Comments

I am interested in working for a company which recruits RSE workers.I have been going to New Zealand for two years working under the program and would like to know if there's some company that would recruit me to work for them in Australia. I have Two years experience in working in the horticulture sector and interested to try out new working environments.

This proposal for the Pacific Skills Visa is a great solution to address Australia's mid-skill worker shortage while empowering Pacific nations with training and migration opportunities.

Thanks Betrina. This is question that opens up a deep set of issues. Our understanding is that the new EBC report supplants the old one. This is something that would need to be looked at by courts. What happens when the new EBC report is inconsistent? Does it revert to the previous map? Are electorate boundaries something that can be reviewed by the judiciary? What if there is more than one map of the same territory in the EBC report? (That is in fact the case, as the index map is not the same as the detailed maps in every case, an additional complication I left out of this text) The Organic Law is clear that the district matches the electorate. We're are in 'unknown territory here' here in more ways than one. The 1977 map has many shortcomings, but one advantage is that it is consistent.

Dr Thiago, well articulated in this article, thank you for sharing these findings on electoral boundaries. I concur with your findings on the electoral boundaries given the discrepancy in the electorate boundaries created in 1977 and one done by the electoral commission in 2022. Which boundaries are constitutional valid and establish a district? your findings also shed the light on the issues currently faced in PNG with the DDAs and service delivery in the districts. Therefore the proposed review of District Development Authority Act 2014 is relevant.

Hi Talitha, Congratulations on your selection. I will email you separately as there are ongoing concerns with visa delays for people who have secured jobs. Regards, Natasha

Hi Richard, Acknowledged, yes the professions of those industries. There are lessons to be learnt from NZ too. Regards, Natasha

Hi Daniel, The 2024 PEV closed 1 August 2024. It will open again this year because it is an annual ballot. Please continue to check https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/getting-a-visa/visa-listing/pacific-engagement/ballot-registration. The Development Policy Centre will also publish a blog when the 2025 PEV opens again. Regards, Natasha

Hi Fredrick, Sorry to hear that you are still waiting for a visa outcome. This is becoming a real concern for others who are in similar position. I will reach out to you separately on this issue. Regards, Natasha

For *electorates* there is little ambiguity - they are established by the EBC's report and maps as approved by parliament. This was reaffirmed by the courts already in the early 80s. Districts were until 1995 a separate matter, as Colin says. There is also the issue of the LLGs. These are established in 1995 in such a way that they can cross district boundaries, but not provincial boundaries. This is in a sense a continuation of the way local councils were organised into area authorities rather than districts, which is itself a continuation of a separation in the colonial period between districts as the unit of administration, the electorate as the unit of representation and the council as the unit of... well... the unit of 'political education', in the paternalist colonial perspective. It is fascinating how these structural choices have persisted. There is a kind of epic cycle of local government. The day seemed to have come in 1995, when LLGs are formalised, but that reform created, as many have pointed out, a 'fourth tier of government', the district. This eclipsed the the LLG, and with the advent of the SIP-centric political economy we've seeen over the last 10 years, this eclipse has become more profound. So in many places the LLG ends up being a kind of 'political pedagogy' again, with little actual power - despite the fact that LLGs have extensive powers (as Colin has written about). But like any good epic, there is a twist, so LLGs have a kind of revenge. They are somewhat easier to alter, and introduce yet another element of ambiguity in the political-administrative map, one which has now basically short-circuited the definition of districts. And that is what has happened: regardless of their origins, after 1995, and certainly after 2022, the EBC maps become absolutely essential. But they are simply ignored, the NSO continues to have their own map and that is a very important map since it has the population, as Bryant points out. Next week, I deal with some of these issues - there are relatively straightforward fixes for the immediate problem of eg. Mendi not having an electorate, but the lack of harmonization between maps is a deep problem. An important aspect of it is that the failure to harmonize the maps after 1995 shows the difficulty, maybe impossibility, of legislating extensive changes in administrative practice - adjusting the districts to match the electorates was perhaps idealistic. But the alternative, to adjust the electorates to map the districts, raises issues as it entails attending to administrative practicalities when redistricting.

I'm sure Colin's history is correct. My ADF mapper was trying to create Electorate maps from textual legal descriptions. But he called them 'Districts' so he was as confused as everyone else, including those who asked him to do the task.

With all due respect, I do not think that PNG had a single law defining the boundaries of districts and open electorates in 1980. That is because these were two different types of geographical entity before the new Organic Law on Provincial Governments and Local-Level Governments was passed in 1995. Before that, districts were administrative units through which public goods and services were delivered to their residents while open electorates were the entities through which voters were represented in the national parliament. This was part of the Australian colonial legacy. As in Australia, the Electoral Boundaries Commission was meant to make periodic adjustments to the boundaries of open electorates in order to ensure that each one contained a similar number of voters. There was no reason why different districts needed to have a similar number of residents, just as there is no reason why different local councils in Australia need to have a similar number of residents. From the point of view of public service delivery, what matters is the distance between the administrative headquarters and the places to which services need to be delivered. In PNG, all this changed with passage of the new Organic Law, and those changes occurred because MPs wanted to get more control over public service delivery in order to enhance their chances of being re-elected. So the old administrative districts were abolished. Since then, the adjustment of electoral boundaries, which are now also district boundaries, should have been based on the numbers obtained from the national census. But since there are no reliable numbers derived from a national census conducted since the year 2000, the production of new electorates (and districts) has been based on a sequence of political decisions to simply divide some existing electorates (and districts) in two, apparently without much consideration of the number of voters or residents that each one of them contains. This does not constitute an excuse for the boundaries to get muddled up, but it does serve to show that the new Organic Law created new opportunities for muddles to be made.

That's certainly an important dimension of the problem. The difficulty describing perimeters is one reason the maps are very important - they provide a 'ground truth' to the electorate and district definitions. It is important to note that the situation now is substantially worse than any ambiguity that might have existed with the 1977 maps. First, the new electorates do not have a perimeter defined in text, instead they are indicated in the EBC report as a collection of LLGs and wards. That's fundamentally ambiguous. The inconsistent maps are a major problem because the EBC maps is how you resolve ambiguities in the text. There is basically nowhere to run to here - the text can't clarify the maps, and the maps can't clarify the text. And that's before we consider that for most of the changes, there are no written indications of the changes at all.