Wrapping up the NSW council elections

NSW voters elected their local councillors six weeks ago, on September 8. At the time I was working on the election campaign and thus didn’t have the time to give the proper treatment to the election on this blog. Now that the Tally Room is coming out of hibernation, I wanted to sum up what happened at the election.

Most councils in NSW are still dominated by candidates running without endorsement by political parties. However the role of political parties are growing, particularly in urban councils in Sydney, the Hunter and the Illawarra. About half of the councils in NSW didn’t have any political party run for the election in 2012, but only two of those councils are in Sydney.

Because of this, it is more useful to zoom in on the Sydney region when you are trying to get an overall picture of how parties perform. Most of the voters live in a small number of councils along the coast, in Sydney and in the regions. This means there are hundreds of councillors elected in Western NSW with a tiny number of votes.

Overall, this election was a good one for the Liberals and a bad one for Labor and the Greens. The Liberal vote has been bolstered by a decision to run for the councils of Camden, Hornsby and Sutherland. These councils are in very conservative areas and solidly vote Liberal in parliamentary elections, but until 2012 had never had official Liberal candidates stand. In all three cases the Liberal Party polled well over 40% of the primary vote and won a majority on the council.

The Liberals, however, also decided to not run officially in Penrith and Fairfield, where liberal independents stood instead. In Penrith the Liberal-aligned independents effectively won control of the council off the ALP.

Result of NSW Local Government Elections 2012 in Greater Sydney region

Overall the number of council seats lost by Labor is much less than the Greens, but the swing against Labor was much bigger than against the Greens.

The ALP had a few good results, but lost ground on a number of big councils in Western Sydney. The Liberal Party won an absolute majority on Liverpool Council, which has always been led by a Labor mayor. The balance of power in Blacktown is held by a single independent, who has voted for the council’s first Liberal mayor in living memory.

In Campbelltown the Liberals and Labor each won five seats out of fifteen, and the Liberals appear to have worked with an independent to lock Labor out of power. In Penrith, Liberal-aligned independents have won a majority and elected a conservative mayor. The Liberal Party won an effective majority on Parramatta Council. The ALP has been reduced to a paltry two seats out of ten in Auburn.

These results should be deeply troubling to Labor considering how strong Western Sydney has been for Labor before. The only major council in Western Sydney where Labor still rules is Fairfield, where Liberal candidates were disendorsed right before the election and ran a dishevelled campaign. The ALP lost their majority in Bankstown but effectively still run the council.

Labor was pleased with their results in the inner west. Both Marrickville and Leichhardt councils now have a split of four Labor, four Greens and four conservatives (all Liberals in Leichhardt – some are conservative independents in Marrickville). In both councils the Greens were locked out of the mayoralty. However despite the result being a setback for the Greens, most of the gains were by conservatives, not by Labor. Between these two councils, the Liberals gained four seats and Labor gained one.

The swing to the conservatives was also very strong in the eastern suburbs. Waverley has been evenly split between conservatives and a Labor-Greens group since 2008. The Liberals now have seven seats in their own right plus a friendly independent, dominating the 12-seat council. The Liberals increased the size of their majority in Woollahra. In Randwick the council is split evenly between Labor and Liberal, with the Greens and another small party losing ground.

The Liberal Party did extremely well in the biggest electoral contest out of Sydney, winning an effective majority in Newcastle between the Liberal councillors and a conservative independent elected as Lord Mayor.

Overall the result reflecting the crushing defeat at the 2011 state election – Labor losing core territory in Western Sydney and the Liberals performing above historic levels. While council elections are very different to state or federal elections, it is true that most elections in Sydney (outside of the North Shore) are now dominated by political parties, and the trend is very clear.

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