Two elections in Australia a week apart. Tomorrow we’ll talk about Tasmania, which holds its state election on Saturday. But last Saturday’s election was bigger: Brisbane city council went to the polls, along with other local government areas in Queensland. With some three-quarters of a million people voting, Brisbane is Australia’s largest local council and its sixth-largest sub-national jurisdiction, after the five mainland states.
This post from four years ago explains Brisbane’s odd status and reports on its last election. That election produced a perfect record for the incumbents: lord mayor Adrian Schrinner, from the Liberal National Party (LNP), was re-elected, his party held all of its 19 seats on the council and his opponents (five Labor, one Green and one independent) held all of theirs.
This year there’s been some change, but very little. Schrinner has been returned for a second full term, with a swing of 1.6% (two-party-preferred) in his favor. The LNP won one seat from Labor, but lost two of its own seats, one to Labor and one to the Greens, who thereby doubled their representation. Another LNP seat, Northgate, is still in some doubt but looks unlikely to move. (Official results are here; the ABC and the Poll Bludger have more user-friendly versions.)
That will leave the LNP still with a very large majority of ten seats, 18-5-2-1. In terms of votes it doesn’t look so overwhelming: the LNP has less than half the vote, 47.1%, against 26.9% for Labor, 22.9% Greens and 3.1% others (all figures provisional). But voting is optional preferential, so a lot of Labor and Greens votes exhaust rather than flowing to each other.
That means that, from the LNP’s point of view, the small boost to its primary vote (up 1.2%) is probably less significant than the big swing from Labor (down 5.9%) to Greens (up 5.1%). As long as they are splitting the anti-LNP vote – and doing so not just in aggregate but in a significant number of individual marginal seats – it will be much harder for either of them to make up ground. And the fact that the electoral system forces them to compete against each other reinforces their mutual hostility, which in turn reduces the preference flow.
Labor and Greens could help each other by informally dividing up the marginal seats between them, agreeing to withdraw or run dead in seats where the other was better placed. Or of course the Labor state government could legislate to overcome the problem by introducing proportional representation. But neither is at all likely, because both would involve admitting that the Greens are a permanent part of the system.
In any case, the state government may only have another seven months to run. Despite the LNP’s underwhelming performance in Brisbane, it is a firm favorite for the state election due on 26 October. Labor, under new premier Steven Miles (who took over in December on the retirement of Annastacia Palaszczuk), is seeking a fourth term, and the signs are that voters are not that way inclined.
Two state by-elections, also held on Saturday, produced mammoth swings against the government: the LNP won Ipswich West with a swing of 17.9%, and scored an even bigger swing in Palaszczuk’s old seat of Inala, 21.3%, although Labor still held it fairly comfortably. The opposition won’t get swings like that in October, but it only needs about 4% to tip Miles out.
The World is Not Enough 