Geocodio can return the federal and state electorates, named as Commonwealth Electoral Divisions (CED) and State Electoral Divisions (SED) by the ABS, for Australian addresses, postcodes, or coordinates. An electorate, also called a division or electoral district, is the area that elects members to the House of Representatives federally, or to the Legislative Assembly in each state and territory. (South Australia and Tasmania call their lower house the House of Assembly.)

You can request the appends via API request in one step, for single addresses or batches. If you're uploading a spreadsheet, you can choose any of these appends in the data appends step of the upload process.

Each counts as its own lookup. Geocodio returns Legislative Assembly and House of Assembly electorates only, not the Senate or the state Legislative Councils, and it doesn't return the names or contact details of members of parliament.

What does Geocodio return for each electorate?

Each append returns a list of electorates, and every entry has the same keys:

• name: the electorate's name, spelled the way the ABS spells it (e.g. "McEwen", "O'Connor").

• code: the ABS code for the electorate. Federal codes are the state digit and 2 more digits, such as 802 for Canberra. State codes are the state digit and 4 more digits, such as 80003 for Kurrajong. Some codes are null. See below.

• ocd_id: the Open Civic Data ID, built from the state or territory and the electorate's name. It's always present, so if you store electorates, key them on ocd_id. See the OCD IDs guide.

• state: the state or territory the electorate belongs to, such as VIC or ACT.

• chamber: state electorates only. house_of_assembly in South Australia and Tasmania, and legislative_assembly everywhere else.

• proportion: how much of the matched area falls in this electorate, from 0 to 1. See below.

• is_upcoming_district: true only when the electorate comes from upcoming boundaries.

• source: the boundary publisher.

Here is the result for 83 Torrens Street, Braddon ACT 2612:

{
  "results": [
    {
      "formatted_address": "83 Torrens St, Braddon ACT 2612",
      "location": {
        "lat": -35.265582,
        "lng": 149.135149
      },
      "accuracy_type": "rooftop",
      "fields": {
        "au_federal_electorate": [
          {
            "name": "Canberra",
            "code": "802",
            "ocd_id": "ocd-division/country:au/territory:act/federal_electorate:canberra",
            "state": "ACT",
            "proportion": 1,
            "is_upcoming_district": false,
            "source": "Geoscape Australia"
          }
        ],
        "au_state_electorate": [
          {
            "name": "Kurrajong",
            "code": "80003",
            "ocd_id": "ocd-division/country:au/territory:act/sldl:kurrajong",
            "state": "ACT",
            "chamber": "legislative_assembly",
            "proportion": 1,
            "is_upcoming_district": false,
            "source": "Geoscape Australia"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

The full response schema is in the API docs.

Federal electorates

Federal electorates, called Commonwealth Electoral Divisions (CED) by the ABS, are the 150 areas that each elect one member to the House of Representatives.

Which federal boundaries does Geocodio use?

Australia redraws its federal electorates in a process called a redistribution. New boundaries are usually decided months before the election that first uses them. Until that election, a state or territory has two sets of electorate boundaries: the current ones, which today's members represent, and the upcoming ones, which will be used in the next election.

is_upcoming_district tells you which one you got. It's true for an upcoming electorate and false for today's. Upcoming electorates can have a null code until the ABS allocates one. New boundaries appear only after Geoscape Australia includes them in a release. Until then, au-federal-electorate-next returns the same electorates as au-federal-electorate.

• Both appends' results are returned under the same key, au_federal_electorate. If you request both in one call, you get only the next-election electorates, billed as one lookup. To compare an address's current and upcoming electorates, make two separate requests, one with each field.

• The upcoming set is chosen per state or territory. Where one exists, every electorate in that state returns is_upcoming_district: true, including electorates whose boundaries didn't change. To find out whether a particular address moves, compare the ocd_id from the two requests.

• If you're working on an election, use au-federal-electorate-next. It returns the new boundaries where they exist and today's electorate everywhere else, so you don't have to track redistributions yourself.

What about Jervis Bay, Norfolk Island, and the other territories?

Addresses in Australia's external and other territories have a federal electorate, even though they aren't part of a state:

The state field is the state or territory the electorate belongs to, so Jervis Bay returns "state": "ACT".

State and territory electorates

Geocodio returns the electorate for the lower house of parliament (or the only house, in Queensland and the territories) in all eight states and territories with their own parliament:

• States call their electorates different things, such as districts, divisions, or electorates. Geocodio returns them all in the same field.

• Tasmania uses the federal boundaries. Tasmania's five House of Assembly divisions share their names and boundaries with its five federal electorates, so an address in Howrah is in Franklin for both. Each division elects seven members.

• The other territories have no state electorate. Jervis Bay, Norfolk Island, Christmas Island, and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands have no state or territory parliament, so au_state_electorate is left out for those addresses.

• The state append always returns the current state electorates. There is no au-state-electorate-next.

Why is code null in Victoria and Tasmania?

Geocodio gets electorate codes from the ABS allocation file, which has no codes for Victorian or Tasmanian state electorates, so code is null for those. ocd_id is always present, so use it to identify electorates when you store or join them.

Why does an address return more than one electorate?

A rooftop or street-level match falls inside exactly one electorate, so it returns one electorate, with a proportion of 1.

A suburb or postcode match can return several. Geocodio returns every electorate that overlaps the postcode in the result's address_components, including for a suburb match, and ranks each field's list by proportion, highest first.

Each one's proportion is its share of the postal area's surface inside each electorate, so the shares for a postcode add up to about 1. Electorates covering less than 0.01% of the postal area are left out, and very small shares are given to 4 decimal places so they don't show as 0.

For postcode 3030, Geocodio returns:

A bare postcode query like this returns one result for each suburb in the postcode, and each result carries the same list.

Check the proportions before you use the first entry. They measure area, not population, so a large rural part of a postcode can outweigh the suburb where most people live. In the example above, Corio comes first but covers less than a third of the postal area. The first entry tells you which electorate covers the most land, not which one a given address is in.

To get one electorate per address, use full street addresses or coordinates instead of postcodes.

Cost

Australian geocoding and coordinate lookups cost 1 credit each. Each electorate append adds 1 credit per address, so an Australian address with both au-federal-electorate and au-state-electorate costs 3 credits in total. Requesting au-federal-electorate and au-federal-electorate-next together counts as one lookup.

Australia is available on all plans, including Pay-As-You-Go. See Country support.

Where does the boundary data come from?

Electorate boundaries come from Geoscape Australia's Administrative Boundaries. Electorate codes come from the ABS allocation files, and names use the ABS spelling. Both are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). If you display or redistribute the data, Geoscape asks for this attribution:

Incorporates or developed using Administrative Boundaries © Geoscape Australia licensed by the Commonwealth of Australia under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).

Related guides

• Australian Census Geographies

• Australian Census Data

• Congressional Districts & Contact Info and State Legislative Districts & Contact Info (the US equivalents)