I have focused my analysis of the upcoming Queensland council elections on the City of Brisbane for a number of reasons. It is the most populous council in Australia, but it also has elections that are strongly partisan, with Labor, the LNP and the Greens running in every ward and holding all but one ward.
There is also a number of neighbouring councils that surround Brisbane that all have a lot of things in common. These six councils are all very populous: they include four of the next eight most populous councils in the country after Brisbane, and every council in the area ranks in the top fifty in the country by population. They also have directly-elected mayors and (with one exception) use single-member electorates for their council.
The main difference between Brisbane and its neighbours, and the only reason I haven’t written profiles of those other councils, is the lack of organised parties in these local councils. It’s not just that Labor and LNP don’t participate, but you don’t see organised tickets of affiliated candidates running head-to-head across these councils.
And this has had consequences, which I will explore in this post. In Moreton Bay in particular, the bad voting system combined with the lack of parties is depriving much of the council of a choice this March, with four out of twelve council seats as well as the mayoralty being uncontested. This is not a random event – it’s the result of the current system, and something you don’t see elsewhere. In this blog post I’ll look at the history of this problem, what causes it, and how to fix it.
There are six councils in this ring that surround Brisbane: Gold Coast, Redland, Logan, Ipswich, Moreton Bay and Sunshine Coast. I don’t include Somerset as it has a much smaller population even though it theoretically borders Brisbane. Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast do not technically border Brisbane but otherwise fit with this group.
This first chart shows the number of elections in each council that were uncontested since 2008. 2008 is a good place to start this history, since a number of these councils were created and first elected in 2008, and another experienced a boundary change at this time. The only boundary change during this period was the deamalgamation of Noosa from Sunshine Coast in 2014, which reduced the size of Sunshine Coast from twelve councillors to ten at the 2016 election.
Moreton Bay has five uncontested elections out of eleven in 2024: four out of twelve council divisions (the word used for a ward or electorate for Queensland councils outside of Brisbane) along with the mayoralty. Four out of twelve divisions are also uncontested in Logan.
Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast also each have one uncontested division in 2024, and Redland has two – the first uncontested elections in Redland in the period of analysis.
There was another peak in 2012, when Ipswich and Logan each experienced five uncontested elections, including the mayoralty of Logan.
Ipswich has not had any uncontested elections since they changed their electoral system in 2020, reducing the size of the council from ten to eight, and replacing the ten single-member divisions with eight two-member divisions using a terrible bloc vote system.
The first problem with these councils is the existence of single-member divisions. I have been very critical of the use of single-member wards (for example in Victoria). They geographically segregate voters and limit their choice when it comes to candidates. By creating “safe seats” you devalue a person’s vote, and produce artificial majorities for groups without majority support.
In councils in particular, where the community is more likely to be homogenous or at least of a similar make-up in each ward, you can see one side win a super-majority of a council despite not winning such a big share of the vote – although that last point shouldn’t apply to enormous councils like Moreton Bay, with a population of 476,000 people as of 2021.
The big problem in a place like Moreton Bay is the lack of parties combined with that single-member system. When you have organised parties, as you see in Brisbane, each party has an interest in presenting candidates in most or all wards, thus giving voters a choice. Most of the time a seat perceived as “safe” is indeed safe, but sometimes there are surprises.
Parties also play a valuable role in shaping the debate. An alternative party has an interest in identifying mistakes and policy failures by those in power, and to challenge them for their position. They identify issues that may mobilise voters and solidify voters around positions. Yes, parties largely perform these activities for their own self-interest, but it still has a public good. When parties don’t exist, you see situations like Moreton Bay, where a mayor will take office simply because he was the only person to nominate.
This next chart shows the number of candidates for mayor in each of these councils. It shows how councils like Redland and Ipswich have often had very small mayoral fields, and Logan and Moreton Bay have managed to. have uncontested elections, while Brisbane and the Gold Coast always have a healthy field of candidates.
So what is the answer? Firstly, I would do away with single-member divisions. Each division should elect at least three members, ideally five members.
Secondly, these councils don’t have enough councillors, considering their population. The most populous councils in New South Wales tend to have fifteen councillors, yet Moreton Bay is much more populous than the City of Blacktown, and only has thirteen councillors. The Gold Coast should have at least twenty councillors, and even Redland council should have fifteen seats on its council.
The replacement of single-member divisions with multi-member proportional divisions should immediately encourage more people to throw their hat in the ring and eliminate uncontested wards. Uncontested elections in New South Wales pretty much only take place in single-member or dual-member wards.
The use of a proportional system would likely encourage the formation of alliances and tickets which would give greater transparency to voters about who a candidate will likely ally with, or their policy agenda on council. This is a good thing, and would improve Queensland local democracy. A larger council size would also likely lead to more parties and tickets to contest these elections and win seats.
These councils usually fly under the radar but are large bodies and should receive more attention. They deserve a better electoral system which encourages real competition and clarifies the significance of a person’s vote.
That’s about it for now on this topic, but for my next post I will be delving into another issue relating to single-member wards – Victoria’s final adoption of single-member wards for all of metro Melbourne in the lead-up to the October council elections.