I live in Tarneit. I study, I work shifts across Melbourne’s west, and I pay rent here. On 28 November I will not be voting, because I am an international student, not an Australian citizen. I wanted to know how many of my neighbours are in the same position, and what the people who can vote here are about to decide.

29%of Wyndham residents were not Australian citizens at the 2021 Census
+11,107voters added to Tarneit’s roll between the 2022 election and September 2026
+12%Tarneit’s enrolment above the average district, outside the ±10% band districts are drawn to

1 · Who lives here

In Wyndham, more than one resident in four isn’t a citizen, and so can’t vote

Scatter plot of Victorian councils. Horizontal axis: share of residents born overseas. Vertical axis: share who are not Australian citizens. Bubble size is population. Wyndham sits in the top right with 28.9% non-citizens, second only to the City of Melbourne.

Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics (2022), 2021 Census General Community Profile, tables G01 and G02, Local Government Areas, Victoria. Bubble area = 2021 population.
Use the dropdown (top right) to swap the vertical axis. Hover any bubble for its full profile, and click a legend item to hide that group.

Each bubble represents a council. Councils further towards the top-right have a higher proportion of residents born overseas, along with more people who are not eligible to vote. Wyndham, which includes Tarneit, ranks 2 out of 79 councils for its proportion of non-citizens. Only the City of Melbourne ranks higher.

When we look at median age, Wyndham is the second youngest council in Victoria, with a median age of 32 years. Looking at mortgage repayments, the typical monthly payment in Wyndham is $1,930. This is higher than the median monthly repayment across Victorian councils, which is $1,517, although it remains lower than the figures seen in the older eastern suburbs.

Together, these figures highlight an important feature of Melbourne’s west: many young households are still paying off their mortgages, while a significant share of their neighbours cannot vote because they are not Australian citizens. This is the community heading into the upcoming election.

2 · Who votes here

Inside Tarneit, Labor’s grip loosens in the newest estates

Stacked horizontal bars, one per Tarneit voting centre plus early, postal and absent votes, showing each party's share of first preferences. A toggle switches to Labor versus Liberal after preferences. Labor's two-candidate share ranges from 56% at Tarneit West to 69% at Mossfiel.

Source: Victorian Electoral Commission (2022a, 2022b), Tarneit District results and two-candidate-preferred results by voting centre, 2022 State election. Bars ordered by Labor's two-candidate-preferred share.
Toggle between first preferences and the final Labor-versus-Liberal count. Click a party in the legend to isolate it, and double-click to bring everyone back.

Labor retained Tarneit in 2022, securing 62.6% of the two-party-preferred vote. While this result suggests a comfortable margin, voting patterns varied across individual polling booths. At Tarneit West, Labor received just 56% of the two-candidate vote, compared with 69% at Mossfiel. Minor parties and independents also attracted a considerable share of support, accounting for almost 27% of first-preference votes. Another important factor is early voting: 54% of all formal votes in Tarneit were cast at pre-poll centres before election day. These figures highlight differences in voting patterns across booths, the support for parties outside the major two, and the significant role of early voting in the electorate.

3 · Growing out of its seat

The west is filling up faster than its electorates were drawn for

Bar chart of all 88 Victorian districts ranked by how far their September 2026 enrolment is above or below the average district. 9 districts are more than 10% above the average, including Tarneit at +12.3%.

Source: Victorian Electoral Commission (2026), District statistics, September 2026 (elector count and variance to average). Tolerance: Electoral Boundaries Commission (n.d.).
Click a bar to highlight that district in this chart and the next one (double-click to clear). Use Find a district to filter both charts at once.

Victoria’s 88 electoral districts were redrawn in 2021 to keep voter numbers relatively balanced, with each district expected to remain within 10% of the average enrolment. However, four years later, 9 districts have exceeded the upper limit. Of these, 4 are located in Melbourne’s western corridor, while the others are spread across the northern and south-eastern outskirts of Melbourne and the Geelong region.

Tarneit’s enrolment has also grown considerably, increasing from 48,792 voters at the previous election to 59,899 in 2026. Despite this increase, the electorate still has just one MP representing its residents, who now number 23% more than before. This growth raises questions about how well electoral boundaries are keeping pace with population changes and whether representation is being maintained fairly across the state.

4 · What it means on 28 November

Most of the fastest-growing seats are Labor seats, and nobody knows how the new voters lean

Scatter plot of the 88 districts. Horizontal axis: 2026 enrolment versus the average. Vertical axis: Labor's 2022 two-party-preferred vote. Bubble size is enrolled voters. 8 of the 9 districts above the +10% tolerance were won by Labor in 2022.

