Local elections in Australia

It’s a fairly big month for elections in Australia. The main interest is in the state election in Queensland next week, which we’ll look at closer to the time, but there are also local elections in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and Victoria.

The ACT has just a single government for both local and territory purposes, so its elections are often treated as on a par with state elections, but this makes it hard to make sense of them. In electoral terms the ACT doesn’t behave like a state, for the fairly obvious reason that it is demographically quite different from the states: its population is almost entirely contained within a single large city, Canberra. It has no towns outside the metropolis and practically no rural population.

In this it should be contrasted with the Northern Territory, which although smaller in population looks much more like a state; it has towns of various sizes as well as rural areas. As a result it behaves electorally like a miniature state, as we’ve noted here before. Its election, held on 24 August, unseated its Labor government with a large swing, very much of the sort that’s expected in Queensland next week.

The ACT, however, has not had a change of government since 2001. Labor has governed since then, although only for one term (2004-08) did it have a majority in its own right; it has otherwise relied with varying degrees of formality on the support of the Greens (and in its first term the Democrats as well). The parties are now officially in coalition, with Labor holding six ministries (including the chief minister) and the Greens three.

Voting is Hare-Clark proportional in five five-member electorates – the same system as Tasmania used prior to its recent increase to seven-member electorates. Last time around, in 2020, each electorate returned two Labor, two Liberals and a Green, with the exception of Kurrajong, where the Greens snatched a second at the expense of the Liberals, thus producing a total of ten Labor, nine Liberals and six Greens. (One Liberal has since been disendorsed and has been picked up by Family First.)

You can read previews of tomorrow’s election from Antony Green, Kevin Bonham, William Bowe and Ben Raue. There has been no serious opinion polling, but there’s a general view that it will be more competitive than the last one, with an increase in minor party candidates, a more progressive Liberal leader and the lack of the Covid bonus for incumbents that helped Labor last time. Whether that might translate into an actual Liberal government is another question.

Like a local council, but unlike a state, the ACT has no vice-regal representative to appoint a new government; instead the chief minister is elected by a vote in parliament. In the event that independents or minor parties win seats it’s therefore possible that a new government could take office without having a sustainable parliamentary majority, but in practice the MPs would presumably work things out.

While the ACT can at least boast a highly democratic electoral system, that for Victoria’s local councils is less so and has been getting worse. To be fair, though, the councils themselves are not to blame: undemocratic processes have been imposed upon them by state governments. Labor’s former local government minister and notorious branch stacker Adem Somyurek (now an independent MP) made the war on local democracy a personal crusade; this piece last year from Guy Rundle gives something of the flavor.

The result is that all attendance elections have been abolished, with councils voting entirely by mail, and that all urban councils (except the City of Melbourne) have been forced to move to single-member wards [link fixed], eliminating any element of proportional representation. The electoral commission has also been given (and has used) the power to disqualify candidates who fail to complete a training program.

As I put it back in 2021:

Local democracy has few friends in state governments of either persuasion. Politicians much prefer that local councils be seen as non-political service agencies rather than rival sites of democratic legitimacy, and they generally find willing allies in council bureaucrats.

Add in Labor’s desire to do maximum damage to the Greens and you’ve had a recipe for the winding back of such democracy as had survived Jeff Kennett’s massacre of the 1990s.

But for what it’s worth, ballot papers are to be in the mail by next Friday, the 25th, with a further week allowed for them to be received. The City of Melbourne has its own system, with a separate mayoral election, proportional representation and automatic group preferencing, although it is still all-postal. Ben Raue has a guide to the major contests.