Yesterday I posted a quick summary of the NSW government’s council amalgamation announcement.
Today I wanted to run through the partisan impact of the councils being created, and the impacts on the next NSW council elections.
In December, I assessed the proposed council amalgamations by calculating the federal two-party-preferred vote in each area.
There is a lot of variation in council elections – strong independents can mask the political bent of an area, and in some areas major parties don’t contest the election. While there is some personal vote effects in federal election results, I thought using the 2013 election would be useful in estimating the underlying political trend of each area. Basically I estimated the 2013 Coalition two-party-preferred vote in each council and then subtracted 3.5% from that figure to get a figure which would produce a statewide 50/50 result.
Some of the trends we saw in the draft proposals can be seen in the final decisions announced yesterday:
- The new Parramatta is more Liberal-leaning than the old Parramatta, while neighbouring Cumberland is strongly Labor-leaning.
- Pro-Labor Randwick has been absorbed into an overall Liberal-leaning eastern suburbs council.
- Including Botany Bay in the eastern suburbs and Rockdale in Georges River would have made both councils more Labor-friendly. Instead a bizarre council has been created in the middle.
- Greater Ryde (as I’ve called it – no name has been released as the decision is pending court action) is substantially more friendly to the Liberal Party than the old Ryde, which was more of a marginal council.
Kiama, which was expected to be absorbed by the larger and more conservative Shoalhaven council, has been spared.
I’ve updated the map to include the rest of the state – a series of new councils have been created in south-western and south-eastern NSW, and the three big towns in central west NSW, Dubbo, Orange and Bathurst, have been brought into bigger regional councils.
Now I want to address the major democratic deficit in yesterday’s announcement.
I’m not going to go over the whole question of whether council amalgamations are a good idea in this form, or whether bigger councils are better or worst, but instead address how the ward boundaries have been drawn, and the absurdly long period that so much of New South Wales will go without elected representatives.
It’s very unclear when elections will be held for most NSW councils. My best guess at the moment is that there will be three council election dates in 2016-17:
- Councils unaffected by mergers (eg. Blacktown, Fairfield) – September 2016
- Councils which were considered for amalgamation but were spared (eg. Hawkesbury, Kiama) – March 2017
- New councils – September 2017
It’s also unclear how soon amalgamations will happen in the case of councils where the minister has given “in principle” support for amalgamations pending court action, or for those where no decision has been made (eg. Newcastle/Port Stephens). Will they be ready by September 2017, or will we have to wait longer?
It firstly seems ridiculous to scatter NSW council elections over such a long period.
More importantly, it’s an absurd amount of time to go without an elected council. I understand that you need some interregnum when replacing an outgoing council with a merged council, but fifteen months is ridiculous.
About 27% of the NSW population lives in one of the nineteen new councils created yesterday. Another 21% lives in the nine proposed councils which will be created once the current court action is resolved. If Newcastle is also merged and its council sacked, that will be a majority of the NSW population living in an area with no elected local representation.
Finally, it is appalling the way that the state government has gone about drawing the ward boundaries for those new councils with wards.
If this were a federal or state election, the process of drawing electoral boundaries is delegated to an independent commission. That commission takes submissions, takes comments on those submissions, makes a draft map, and then takes objections and comments on those objections. If their second map is significantly different to the first map, they can sometimes provide a third round of objections.
In Victoria and Queensland, a centralised authority uses a similar process to draw up boundaries, with rounds for objections and comments.
We don’t get that in NSW. A referendum or ministerial approval is needed to change the number of councillors, create wards, abolish wards or change the mayoral election method, but the council itself can draw its own wards. Having said that, such a process is still open, with draft boundaries being put out for consultation before being decided by the council.
We got none of that for these new councils. There was some discussion about how many councillors each council should have, and whether there should be wards. But there was no hint that the wards would be decided unilaterally without any consultation at the same times as the councils were being created. The elections have been delayed by a year, there’s plenty of time to do it properly.
Having said that, we now know the wards for a bunch of new councils across Sydney. Once the federal election is over, I’ll move over to preparing ward maps for the upcoming Victorian and NSW council elections (all of them). Until then, this is my last post about this issue, and I’ll soon resume posting about the federal election.
