Nominations closed on Tuesday for the two Queensland state by-elections and the Queensland council elections, all to be held on March 16. I have now updated my candidate lists for my Brisbane City, Inala and Ipswich West guides.
For this post I’m most interested in the nominations for the City of Brisbane. I have some other thoughts about nominations in other councils which I might return to in coming days.
You can download a full list of Brisbane City candidates here.
Overall 82 candidates nominated for the 26 wards of the City of Brisbane, an average of 3.15 per ward. This is roughly in line with the past few elections. 86 candidates nominated in 2020, 82 in 2016, 75 in 2012, 81 in 2008 and 76 in 2004.
Most of the candidates belong to the Labor, Liberal National and Greens parties. These three parties nominated 26 candidates each, and there were just four others, all independents. At most recent elections, the Greens have stood in most but not all wards – the only other time the Greens ran a full ticket was in 2016.
Six candidates nominated for lord mayor, including Labor, LNP, Greens, but also Legalise Cannabis and two independents. This is the smallest lord mayoral ballot since 2012, when just five candidates stood. There were nine candidates in 2020.
The other point of interest is in the gender balance of candidates. All three main parties are running more women than men.
The Greens ran even more women in 2020, but this is a noticeable uptick for both Labor and LNP.
This is paralleled by a significant change in the gender balance on council. Of course, overall gender balance of candidates can be significantly skewed by candidates running in seats they cannot win, so it doesn’t necessarily tell you who will get elected.
Twelve women were elected to the council in 2020, but in the last term there have been seven councillors resign and were replaced by their party as casual vacancies (a topic I plan to return to). In the five cases where the retiring councillor was a man, all five were replaced by women (the two women were also replaced by women). So this increased the female proportion on the council from 46.2% to 65.4%.
Interestingly, when I analysed the numbers all the way back to 2000 (as far as my data repository goes), I find that women made up a majority of councillors elected in 2000 and 2004, when Labor still held a majority on the council. This majority was not as large as the female majority on the outgoing council right now.
It wasn’t just that Labor had a lot of women on council – the Liberal Party had a small number of councillors (eight in 2000 and nine in 2004), but most of them were women. As the LNP won control of the council in 2008 and increased their numbers in 2012 and 2016, they elected a lot more men and a lot of Labor women lost. From 2004 to 2012, the number of Labor women dropped from ten to three, while the number of LNP women only increased from five to eight.
So while this isn’t the first time women have made up a majority on the council, it is a new record, and the first time on an LNP majority council.
Since there are no councillors retiring at the election (they all retired early), you’d expect a status quo result to repeat the same gender balance.
And if you look at the most marginal seats, there is only upside for electing more women. All of the candidates in Calamvale, Paddington and Walter Taylor are women, while male LNP incumbents in Enoggera and Northgate are being challenged by women from both Labor and Greens.
That’s it for today, but I have more analysis to come on Brisbane City in the coming month.
Not having mayoral opposition candidates in some councils in Moreton Bay is NOT democracy. The people deserve a chance to vote against the mayor if they wish to. There should be a law that forbids candidates from being unopposed and the way you would do this is allow “None of these candidates” as an option.
Gee I would have ran for mayor if I still lived up there if I knew nobody was running. Of course the mayor would win. But give the people a chance to express their opinion on him.
If a candidate is unopposed are ballot papers still printed? Or is the election basically cancelled? If not, would it basically mean not voting for the solo candidate would be an “invalid vote”? That’s the part that isn’t democratic.
No ballot papers, no voting. If an election is uncontested the candidates are declared elected.
Still think the BCC mayoral election will be interesting. Saw a LNP ad yesterday and it was all about Jonathan Sriranganathan (Greens), with a tail end about the Labor candidate. While I don’t think the Greens will win, the internal polling from the LNP must be saying that it is much closer than they would like, in order to make him the centrepiece of their attack ads.
Ben, don’t know if you resources or inclination to cover Logan at some stage. It was the Council I once worked for and I noticed last election the Labor Party made a covert play (not branded as Labor, but they were Labor people) for this Council mayoral election. I drove through the other day and saw that former Federal ALP member (Brett Raguse) is running for Mayor as an independent. A few years ago Logan turned from a nearly full city to an greatly expanded city with plenty of new urban development areas – this makes it a very powerful city to control for a number of valid and nefarious reasons. The past former Mayor (Luke Smith) got done in courts for corruption and to me it is one of those positions that needs a bit more scrutiny.
Also meant to say that the election that Luke Smith ran for and won had the biggest spend by a candidate in any LGA in Queensland. This amount was far greater than what was spent by the mayoral candidate in BCC, which is bigger and richer than Logan. That said something to me about the power play that is going on here.
