Shoalhaven council election, 2024

The City of Shoalhaven covers parts of the south coast from Shoalhaven Heads to Durras North. Towns in the council include Nowra, Berry, Ulladulla, Milton, Sussex Inlet and Huskisson.

The council has a population of about 110,000 people as of 2019.

• Wards
• Incumbent councillors
• History
• Council control
• Candidate summary
• Assessment
• 2021 results
• Vote breakdown by ward
• Results maps

Wards
Shoalhaven is divided into three wards, with each ward electing four councillors. The council also directly elects a mayor, adding up to a total of thirteen councillors.

Ward 1 covers the northern end of the council, including Kangaroo Valley, Berry, Shoalhaven Heads, Bomaderry and most of Nowra.

Ward 2 covers towns around Jervis Bay and to the south of Nowra, including Vincentia, Huskisson, Culburra and the southern outskirts of Nowra.

Ward 3 covers the southern half of the council, Ulladulla, Milton and Sussex Inlet.

Incumbent mayor
Amanda Findley (Greens)

Incumbent councillors

¹Gillian Boyd won a countback on 4 July 2023 after the resignation of Liza Butler.

History
Shoalhaven tends to vote for conservative parties at a state and federal level, but until recently there wasn’t as much structure in terms of parties on the council as there is now.

Greg Watson has been the leading figure in the Shoalhaven Independents Group for at least the last two decades. After having served as Mayor of Shoalhaven in the 1970s and 1980s, he won the directly-elected mayoralty in 1999.

Watson was re-elected in 2004 along with six other SIG councillors, giving them a majority. Four independents and two Greens were also elected.

Watson was defeated for re-election in 2008 by another independent, Paul Green, who polled 31% of the primary vote and ended up with 57% after preferences. Watson returned as one of four Shoalhaven Independents councillors, alongside eight other independents and one Green. Those eight independents were elected on six different tickets. Gareth Ward elected a second independent with him in Ward 1, and Paul Green’s running mate took his council seat in Ward 2 with him elected mayor. The other four were elected on solo tickets, and it is not clear if there was any broader faction that some of them may have belonged to.

Green and Ward were both elected to state parliament in 2011: Greens as a Christian Democratic member of the upper house and Ward as the Liberal MP for Kiama. Both vacated the council scene in 2012, but were replaced by another big political identity.

Joanna Gash had held the federal seat of Gilmore since 1996 (she would retire in 2013), and ran her own ticket for council with her as the mayoral candidate at the 2012 council election.

Team Gash won seven council seats, and Gash herself easily won the mayoralty with 63% of the primary vote. This gave her faction a clear council majority. The Shoalhaven Independents were reduced to just three seats, along with one independent and one Green.

The Gash wave did not last. The faction had polled almost 50% for council in 2012, but this dropped to less than 29% in 2016. The vote for Shoalhaven Independents shot up by 15%, and there was also a swing to the Greens of 7.7%. Labor also ran for the council for the first time in recent history.

Team Gash won just one seat in each council ward. Shoalhaven Independents won five, and the Greens also won a seat in each ward. Labor won their first seat.

The mayoral race was a close three-way race. Gash led on 37.4%, followed by the Greens’ Amanda Findley on 32.1% and Watson on 30.5%. Watson’s preferences boosted Findley and she won by 1394 votes.

The current council thus had a split of 5 Shoalhaven Independents, 4 Greens (including the mayor), one Labor and three for Team Gash. Thus a left-wing minority on the council sat alongside two different groups of conservative independents.

Greens and Labor supported Kitchener from the Shoalhaven Independents for deputy mayor and White from Team Gash for assistant deputy mayor in 2016.

White moved up to deputy mayor with Pakes from SIG as assistant deputy mayor, both unopposed, in 2017.

This peace broke down in 2018, when Joanna Gash’s two factional colleagues both broke with her and aligned with the Shoalhaven Independents, giving SIG a majority on the council. The Greens contested both leadership roles that year but lost both races to the incumbents.

Every leadership election since 2018 has been won by the expanded SIG, with Greens and Labor on the losing side, and Gash floating freely.

White and Pakes held those jobs yet again in 2019, and Watson took the deputy mayoralty in 2020.

The 2021 election saw a swing to the left on the council. Amanda Findley was re-elected as mayor alongside three Greens colleagues, but Labor picked up a second and third seat. This gave the centre-left seven seats. The right won six seats: four Shoalhaven Independents councillors and two other independents.

Labor councillor Liza Butler won the deputy mayoralty in January 2022 by an 8-5 margin. One of the Greens councillors was absent for the September 2022 mayoral election, and the result was tied 6-6. Independent conservative Paul Ell won when his name was drawn out of the hat. The left regained the deputy mayoralty in September 2023, with Greens councillor Christen winning by an 8-5 margin.

Council control
An alliance of Greens and Labor controls the council by a 7-6 margin. Conservative independents won two seats in each ward. Greens and Labor each won one seat in each ward. This added up to six seats for the left and six for the right, with the council’s control decided by the mayoral election, won by the Greens.

