I’ve recently been made aware of a process in the Northern Territory which is reviewing the ward structures of local councils following last year’s council elections.
I’m particularly concerned by a proposal to break up the City of Palmerston into tiny wards, seemingly as a solution to an informal voting problem, and to foreshadow a similar change in Alice Springs for a future review.
Both of these councils currently use single transferable vote with all councillors elected at large – seven in Palmerston and eight in Alice Springs. There are other councils that use wards, most notably the City of Darwin which consists of four three-member wards.
The NTEC’s representation committee has proposed breaking up Palmerston into four wards: three electing two councillors each, and the other electing just one councillor.
The main justification appears to be that the council had a high informal rate of 8.7% in 2021. This appears to be due to NT electoral rules having no savings provisions, so voters must number every box on the ballot (they also don’t have party groupings or above-the-line voting). In the case of Palmerston in 2021, that was 14 candidates which we know is a number that tends to produce high informal rates.
It seems likely that cutting up the council, and thus reducing the ballot size, will reduce informal voting, but at the cost of a lot of political choice for voters.
I wrote a lot about the importance of district magnitude during the NSW council elections last year. Lower district magnitude tends to produce smaller candidate fields (with a lot more uncontested elections), reduces proportionality and makes it harder for minority groups to win representation.
Just to take one example: the 2021 census reported that 13.0% of people in Palmerston were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. The quota for election at the moment is 12.5%, but it would raise to 33-50% under the proposed ward structure. If Indigenous voters in Palmerston all coalesce behind one candidate, that candidate will win, but they remain a minority that would be split up if wards were implemented.
That same principle could be applied to any group with a common interest who may coalesce behind a candidate.
I’ve sent in a submission objecting, but if you want to know more the report is on the NTEC website and submissions close on 4 November.
I strongly agree Ben. Unless there’s two significant localities within a larger rural council, or one locality that dominates another (like the new Dubbo council in NSW), regional city councils should be elected at-large in one constituency.
In line with your comment Daniel, I believe the NT should use optional preferences for its council elections just like in NSW and Queensland so that the informal rate isn’t too high.
Palmerston… seven wards… How many electors per ward does that amount to? The NT LA only has four divisions covering Palmerston!
If you want to get rid of informal voting you need to have OPV everywhere as CPV means you are forced to preference one of the candidates who will inevitably make it to the top 2 (unless you are fine with casting an informal vote)
Informal voting happens everywhere even in places with FPTP but typically those who do it are because they don’t like any politician, or don’t like the parties that are presented on the ballot paper.
Increasing the number of seats does not increase the number of candidates in each ward/seat if anything it could reduce them because possible contenders would be moved to other seats. All this really does is it expands the number of politicians who sit in parliament or town hall, something I strongly oppose as bigger government isn’t the answer.
They’re not proposing seven wards. They’re suggesting electing 7 councillors across 4 wards.
Daniel, I think you’re wrong about the relationship between seats and candidates. If you increase the number of seats you make it easier to get elected and thus produce more candidates. But pretty much all elected bodies in Australia are too small. It’s got nothing to do with “bigger government” – larger elected bodies are more representative and increase political diversity. It has very little relationship with the cost of government or the size of government.
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