Throughout the most recent outbreak of COVID-19 in New South Wales there has been a lack of information about how the election process would be adapted to deal with the risk of infection, apart from postponing the election for three months.
The Electoral Commission had announced plans to make the spaces inside polling places safer, with the same techniques we’d all be familiar with.
There is a local council election currently being held in South Gippsland Shire in eastern Victoria.
South Gippsland’s former dysfunctional council was sacked in 2019 and replaced by administrators. The rest of Victoria held their council elections in late 2020, but South Gippsland was delayed until late 2021.
Over the last two decades, we’ve seen the culmination of a long trend of political parties taking on a more dominant role in local government in urban New South Wales, particularly in the Greater Sydney region. The Liberal Party has moved into council politics in a lot more of Sydney, while the Greens have become a factor in many councils.
This is the final chapter in my series looking at electoral enrolment data in the Sydney region.
One of the things I noticed when I was looking at local trends in the last post was that, in some areas, enrolment has been declining over the last year-and-a-half.
Last week I put up a number of posts analysing enrolment data in the Greater Sydney region, with a focus on Camden and Blacktown. This is my last post on the topic, looking at a number of other councils.
While I made a number of charts and maps, the most useful one was the one showing the enrolment by ward for a particular council over time. It makes it easy to see the impact redistributions had on population trends, and how population growth has been distributed within a council.
It’s been two weeks since I first posted about the resignations of three Coalition MPs leading to impending by-elections, and the guides I’ve prepared for those by-elections.
This is a follow-up to Wednesday’s post about voter enrolment numbers increasing in Camden Council, this time looking at the equivalent growth taking place in the north-west of Sydney, primarily in the north-eastern corner of the City of Blacktown.
On Monday, I posted about the trends in population growth across Sydney as seen in the NSWEC enrolment data, with a particular focus on Camden, which has more than doubled in size over the last fourteen years.
This growth in population has not been even, but has rather been concentrated at the northern end of the council, totally transforming the political geography of the area.
I have been paying a lot of attention to local councils in New South Wales over the past year, with a particular focus on the more populous councils. As part of my analysis, I decided to draw a line under those councils with a population of over 100,000 people. When I prepared my guides for the 2016 and 2017 council elections, there were 23 councils meeting this criteria. But now there are 25, with Camden and Shoalhaven councils crossing the line since the last round of elections.
The resignation of NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian on Friday under a cloud of investigation by the Independent Commission Against Corruption has now led to two of her ministers also announcing their pending resignations, not just from cabinet but from the parliament. This means we will see at least three NSW state by-elections in the coming months.
I have now prepared a guide to all three seats which is free for all to check out: