In addition to the Sydney by-election, Saturday is election day for 78 councils across Victoria.
I haven’t been following the Victorian council elections closely and I probably won’t be covering them in depth or being in a position to analyse them in the same depth as I have for New South Wales.
This is an open thread to discuss Victorian council elections.
A majority of Victorian councils are conducted entirely by postal ballot so vote-counting will start taking place on Saturday morning, with the eight councils using attendance voting counting votes on Saturday evening.
Voters without clues in Geelong. All wards are contested, unlike last time. 9 candidates for directly elected Lord Mayor serious candidates are 1) group of business-aligned independents all preferencing to each other likely first placer among these is hardware shop owner Keith Fagg whose posters are everywhere 2)incumbent Mayor Labor but not identifying as such 3) Socialist Alliance whose candidates is quite personable & handles questions well. In the wards the only party endorsed candidates are two Greens, but the one running in my ward which is safe Labor territory at state & federal elections has zero presence. Although this is a Labor town I suspect name recognition will favour Fagg for the mayoralty. Incumbent councillors tend to be re-elected, their ability to distribute funds to local clubs is a big help. In my view Labor & Greens lost opportunity by not endorsing for mayoralty.
Welcome back Ben. As a new Victorian, I must say I find council elections down here pretty confusing. Neither the Libs nor Labs officially run candidates in nearly all councils, though they ‘endorse’ some. In the City of Melbourne there are tickets with candidates from all sides of the political spectrum intermingled. There has also been some news about alleged vote rigging (easy to do I guess when the ballots are all posted).
In the City of Melbourne, Gary Singer and John So (son of the former Lord Mayor) may pose a solid challenge to Rob Doyle. The Greens have run a fairly low-key campaign in my opinion, as have most of the other indi groups. In regard to broader political implications, I would say that Victorian councils have far lesser effect than their NSW counterparts.
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