Division of Durack
The Division of Durack is an Australian electoral division in the state of Western Australia. It is the largest electorate in Australia by land area, at 1,410,947 . It stretches all the way along the coast from Guilderton to the Northern Territory border.
Since 2013, its MP has been Melissa Price of the Liberal Party.
History
The Division is named after the pioneering Durack family, whose lives are recounted in Dame Mary Durack's books of history.Created to replace parts of the divisions of Kalgoorlie and O'Connor, it elected its first member at the 2010 election. It was created as a comfortably safe Liberal seat. Sitting Kalgoorlie MP Barry Haase contested the seat for the Liberals and won. Haase announced he would not recontest Durack at the next election on 15 June 2013. The seat was won at the 2013 election by Liberal candidate Melissa Price. She held the seat without serious difficulty until the 2022 election, when she suffered a swing of over 10 percent to make the seat marginal for the first time.
Geography
Since 1984, federal electoral division boundaries in Australia have been determined at redistributions by a redistribution committee appointed by the Australian Electoral Commission. Redistributions occur for the boundaries of divisions in a particular state, and they occur every seven years, or sooner if a state's representation entitlement changes or when divisions of a state are malapportioned.In August 2021, the AEC announced that Durack's Wheatbelt Shires of Bruce Rock, Cunderdin, Kellerberrin, Koorda, Kulin, Merredin, Mount Marshall, Mukinbudin, Narembeen, Nungarin, Quairading, Tammin, Trayning, Westonia, Wyalkatchem and Yilgarn and Durack's Mid West Shire of Wiluna would be transferred to the seat of O'Connor, while the Wheatbelt Shires of Chittering, Gingin, Northam, Toodyay and York would be transferred to Durack from the seat of Pearce. These boundary changes took effect with the next federal election.
Durack presently includes the Kimberley region, the Pilbara region, the Gascoyne region, most of the Mid West region, and northern and central parts of the Wheatbelt. A small portion of Perth's metropolitan area also falls in the electorate with the town of Bullsbrook, part of the City of Swan, marking part of the southern boundary.
At 1,410,947 km2, Durack is the largest electorate in Australia by land area, the largest constituency in the world that practices compulsory voting, and the fourth largest single-member electorate in the world after Yakutsk in Russia, Nunavut in Canada, and Alaska in the United States. It is also larger than all Australian states and territories except for Western Australia itself and Queensland.