Sources: Victorian Electoral Commission (2022c), Two-party-preferred results, all districts, 2022 State election; Victorian Electoral Commission (2026), District statistics, September 2026.
This chart is linked to the bar chart above: click a bubble or a bar to highlight the same district in both, and use the filters above to narrow them together.

Among the 9 electoral districts that have exceeded the 10% enrolment limit, 8 were won by Labor in 2022. In these districts, Labor’s two-party-preferred vote ranged from 55% to 66%.

This highlights an important issue heading into the election. The results from 2022 reflect electorates that have since experienced significant population growth and no longer have the same voter base. Tens of thousands of additional voters have joined the electoral roll, but their voting preferences remain unknown. They may include people who have recently moved into new housing estates, newly naturalised citizens and young people who have recently turned 18.

At first glance, Tarneit’s 63% two-party-preferred vote might suggest a comfortable margin for Labor. However, the electorate has changed since that result was recorded, and the people living in Tarneit today are not necessarily the same people who determined the 2022 outcome. Furthermore, many residents, including international students like me, are unable to vote because they are not Australian citizens. As a result, election results capture only part of the community’s population and its changing demographics.

About the data and methods

  • Census (ABS, 2022). 2021 Census General Community Profile DataPack for Victorian Local Government Areas, tables G01 (population, birthplace, citizenship, language) and G02 (medians), read directly from the downloaded ZIP. Non-geographic ABS categories (“Migratory”, “No usual address”, “Unincorporated”) are excluded. The share who are not citizens is 1 − Australian citizens ÷ total persons. It includes children, so it is not a count of non-citizen adults. Census electorate-level data is published on pre-2022 boundaries, so councils are used instead.
  • Election results (VEC, 2022). District two-party-preferred file (Labor versus Coalition in 87 districts; Narracan’s 2022 poll was a separate supplementary election and is not in the file, so it appears in the growth chart but not the scatter), the Tarneit first-preference workbook by voting centre, and the Tarneit two-candidate-preferred page (read live with rvest). Minor parties and independents are grouped as Other where they won fewer votes than the named parties.
  • Enrolment (VEC, 2026). District statistics for September 2026, giving elector counts and each district’s variance from the average. Tarneit’s 2022 figure is the enrolment at the close of rolls reported in the 2022 results workbook.
  • Western growth corridor (Tarneit, Werribee, Point Cook, Laverton, Melton, Kororoit) and western growth councils (Wyndham, Melton, Brimbank) are my own groupings for highlighting, not official regions.
  • All charts were built in R with plotly and crosstalk. Pre-processing used dplyr, tidyr, stringr, readr, readxl and rvest.

Acknowledgements

I used Claude (Anthropic), an AI assistant, to help improve code alignment and indentation, make code comments more precise, and check for grammar and spelling mistakes. The story, visualisation choices, and final review are my own.

References

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2022). 2021 Census of Population and Housing: General Community Profile DataPack, Local Government Areas, Victoria [Data set]. https://www.abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/datapacks

Cheng, J., Sievert, C., Schloerke, B., Chang, W., Xie, Y., & Allen, J. (2023). crosstalk: Inter-widget interactivity for HTML widgets [R package]. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=crosstalk

Electoral Boundaries Commission. (n.d.). About redivisions. Retrieved October 24, 2026, from https://ebc.vic.gov.au/About/AboutRedivisions.html

R Core Team. (2024). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/

Sievert, C. (2020). Interactive web-based data visualization with R, plotly, and shiny. Chapman and Hall/CRC. https://plotly-r.com

Victorian Electoral Commission. (2022a). Tarneit District results by voting centre: 2022 State election [Data set]. https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/state-election-results/2022-state-election-results/results-by-district/tarneit-district-results

Victorian Electoral Commission. (2022b). Tarneit District 2CP results by voting centre: 2022 State election [Data set]. https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/state-election-results/2022-state-election-results/results-by-district/tarneit-district-results/tarneit-2cp-results-by-voting-centre

Victorian Electoral Commission. (2022c). Two-party-preferred results – all districts: 2022 State election [Data set]. https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/state-election-results/2022-state-election-results

Victorian Electoral Commission. (2026). District statistics – September 2026 [Data set]. https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/enrolment/electoral-roll-statistics

Wickham, H., François, R., Henry, L., Müller, K., & Vaughan, D. (2023). dplyr: A grammar of data manipulation [R package]. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=dplyr