Liberal nomination debacle put their opponents in box seat in NSW council elections

Over the last few days I have been frenetically trying to keep my candidate lists up to date as many candidates announce last minute, and as we started to see official nominations appear on the NSW Electoral Commission website for the September 14 NSW local government elections. To be honest I couldn’t keep up – there’s over 300 candidates listed on my spreadsheet that I’m yet to add to my election guides.

But last night I was noticing the absence of Liberal candidates in many wards. The Greens generally got their nominations in quite early, and Labor candidates were popping up. But the Liberals were taking their time.

This afternoon we got the word that quite a lot of Liberal nominations were not submitted properly, thanks to an announcement from the Liberal Party’s state director, then reported in the Sydney Morning Herald.

The NSWEC is still in the process of publishing candidate nominations, so we don’t know the full extent of the problems. The NSWEC publishes individual candidates as ungrouped candidates and then later moves them into groups once they successfully meet the criteria for a group, so the existence of Liberal candidates in the ungrouped list doesn’t mean they didn’t get a group in. The official ballot draws will take place at 2pm tomorrow, so we assume by then we will have a full picture of what has happened.

It appears that in some places nominations were not lodged at all. In other places, some candidates may have nominated but they have not been able to fulfill the requirements for an above-the-line box.

Councils listed by the Liberal Party as not having lodged nominations include:

• Blue Mountains
• Camden
• Campbelltown
• Lane Cove
• Northern Beaches
• Shoalhaven
• Wollongong

And there are apparently issues with partial nominations in Georges River, North Sydney, Penrith, Canterbury-Bankstown and Maitland.

I haven’t been closely following all of these councils, but this list includes eight of the 26 councils I’m analysing.

You need to nominate a group of candidates equal to the number of vacancies in a ward, or half the number of vacancies for an undivided council, in order to get a box above the line. If only some of their candidates have been nominated, they may be in the ungrouped column or may have a group without a box above the line.

Where Liberal candidates have managed to nominate without an above-the-line box they can still theoretically get elected, but it will disadvantage them relative to their rivals. It will be more complicated to cast a vote, and they won’t be able to gain above-the-line preferences. But in some wards where there are only 4-5 groups, it will be much easier to run a BTL campaign than in the Senate.

Where they are entirely absent, that will create a vacuum and allow for others to gain support. Some of those votes will go to their main opponents, but it may also allow for conservative independents or minor parties to thrive in their absence.

The Liberal Party has been expanding to run in most urban council elections in recent decades, and this has mostly wiped out the ranks of conservative councillors, who have either stopped running or been absorbed as Liberals. This means that some councils don’t really have any right-wing alternative to take up the lead. This is different to 2021, when there was some notice that the party wouldn’t run, and thus allowed Liberals to run as independents or made room for parties like Our Local Community to thrive. It’s too late now.

The Liberal Party had never run for Shoalhaven council, but there were two sitting councillors who were party members and were going to run for the party. If these reports are correct, they will be out of a job. This will probably help the right-wing Shoalhaven Independents or the ticket of independent Jemma Tribe. Shoalhaven is heavily polarised and it’s likely that the right wing will win half of the council seats regardless. If anything, the right may benefit from a more unified mayoral campaign, unlike in 2021 where enormous rates of preference exhaustion allowed a Greens mayor to be re-elected without a majority of the vote.

In Northern Beaches, the Liberal Party has mostly mopped up any other right-wing parties, and they run in opposition to Your Northern Beaches, with Labor, Greens and Good For Manly as smaller parties. YNB was in a vulnerable position, with their leader Michael Regan leaving for state parliament, one other councillor defecting to the Liberals and others retiring.

Right now there are no Liberals listed on the NSWEC website, which opens up the possibility of YNB to win a large majority on the council.

In Georges River, the council is split three ways between Labor, Liberal and the Georges River Residents and Ratepayers Party. The Liberals have successfully nominated in three wards, so I suspect there will be potential for Labor or GRRRP to win second seats in the other two wards, sidelining the Liberals as the third-biggest party on the council.

Labor was on the verge of winning a majority in the City of Wollongong. I am not aware of many conservative options running for the council, so this will probably cement a Labor majority there.

Labor also does quite well for the City of Campbelltown, with a loose alliance of Liberals and small parties in opposition to them. If there is no Liberal ticket, it should boost local parties, but might be enough for Labor to pick up an eighth seat and a majority.

It’s worth noting the Libertarian Party, formerly the Liberal Democrats, are running in a surprisingly large number of councils, and could benefit where the Liberals aren’t on the ballot.

We will have to wait and see, and tomorrow night I will try to write up a proper analysis of the state of play. In the meantime, I will keep updating my election guides with the information we have.

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