As part of the nomination process for the 2024 Victorian council elections, each candidate was asked to fill out a questionnaire. One of the questions was whether the candidate was endorsed by a party. Not everyone did the survey, but most candidates did. This means that it is possible to identify candidates endorsed by a registered party, but not as easily as it would be in other jurisdictions.
In comparison, in New South Wales party labels are printed on the ballot, and thus are easy to access in the candidate list download. In Victoria, you have to download each PDF one by one, which is quite tedious. So I’ve just done it for the 33 biggest councils that I had originally been planning to profile, and I’ve used that data for this blog post.
Across these 33 councils, including the councillor and leadership team candidates for the City of Melbourne, there are 1553 candidates. 1300 of those candidates don’t appear to have been endorsed by a registered party. The Greens are running 108 candidates, the Victorian Socialists are running 73, Labor is running 54, the Libertarians are running seven, Animal Justice are running seven, and the Liberal Party are running four (solely in the City of Melbourne).
In addition, I have been able to identify a number of quasi-parties where a group of candidates who are formal independents are actually affiliated running under a brand or with common styles. Yarra For All are running in Yarra. Oscar Yildiz’s Your Local Independents are running in most wards of Merri-bek, and there are two different parties of this sort running in Port Phillip. The Socialist Alliance, who are not registered with the VEC, are running candidates for two councils.
This map shows the number of party-endorsed candidates in each council, and you can toggle to see the trends for Labor, Greens, Victorian Socialists and the quasi-parties. The map doesn’t show the City of Melbourne, which works differently.
There’s a very strong geographic trend – in an inner city ring of councils, a large proportion of candidates are party-endorsed. The Greens and Victorian Socialists are running candidates all over Melbourne, but both are running more in the inner ring, in councils like Maribyrnong, Merri-bek, Darebin, Yarra, Stonnington and Port Phillip.
Labor’s nominations seem to be in response to the Greens, mostly just running in the inner ring, along with Whittlesea. Labor has declined to officially nominate in many strong Labor areas in the western suburbs, but are running full tickets in the Greens heartlands of Merri-bek and Darebin.
This is a trend I have definitely noticed while writing my council guides – in outer suburban councils, parties and factions are vague and hard to define, but in the inner city the dividing lines are very strong. There are numerous wards where every candidate belongs to a clearly-identified partisan grouping.
Hi Ben, great use of maps to show a trend! I did a thesis on party politics in NSW local government back in 2017, I came to similar conclusion to you that party politics increased with urbanisation and population. As these are both strong demographic trends more broadly, party influence is only going to increase in the future. Especially so if structural reforms of the sector lead to amalgamations and bigger councils.
Hi Ben,
This is a step in the right direction to collect data on parties but it has a major flaw. The VEC questionnaire only asks candidates if they are “endorsed” not whether they are or ever have been a member of a party. As you note, it’s not compulsory and a number of candidates don’t even respond.
In Victoria the Greens always endorse, Labor does in only a handful of Councils and the Libs hardly ever, although they did endorse for Melbourne this cycle. Most of the minor parties don’t endorse candidates either.
A better question would be “Are you a member of a political party?”
Yes I’m aware of the difference between endorsement and membership, but I don’t think the latter is more useful. Endorsement seems to be a more significant step.