Terrier guest writer – Jim Burke*

This week the local newspaper reported that three former councillors thought that the outcome of the recent council election was “undesirable” and that a ward system with three councillors in each ward would prevent “undesirable” results in the future.

Really!  Well let’s unpack that.

Firstly, just how was this election result “undesirable”?

The election was a well-run, open, democratic process conducted independently by the Victorian Electoral Commission. The candidates all campaigned in good will and the community seemed to be fully engaged.

The election results were overwhelming, the community wanted a clean sweep: that is what they voted for and that is what they achieved.

It seems clear that the voters understood that they could likely end up with seven councillors who would come to the job with no previous experience.

Is that what happened? Well, actually, no.

The seven new councillors bring a wealth of skills and experience to the table and they have had the benefit of observing their predecessors and an understanding of just what is at stake.

The result of this election was not “undesirable”: it was the exact opposite. It was clearly the result the community desired.

Now, would a system of three wards, electing three councillors each, have changed the election results?

In the case of the 2020 election, I doubt that a ward system would have changed the outcome. There was a strong mood for change, and this can be seen in the voter turnout.

More were enrolled to vote in 2020 than in 2016, and of these, more people actually voted in 2020 as a proportion of those enrolled than was the case in 2016.

The proportion of informal votes also went down, not up, as implied by the former councillors in the newspaper article.

If we had three wards electing three councillors each in 2020, the outcome may have been different, if only because it might have caused a different range of candidates to nominate.

For instance, all of the sitting councillors who sought re-election in 2020 lived and/or worked within a short walk of Liebig Street; do you think that any of them would have been accepted in a ward that included, say, Allansford?

We had no candidate running from Allansford (or Woodford) in 2020, so perhaps under a system of wards, we would see such a candidate.

I would argue that such was the mood for change, the outcome would have been much the same, whether it was a single electorate, or an electorate divided into wards.

The retired councillors also made some further observations that I would like to challenge:

First, that a ward system would have reduced the informal vote from nine per cent to two per cent.

I am not sure what they base this on, or how they arrived at the figure of two per cent, but in any case the assertion is misleading.

If the 2020 election had been held over three wards, the informal vote (nine per cent) divided among three wards would have been three per cent per ward.

Perhaps with fewer candidates per ward, then the informal vote may have been lower. But a whole percentage point?

Secondly, these retired councillors harked back 30 years when there was a ward system, elections were held annually, and one third of the councillors retired each year. The idea being that this would have avoided the “undesirable” outcome of the 2020 election, by reverting to an enforced system of “old and new faces” at the council table.

This is a bogus argument that needs to be debunked right now.

Whatever the merits of the idea, it will not happen now or ever. We would have to endure three months of election activity every year, and the costs to candidates and councils – in cash and personal and professional disruption – would be unacceptable.

In any case, no State Government would ever commit the resources or pay the huge cost of an election in all 79 councils in Victoria every year. It just will not happen.

But change is in the air for the next election in 2024, with Warrnambool set to return to wards in response to a State Government review.

How many wards, their boundaries, names and the total number of councillors (the review recommended nine), will be decided in the coming months.

For now, however, all eyes are on this new council and the fresh start that Warrnambool desired and achieved.

*Jim Burke, a retired naval officer, ran for the WCC election for the first time and finished 11th after preferences. He is a regular fixture in the public gallery at council meetings and continues to run a Facebook page with commentary on civic affairs.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Ah, the sweet irony of politics. Independent candidate James Purcell, having tried his darnedest to edge Liberal Roma Britnell out of her seat, ended up being the one who kept her in it.

Remember a few weeks ago we talked about the importance of potatoes, aka preferences? (If you missed that explainer, you can find it here).

Having had a good close look at the numbers now that the state election result for the south-west has been finally declared, it all came down to James Purcell’s bag of potatoes as to whether Labor won, or Liberal.

It was that close.

To win, Roma Britnell needed every single potato/preference she could get her hands on.

 

Unlike in other years, the Liberals didn’t start with a huge truckload of first-preference votes: Labor’s Kylie Gaston started with 10,074 and Roma received 13,296. James Purcell was next in line with 6763.

In a big old blue-ribbon Liberal seat like the south-west, this is extraordinary and a sign of just how on-the-nose the Liberal Party is right now. (Keep it up, south-west! We have a federal election next year.)

As the distribution of the preferences began, it really was neck-and-neck the whole way between Kylie and Roma, as you can see by this image:

After the distribution of all the preferences from Terry Riggs (Socialist), Mike McCluskey (Independent), Joseph Purtill (DLP), Thomas Campbell (the Greens), Jim Doukas (Country Liberal Party) and even right down to Michael Neoh (Independent), the two main candidates were still only a couple of thousand votes apart.

All that remained to be distributed was James Purcell’s preferences.

Oh the tension, the drama! Which way would it go?

Would the south-west defy every single prediction before the poll and elect a new member?

 

Would we have an ALP local member for the first time in 2000 years? (I exaggerate, but you get the picture).

You can see by the numbers that, in the end, James’s preferences were split almost 50-50, but MORE went to Kylie than to Roma… just not quite enough to get her past Roma.

If another 1000 of Purcell’s potatoes had dropped into Kylie’s bag, she would now be sitting in Parliament House at the top of Spring St.

 

It was that close.

James did not quite do what he set out to do, which was to win the seat, but he achieved what we all hoped he would do, and that was to help make this seat marginal.

As predicted by the ABC’s number cruncher Antony Green on election night, the south-west is now on a margin of less than 4% at 3.8%. (Until November 24, it was on a margin of 11%).

What are we going to do with this gorgeous little margin next time around, in 2022?

Are we going to relax back into the easy chair and put all of our potatoes back into one big blue bag with “Liberal safe seat” written across the front?

Or are we going to push it even further and go for a real change?

We might never get the same chance for another 20 years.

One thing is for sure, there will be a swag of candidates all lining up to try and drag that margin back even further and I suspect James Purcell will be among them.