It was suggested, when I wrote what was to be my farewell post in November, that I might provide a postscript and offer some comment on the results of the December Council elections. Being the obliging sort of guy I am, here you go.
First up, the result followed the same pattern as in all elections in the recent past—all of the successful candidates were effectively elected on first preference votes. The distribution of preferences made no difference to the top 11 candidates, nor even the order in which they were elected.
Just for the record, there were 43,470 voters on the roll, and 35,497 turned out to vote. That’s an 81.66% turnout, which is not atypical. Further, there were 33,813 formal votes cast, so the informal vote was just 4.74%, which is significantly lower than in previous local elections. Given that there were 75 candidates contesting the election, one of the largest fields in the State, that wasn’t a bad effort.
The Above-the-Line/Below-the-Line split was 82.1%/17.9%, which is also par for the course in QCC/QPRC elections.
The Quota for this election, that being the number of votes required for any candidate to be guaranteed a seat on the Council, was 2,818 votes. In the event, seven candidates achieved Quota, six on first preference votes alone. The final four seats were filled by the last four candidates left in the count, after the distribution of preferences. As already noted, the successful candidates were the same eleven candidates that lead the count before any preferences were distributed.
Your new Council is thus, in order of election:
- Bryce Wilson (Labor)
- Louise Burton (Liberal)
- Kenrick Winchester
- Katrina Willis (The Greens)
- Esma Livermore (Labor)
- Jacquiline Ternouth (Liberal)
- Mareeta Grundy
- Edwina Webster
- Steve Taskovski
- Michele Biscotti
- John Preston (Labor)
At its first meeting, the new Council elected Cr Winchester as Mayor and Cr Livermore as Deputy Mayor.
The ultimate result was interesting from a couple of points of view. The first was the fact that this was the first time that all preferences had actually been counted in a NSW local government election. As I mentioned in a previous article, while the vote has essentially been counted electronically for several decades, the process used to this point had been as if it had been counted manually, with only a statistical sample of preferences being counted, simply because the relevant legislation had not been appropriately updated. In the event, as noted above, the full count did not change the ultimate outcome (any statistician could probably explain why that should come as no surprise), in that preferences made no difference to the result.
While in the past I have suggested that this may have been related to the number of votes that exhausted before the count was finalised, often in excess of a full Quota, on this occasion around 80% of the 2,583 votes that did exhaust did so in just the last four rounds of the count, 60% in just the last two. And the last two candidates eliminated from the count, Margot Sachse and John Mangos, could not have had any impact on the final result even if all of their preferences had gone to each other.
Just for the record, with 11 candidates to be elected, the preference count stops when there are 12 candidates remaining because there is nothing to be gained by counting the preferences of the 12th candidate—Bill Waterhouse, from Majors Creek, in the present case. It was quite unfortunate that Bill didn’t manage to squeak in there at the end, as this would have provided some local representation from the eastern part of the LGA.
What might be of more interest now with a full preference count, especially given the possibility that one of the recently elected councillors may stand in the upcoming Monaro by-election, and resign from Council if successful, is that casual vacancies on Council can (with some conditions) be filled via a count-back of the recent election results, rather than a by-election. Since the major political parties dominated this Council election, and the fact that a count-back would generally just replace one party member with another of the same ‘colour’, this will have little impact on the political make-up of the new Council—but there now shouldn’t need to be a by-election in this term of Council.
Which brings me to the second point. It was always going to be interesting where Tim Overall’s not insignificant support base lay, and where ‘his vote’ would go when he departed. In the event, it would seem that his support was more personal than political in that his vote would appear to have been fairly evenly spread across the political parties and independents.
If there has been a change in the ‘balance of power’ on this Council, coincidentally or otherwise, it simply reflects the order in which candidates were grouped on the ballot paper. The ‘political leaning’ of the first Group on the ballot paper tends to prevail in our LGA. Sometimes, the ‘reverse donkey vote’ comes into play, but in this election, both the first (The Greens) and last (Labor) Groups on the ballot were of a similar ‘political leaning’, so the outcome in this regard is pretty much what might have been predicted.
And after some people noted that the last Council included more grey-haired men named Peter than women, the new Council comprises six women and five men, none of whom are predominantly grey-haired and none of whom are named Peter!
Now it just remains to be seen how the incoming Council, with 9 of the 11 members new to the job, handles the task at hand.