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 five councillors resign and were replaced by their party as casual vacancies (a topic I plan to return to). In all five cases the retiring councillor was a man and their replacement was a woman. 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.