Fifteen months of administration isn’t exactly unprecedented. When councils have been sacked they’ve usually been under administration for much longer – 3+ years in cases like Tweed, Wollongong and Shellharbour, 4 years for Port Macquarie. Of course you could argue that the circumstances relating to those sackings necessitated a period of administration, whereas this is different since these councils (or presumably most of them at least) aren’t being placed under administration due to misconduct.
In the round of mergers announced on the eve of the March 2004 local government elections though, most of the new councils were placed under administration for twelve months, so again there’s a precedent it’s generally following.
I didn’t understand the need for such administration periods in 2004/5, and I don’t now, but whichever party is in power in Macquarie Street all seem to think it is a good idea.
Wow! While in principle, I support the consolidation of local councils, the government has really ballsed the process here. There’s a whole heap of unresolved questions here:
Why couldn’t the existing councils be maintained until the new elections?
Why not delay all elections so there’s one date for every council?
While the Queensland local government amalgamations under Beattie/Bligh weren’t perfect, they were a bloody sight better than this!
I’d argue exactly that Nick – the purpose of the administration is entirely different.
Surely the purpose of such a long period of administration is to have an administrator in place in the inner western councils to ensure WestConnex gets a rubber stamp approval.
Additionally, the new “Cumberland” council is a disgrace. It’s a prime example of a gerrymander to lock up Labor areas in a poor council, and wealthier areas into the new Liberal-leaning Parramatta.
Wondering under what authority can the NSW government do all that it has done?
Has it been legislated?
The diminishing of our democracy happens every day replaced by autocracy.
The local council mergers is an excellent example of this.
Such a pity.
The apparent partisan advantage motivation behind some of these decisions just invites similar in the future – expect a new round of council boundary changes the next time the ALP is in power.
there has been a long history of partisan redistribution of local government by both sides of politics in NSW, particularly in the inner areas of Sydney. The rationale of some of the rural redistributions this time around is far from clear on either political or economic terms.
That’s certainly true of the City of Sydney, but it hasn’t been true of any other part of Sydney. Apart from the Canada Bay merger, no other parts of Sydney outside of the City of Sydney and its immediate borders have changed since 1948.
The Victorian government also had a long period of administration when they combined the councils in the 90’s. Perhaps people need time to get used to the new entities before voting in the new councils. A little over a year doesn’t seem excessive to me.
However these changes contain some clear examples of putting political interest above common sense.
1. Combining Ryde with Lane Cove is complete nonsense. There are nearly no community links to the lower North Shore from Ryde and socially the areas are completely different. Indeed that is the whole point as labor leaning to marginal Ryde is placed with smaller but solidly Liberal areas on the North Shore. It would be much more sensible to place all of Epping, including North Epping into Ryde and send Lane Cove and Hunters Hill over to the new lower north shore council.
2. Putting Epping in Ryde would mean it wasn’t available for Parramatta. The whole Parramatta exercise is an exercise in gerrymandering. Including Liberal Epping in Parramatta instead of Ryde (or Hornsby) and splitting Parramatta into north and south (Cumberland) when logically there should have been a combined council. Cumberland is a complete mish-mash, the main and only possible unifying centre for Cumberland, is in fact the Parramatta CBD.
3. As Ben mentioned the proposed Kingsford Smith council is the most ridiculous of all. Its actually preposterous. If the AEC came up with an electorate like that they’d be pilloried. These areas are completely separated by the airport, are in different geographic areas of Sydney and both have completely logical alternate fits (Eastern Suburbs and St George respectively).
These decisions have turned what is otherwise a worthwhile and needed reform into an exercise that stinks of shortsightedness and corruption. It risks reducing the current NSW government to the same level as its predecessor. Combined with the growing influence of lobbyists on the dominant faction in the NSW Liberal party, it could perhaps be a prescient warning of things to come.
I agree with all of the above in Peterjk23’s post. Except perhaps the bit about needing a year to adjust.
Ben’s points about the political interference in not just this reorganisation, but in setting the parameters for local government in NSW in general, are also very well made.
A genuine independent process would have addressed all these concerns.
With its heavy handedness, the Baird government has shown there is a case for reform. Just not the one they set out to make.
This is why I think Queensland’s local government system is far superior. When you have larger councils, there’s less change to draw boundaries in a partisan way. Take Brisbane City Council for example…
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