor cost” compared to state budgets.

Mickel agrees: “This increase of four [seats in 2017] does not even come close to reflecting population growth.”

He suggested that a formal parliamentary committee should be set up to have “a proper and informed discussion” about whether the state needs more politicians and, while they were at it, changes should be made to the mandatory preferential voting system.

“Democracy costs money – we could easily abolish it and have one person tell us what to do. Would that be better? I don't think so.”

While politicians and parties probably don't want to talk much about this idea in the current election campaign, the electoral map will still look different in the next election campaign – perhaps in more ways than one. The question is just by how much.

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