Bjelkemander

The Bjelkemander was the term given to a system of malapportionment in the Australian state of Queensland in the 1970s and 1980s. Under the system, electorates were allocated to zones such as rural or metropolitan and electoral boundaries drawn so that rural electorates had about half as many voters as metropolitan ones. The Country Party (later National Party), a rural-based party led by Joh Bjelke-Petersen, was able to govern uninhibited during this period due to the 'Bjelkemander'.

The term is a portmanteau of Joh Bjelke-Petersen's surname with the word "Gerrymander", where electoral boundaries are redrawn in an unnatural way with the dominant intention of favouring one political party or grouping over its rivals. Although Bjelke-Petersen's 1972 redistributions occasionally had elements of "gerrymandering" in the strict sense, their perceived unfairness had more to do with malapportionment whereby certain areas (normally rural) are simply granted more representation than their population would dictate if electorates contained equal numbers of voters (or population).

When the Country (later National) Party first won power in 1957 under Bjelke-Petersen's predecessor, Frank Nicklin, it inherited a system of malapportionment from the previous Australian Labor Party government. After becoming premier Nicklin reworked this setup to benefit the Country and Liberal parties. The provincial cities were split off from their hinterlands, where new Country Party seats were created. At the same time, more Liberal seats were created in the Brisbane area. While fairer than Labor's map, it was still slanted toward the Coalition.

Bjelke-Petersen tweaked this setup even further after becoming premier, benefiting his own Country Party at the expense of the Labor and Liberal parties. In Queensland, unlike at the federal level and in the other states, the Country/National Party was the senior partner in the non-Labor coalition, with the Liberals as junior partner. However, Bjelke-Petersen's system discriminated against the Liberals as much if not more heavily than the Labor Party. As a party drawing its votes mainly in Brisbane, the Liberals were regarded by Bjelke-Petersen as liberal (with a small l) and not representative of Country/National interests. When he became premier, the number of seats held by the Nationals and Liberals was relatively close and therefore there was a further incentive for the Country Party to increase their parliamentary numbers at the expense of the Liberals.

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