Ryde council by-election a failure of policy
There’s a by-election taking place today in the West ward of Ryde council in the northern suburbs of Sydney. The by-election was triggered by the resignation of former Labor mayor and newly elected...
View ArticlePodcast #79: Tasmanian council elections preview
Ben is joined by Tasmanian psephologist Kevin Bonham to discuss the upcoming Tasmanian council elections – the electoral systems, the emergence of local tickets, and they then dive into the specific...
View ArticleSouth Australia’s tiny wards
South Australian voters are currently going to the polls to elect their local councillors for the next four years. Voting takes place by mail, with polls closing on November 10. Incidentally this means...
View ArticleDirectly electing mayors – a livestream discussion
Last month I wrote a post explaining why I oppose mayors being directly elected by the voters rather than elected by their fellow councillors, specifically in the context of New South Wales local...
View ArticleTime to end non-residential voting for councils
New South Wales appears to be considering changes to rules around voting for the City of Sydney, replacing a special law passed a decade ago to expand the business vote in that council alone. Yet I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Single-member council wards rolling out in Victoria
Victoria is continuing the process of reviewing its local council wards, and since my last update in May, we have started to see proposed ward boundaries for those councils that are being forced to...
View ArticlePodcast #101: Group voting tickets and ward changes in Victoria
Ben is joined by psephologist Henry Schlechta to discuss two issues of democratic reform in Victoria: the arguments around abolishing group voting tickets, and the implementation of single-member wards...
View ArticleWestern Australia’s first step on local council voting reform
The Western Australian Labor government has been recently going through a process of changing the structures of local government elections in the state. The process involves the replacement of...
View ArticleGood, bad and ugly ward redistributions in NSW
The process of redrawing local council wards for next year’s New South Wales council elections is now quite advanced, with the councils due for a change having mostly decided on draft boundaries and...
View ArticleChoosing a voting system for NZ councils
I have been fascinated recently with voting systems for local government, and how they change – in NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. New Zealand also has an element of choice in...
View ArticleMy papers for the 2023 APSA conference
The 2023 conference of the Australian Political Science Association is taking place in Sydney this week, and I will be presenting two papers – one today and one tomorrow. I won’t be printing copies of...
View ArticleQueensland ward boundary changes concluded
Queensland’s local councils will be up for election next March. Numerous Queensland councils, including the urban councils of the south-east, use single-member wards (called “divisions” in Queensland)....
View ArticleNSW ward redistributions completed
New South Wales councils will be up for election in September 2024, and the process of redrawing ward boundaries for these elections has now concluded. I have now finished making my new boundary map....
View Article