Candidate summary
Sitting Greens mayor Amanda Findley is not running for re-election, and sitting councillors Evan Christen (Greens), Moo D’Ath (Greens), Mark Kitchener (Shoalhaven Independents), Greg Watson (Shoalhaven Independents) and John Wells (Shoalhaven Independents) are not running for re-election. Labor councillor John Kotlash has dropped to fourth place on the Labor ticket in his ward.

Sitting independent councillors Paul Ell and Serena Copley had planned to run as Liberal candidates but did not make it onto the ballot due to a Liberal Party nomination error.

There are four blocs which all candidates are a part of: The Greens, Labor, the Shoalhaven Independents Group and Team Tribe, an independent ticket led by ex-Liberal independent Jemma Tribe. The ALP is not running for mayor, but otherwise each group has a mayoral candidate and a full ticket in each ward.

Assessment
Shoalhaven currently has a progressive majority but this is precarious, built on the peculiarities of the local electoral system and division within conservative ranks. It’s also a unique situation in recent decades: the council has historically favoured the right.

The four-member ward structure made it possible for the centre-left to win half the seats on council despite the right-wing groups winning a clear majority on the council in all three wards.

And then the left gained a majority thanks to Amanda Findley winning the mayoralty. Yet Findley did not come close to winning a majority of votes, even after preferences. Findley’s final vote after the full distribution of preferences made up just 37.4% of the formal vote. She won the race mainly because there were four prominent conservative candidates for mayor. Paul Green polled 25.5%, and three candidates for the Shoalhaven Independents polled over a third of the vote between them. That’s almost 59% of the vote between them.

This year’s mayoral ballot is much smaller and this should minimise wasted votes on the right. So unless there is a big swing in support towards the left after eight years in power, I’d expect either Patricia White or Jemma Tribe to win the mayoralty with preferences from the other.

The four-member wards and the current distribution of political support in Shoalhaven lead themselves towards each of the four blocs winning one seat in each ward. This would result in a left-wing bloc of six Greens and Labor, and six Team Tribe and Shoalhaven Independents. The mayoralty would thus break the tie, and I expect that to favour the right-wing groups.

2021 council election result

2021 mayoral election result

2021 mayoral election two-candidate-preferred result

Vote breakdown by ward
The following tables show the vote in each ward. Unfortunately the mayoral results were not separated by ward, so we can only identify the home ward of ordinary votes.

The Shoalhaven Independents had the highest primary vote across the council, with a vote ranging from 35.7% in Ward 2 to 51.5% in Ward 3. Their vote was much higher in Ward 3 where there was not a competing conservative independent.

The Greens came second, with a primary vote ranging from 25% in Ward 2 to 27.8% in Ward 3.

The Labor primary vote ranged from 18.2% in Ward 1 to 21.7% in Ward 3.

The Greens primary vote for the mayoral election was substantially higher than the Greens vote for council, but much lower than the combined Greens/Labor vote at the council election.

Council results by ward

Mayoral results by ward

Election results at the 2021 City of Shoalhaven election
Toggle between primary votes for Shoalhaven Independents, the Greens, Labor and independent candidates Paul Ell and Serena Copley.

Election results at the 2021 City of Shoalhaven mayoral election
Toggle between primary votes for the Greens, Shoalhaven Independents and independent candidate Paul Green.

Candidates – Mayor

• Kaye Gartner (Greens)
• Cr Patricia White (Shoalhaven Independents)
• Jemma Tribe (Team Tribe)

Candidates – Ward 1

• A – Labor
  1. Cr Matthew Norris
  2. Kylie Lawrence
  3. Deborah Shapira
  4. Graeme Evans
• B – Shoalhaven Independents
  1. Peter Wilkins
  2. Jason Cox
  3. Brett Steele
  4. Amanda Smith
• C – Greens
  1. Cr Tonia Gray
  2. Sarah Waddell
  3. Carmel McCallum
  4. Terence Barratt
• D – Team Tribe
  1. Selena Clancy
  2. Crystal Brandon
  3. Ashleigh McGuire
  4. Bohdan Brumerskyj

Candidates – Ward 2

• A – Shoalhaven Independents
  1. Robert Proudfoot
  2. Luciano Casmiri
  3. Clive Robertson
  4. Allan Harvey
• B – Labor
  1. Ben Krikstolaitis
  2. Leonie Ebzery
  3. Michelle Miran
  4. John Kotlash
• C – Greens
  1. Linda Nowak
  2. Evan Christen
  3. Joanne Warren
  4. Robert Barrel
• D – Team Tribe
  1. Jemma Tribe
  2. Jessica Bromley
  3. Zeke Lorenz
  4. Timothy Cochrane

Candidates – Ward 3

• A – Labor
  1. Cr Gillian Boyd
  2. Gabrielle Curry
  3. Terrie Gardner
  4. Carol Joyce
• B – Greens
  1. Takesa Frank
  2. Debbie Killian
  3. Jorj Lowrey
  4. Suzanne Taylor
• C – Shoalhaven Independents
  1. Cr Patricia White
  2. Mitchell Pakes
  3. Karlee Dunn
  4. Denise Kemp
• D – Team Tribe
  1. Natalee Johnston
  2. Emily Jenkins
  3. Jordan Hamilton
  4. Glynis Howard

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