We’ve known it’s coming for about four years, but the Victorian government has finally implemented the final stage of legislation first passed in 2020, imposing single-member wards on all but one council across Melbourne along with many regional councils.
Legislation sponsored by then-local government minister Adem Somyurek in 2020 mandated that metro councils (excluding the City of Melbourne) along with a number of categories of larger regional councils would be required to use single-member wards for their elections. In some other regional councils, the option of having no wards at all, or having multi-member wards with the same number of councillors in each ward remained. The option of having wards with different numbers of councillors has been removed entirely.
I wrote about this a lot for the 2020 Victorian council elections. About half of the state’s councils were reviewed before the 2020 election, and these new rules were imposed on those councils. The remaining 39 councils had been spared this change until this election cycle, when they have also been reviewed.
While the panels themselves have been professional and done their best under the circumstances, options have been limited. Often a council has been presented with three different ways to split up its area into tiny single-member wards, all of them looking absurd.
Just yesterday, the minister finally published his approval and with it the final recommendations of the panels. I am still working on an interactive map allowing you to compare the previous and new ward boundaries for these 39 councils, but in this post I’m going to analyse the broader impact.
Firstly, this change is the culmination of a reversal in a twenty-year trend of a move away from majoritarian electoral systems in favour of more proportional systems. This chart shows how many councils use each of five types of system.
The number of councils gradually declined from 2004 until 2016, with even more planned to shift in 2020 before the change in legislation. 38 out of 79 councils (almost half) used single-member wards in 2004. This would have been just eight councils in 2020 under the old rules, but instead climbed to 16. It will now apply in 46 councils in 2024.
There had also been a growing use of multi-member wards with different numbers of councillors, and councils with a mix of multi-member and single-member wards. Both of these structures are now extinct. I’m not a fan of these structures, but they are preferable to single-member wards.
The number of councils using multi-member wards of equal sizes has also declined from a peak of twenty in 2016 to just eleven in 2024. A number of urban councils used this ideal system but have been moved to single-member, while some rural councils that previously used a mix of single- and multi-member wards have been moved to this system.
This next chart shows the average number of councillors per ward. This metric directly speaks to the proportionality of a system. While a 2-member ward might theoretically use “proportional representation”, it is far less proportional than a 5-member ward or a 9-member undivided council.
This metric had been increasing for both Melbourne and regional councils consistently until 2016. But the 2020 changes actually slightly increased this metric in rural councils, while leading it to crash in Melbourne. Well regional councils have also seen a big drop in 2024, while Melbourne has come close to a ratio of 1 (only avoiding actually hitting that ratio due to the City of Melbourne being undivided). I think this is because there have been more regional councils with single-member ward mandates this time around.
Of the 39 councils reviewed, four have been given multi-member wards. Three of these councils will lose a councillor, dropping from seven councillors to six, with three two-member wards. The other will remain the same with nine councillors, with three wards of three.
Another five councils will be undivided. All five of these previously had a mixture of multi-member and single-member wards, and are small rural councils.
In the other 30, single-member wards have been imposed.
Interestingly, the panel had the option of single-member wards everywhere but tended to reject it where they had a choice. Of the twelve councils where multiple options were available, the panel opted for single-member wards in just three. While this process has been clouded by the use of an independent panel, the shift in electoral structure is an imposition by the parliament, not a choice of experts.
The panel also had the option to change the size of each council. Generally I think Victorian councils are far too small, but it seems like they have generally acted to bring council sizes closer to similarly-populous councils. Four councils increased in size: Mount Alexander, Casey and Melton each gained a single councillor while Moorabool gained two. Three councils lose a councillor: Buloke, Northern Grampians and Yarriambiack each had seven, and were moved to a multi-member ward system with six each. With equal-sized wards, you can’t have a seven-member council unless you use a single-member ward system. Overall this means the number of councillors across the state has increased by two.
Finally, this map shows the structure used for every council. If you click on each council it will give you some basic information about the council’s electoral structure, and if it was reviewed it will give the same information for the former structure. The map is colour-coded by the new structure.
The map of Melbourne is a sea of single-member green. Outside of Melbourne, single-member wards can also be seen in Geelong, Bendigo, Ballarat, Wodonga and some surrounding towns. Generally outside of these areas, multi-member wards tend to be used for neighbouring councils, and the same for undivided councils.