They’ll probably get mentioned on the podcast, but until partisan elections emerge in SEQ I probably won’t be doing guides for those other councils.
Worth noting that rival candidate for Logan mayor Jon Raven is also a Labor party member. The likely outcome then is a Labor mayor, just not under the formal banner.
30 days until the Queensland local elections are held on 16 March.
The electoral calendar for March is already big:
* 2 March: federal by-election in Dunkley, Victoria
* 16 March: Queensland local and mayoral elections and state by-elections in two Queensland seats (Inala and Ipswich West)
* 23 March: Tasmanian state election and a state by-election in Dunstan, South Australia
Everyone, we’ve got a big month ahead.
@Neil @Wilson
Also been keenly interested in the Logan mayoral race. I thought it was unusual that both of the main contenders are both of the Labor party.
Raguse comes from a Federal Labor background (once the elected member of Forde). And Raven is simply one of the current councillors.
I wonder if Raguse might perceive being the Mayor of Logan as a valuable platform to rebuild his profile and rapport in the Logan community to soon have another crack at the marginal division of Forde.
Another race I had eyes on – Division 7 Gold Coast is shaping out to be as interesting as initially speculated. The murder-accused Ryan Bayldon-Lumsden is now officially on the ballot.
The Gold Coast has served up some unique characters in politics before, but I would imagine even their voters would draw the line at someone with an outstanding murder charge hanging over them.
@Wilson I think you’re right. His initial favourable, sympathetic Facebook support has started to evapourate recently. With commenters instead starting to vent frustrations about having a suspended councillor that is unable to fulfil their duties as their elected representative. His ballot contenders have been echoing these sentiments too of course.
Still though, name recognition is surely to offer some benefit to him. He might with his high profile, acquire the most first preference votes. But inevitably get caught up on the distribution of preferences.
Curious to note that the field of contenders on the division 7 ballot is fairly big. Most on the Gold Coast (behind the mayoral race). Wonder how it compares to some of the other division races in other LGAs.
SEQ Observer, I find it quite logical there would be many candidates contesting division 7 because of the cloud hanging over the incumbent. Several people would imagine they’re in with a shot, whereas as we’ve seen in other divisions and mayoralties across Queensland, there are plenty of incumbents who were the only candidate to nominate because nobody thought they had a chance at beating them. I suppose that’s a good outcome for democracy.
@SEQ Observer & @Wilson
Thanks Wilson for letting me know about Jon Raven being Labor, I had retired before he came on board. You always had “party” people in Council, but they always ran as independents and never had their party affiliations on their campaign material. From the people I still have contact with there, they all say the the same thing – Raven has been a Mayor in waiting for sometime and is a smooth operator.
I am not concerned about it being won by Labor, but by the wrong person. There is an arm of the Labor Party that are renowned for doing deals that, lets say, are not always done with the wider community’s interest at heart.
Neil, sadly I doubt there’s a way to protect against those deals. They will always be a feature of politics unless voters resoundingly reject it like they did to Kristina Keneally in Fowler.
I think it’s better when parties run at council elections officially, because although it would prevent contests like Raguse v Raven from taking place publicly, the community are left in no doubt as to the political allegiance of these candidates, rather than needing to know of their membership or previous history of contesting elections. Information like this should be open and transparent at the voting booth.
@ Wilson
I suppose I come to elections and governance from a completely different angle to what a psephologist would view it. My pet peeves are corruption and people going into politics for the wrong reasons.
I recently finished reading a book by Brian Klaas – Corruptible: Who gets power and how it changes us (highly recommended). His central theme is that there are some people who are naturally corrupt and are drawn to positions where they can exercise that power and there are others that are not naturally corrupt, but may get drawn into that endeavour if the right conditions exists. But he also makes the point that there are certain positions where the risks of corruption are so high that “we” should be designing systems to stop or weed out those who are seeking these positions because they are doing so for the wrong reasons. To that end, for politicians he recommends, amongst other things, that “we” should devote sufficient resources to screen out the corrupt or corruptible person who tends to gravitate towards these positions. It comes at a cost, but this is seen as a worthwhile forward investment. He suggests psychological profiling should be used to get behind the rote answers that power hungry people have used to get beyond the interview process.
It is an interesting concept that will never be supported by the political class. But like the recent series of Nemesis has shown us, we never truly know who we are voting for until well after they had succeeded.
“In all five cases the retiring councillor was a man and their replacement was a woman.”
Not so – Morningside’s Kara Cook ( a woman) was replaced by Lucy Collier.
Ah true. There was actually seven changes. But every man was replaced by a woman, and there were 5 such changes. Will correct.
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