As I have previously noted, there are several matters that cannot be acted upon by Council unless approval to do so has been given at a constitutional referendum. Having discussed the process by which the Mayor is elected as one of these matters, and given that the subject arises from time to time, I thought it might also be worthwhile looking at the issue of electoral wards, formerly known as ridings (an area within which a representative could reach any constituent on horseback in a day’s ride).
There’s nothing novel about electoral wards. They are effectively used at both the state (electoral districts) and federal (electoral divisions) level to elect members of parliament. At the local government level, however, there are a couple of differences in the way electoral wards are implemented.
The first is that the electorate can choose, at any time (through a constitutional referendum), whether or not they would prefer to use either a ward system (like other levels of government) or a single area system (more like a Legislative Council election, where several candidates are elected across the entire state or area). The other main difference is that, while [lower house] state or federal electorates are represented by a single member, no NSW Local Government Area (LGA) currently operates under a system of wards comprising fewer than two councillors each. In fact, the Local Government Act (Section 224A (9)) does not allow the number of councillors representing a ward to be reduced to fewer than three.
Some years ago, I made enquiries to the NSW Office of Local Government as to how, given Section 224A of the Act, a Council could legitimately be organised into wards represented by only two councillors each—there are currently five Councils in NSW conducting elections under a such a system. I never did get an answer but that lack of response in itself did raise the question of legislative loopholes and the potential to operate a ward system with even just a single councillor per ward, as long as you didn’t start out with more.
Nonetheless, the issue most commonly overlooked when constituents suggest the introduction of a ward system is the fact that it works just like the state and federal systems in that the population within electorates must not vary by more than 10%. In a relatively homogeneous area, like a typical metropolitan electorate or a large rural electorate, this may be of little consequence. Where the division can become challenging is in geographically large LGAs where the population or communities of interest are not evenly spread throughout the area. In an area like QPRC for example, where 75% of the population lives in around 2% of the council area, it could be difficult to find an acceptable structure where even just one ward is not dominated by the interests of an urban population.
The next complication, which follows on from this, is that the number of councillors to be elected must be able to be evenly divided across the proposed ward structure. The present QPRC Council of eleven (a prime number) councillors, for example, could not practically be elected under a ward system. To introduce a ward system, the number of councillors would need to be reduced or increased (and this change itself is another matter that can only be decided via a referendum) to something that was wholly divisible by the number of wards to be created.
Regardless, as we’ve noted, none of this can happen without the electorate’s approval (expressed through an appropriate referendum). But while a Council can’t change any of these things by itself, the astute reader will have twigged to the fact that the Council alone decides whether or not to hold a referendum in the first place. The result, of course, is that the only matters that go to a referendum are those that it suits the Council of the day to change.
As previously noted, around 25% of NSW Councils currently have their Mayor elected by the electors, rather than by the Council. By comparison, around 33% of NSW Councils conduct their elections under a ward system. Further, the three Councils that have most recently resolved (as a result of a referendum on the subject) to change the method by which their Mayor is elected, either already operate under or also resolved to concurrently introduce a ward system for the election of councillors. In our LGA, however, even though a change in the way the Mayor is elected would make it possible to introduce a ward system (there would then only be ten councillors to elect, an even number, divisible by either two or five), our Council recently rejected a proposal to seek the views of the electorate on the issue of wards at the same time as they seek their view on the method of election of the Mayor.
If you’re interested in the legislative details governing ward systems, I’ve pulled together the relevant extracts from the Local Government Act in another post on the QPR Blog. Needless to say, there’s a lot more in there than would be of interest to most readers. Of course, if you have a problem with insomnia…