The guideline about geographical names is poorly worded but I don’t think its meaning is that hard to discern. It is surely about continuity. Whilst the concept of naming new divisions after locations has gone out of fashion, it is still preferable to retain the names for long standing electorates. Adelaide, Brisbane, Newcastle, etc.Possibly what was meant was ‘New geographical names should not be introduced, but existing ones may be retained’. But if that is what was meant, why wasn’t it said? Surely that wouldn’t have been hard.
And numbering electorates is an awful system. I can easily place the location and political hue of Bennelong, which I’m not going to confuse with Blaxland. But trying to place NSW-25 as opposed to NSW-26? Ugh! Do you have an easier time remembering postcodes than suburb names?People in the US seem to cope, just the same. Also, as I pointed out, there’s no chance of the system being adopted here.

If I were asked to write a set of rules for naming (numbering) electoral divisions, I could produce a result both more clearly worded and structured and more clearly supported by valid reasons than the existing ones. But nobody’s going to ask me to do that, are they?

What exactly is your point? You object to the committee forming independent judgements and bemoan that guidelines get ignored. Yet at the same time you insist you’re not saying the guidelines should be strictly followed. So what are you saying?

The guidelines are many and varied. Some guidelines can come into contradiction with other guidelines. The committee is quite entitled to exercise commonsense.

The guideline about geographical names is poorly worded but I don’t think its meaning is that hard to discern. It is surely about continuity. Whilst the concept of naming new divisions after locations has gone out of fashion, it is still preferable to retain the names for long standing electorates. Adelaide, Brisbane, Newcastle, etc.

And numbering electorates is an awful system. I can easily place the location and political hue of Bennelong, which I’m not going to confuse with Blaxland. But trying to place NSW-25 as opposed to NSW-26? Ugh! Do you have an easier time remembering postcodes than suburb names?

I am not putting an argument about what I think the names should be. If it were up to me, I would prefer to use the US system and number the divisions instead of naming them. But obviously that isn’t going to happen. The UK system would also be better than ours: there, all the names are strictly geographical and the names are changed frequently when the geography change. But we are stuck with what we’ve got. And what we’ve got is, as I said, a system where the Electoral Commission does what it damn well pleases–and the guidelines, as I have already acknowledged, specifically endorse this. You go back and look at past redistribution reports and you will see that what I have said is true: if they don’t want to follow the guidelines, they disregard them, but when somebody makes a suggestion that goes against the guidelines (and they don’t want to follow it), they invoke them. I’m not saying the guidelines _should_ be followed–for one thing, they’re so badly worded that you couldn’t follow them even if you wanted to. Look at the geographic name guideline, for example: what does that tell you to do? Don’t use geographic names except when you do! How helpful is that? It mentions Perth and Kalgoorlie as ‘examples’ for the exception, but how are they examples? What do they exemplify? How can you tell whether any other geographical names fall into that same category or not?

It will be interesting to see whether Tuckey and Haase have any more success in getting their views about names accepted than a random member of the public would. I still think, for what it’s worth, that their approach is, as I said before, more in line with the spirit of the guidelines as a whole. And it’s also in line with what I think is a sound principle that the choice of names for divisions should not have an arbitrary political impact (as it would if the proposed names were adopted and made it look as if Tuckey and Haase were changing seats when they’re not).

I would prefer a different name to Court, though. I notice that there are not currently any seats named after famous Western Australian Aboriginals. (Kalgoorlie _is_ an Aboriginal word, of course, but it’s the name of a place, not a person.) If you wanted to go that way, though, I would want to act with the advice of local Aboriginal people.

See here and here.

The guideline about geographical names makes exceptions, with Kalgoorlie cited as a specific example.

The guideline about name continuity is stuffed into “other criteria”, suggesting it’s of lower order importance to the rest.

Swing Lowe – Barwick was from New South Wales. It has been mentioned repeatedly that French is the first CJ from WA.