Voters in ten NSW local councils won’t just be electing councillors this month, but will also be voting on questions put on the ballot by their council. In eight councils, they’ll be considering binding referendums that would change the council’s constitution. In two other councils there will be non-binding polls (or plebiscites) on policy issues. There are 14 distinct questions across those ten councils.
When I was compiling my candidate lists I was keeping track of what was happening with incumbent councillors.
This has allowed me (at least for the councils I am closely following) to calculate the proportion of seats where the councillor is running for re-election. I have previously tracked this statistic in 2021, so I can compare the two data points.
The South Australian state redistribution was released two weeks ago, but with all of the other elections I have only now had time to complete my analysis. This wasn’t helped by the SA Electoral Districts Boundaries Commission (EDBC) not publishing a shapefile. I had hoped to move away from drawing my own boundary files and simply using the official shapefiles, but in this case it was necessary.
A by-election will be coming up soon for the NSW state seat of Pittwater, at the northern end of the Northern Beaches, after sitting Liberal MP Rory Amon was charged with ten sexual assault offences earlier today. Amon also resigned from the Liberal Party.
Ben is joined by the ABC’s Thomas Morgan to discuss the results of the NT election. We talk about the CLP’s big victory, how northern Darwin has flipped back after being solidly Labor for 23 years, and the rise of the Greens and independents on Labor’s left flank.
Last night’s election results were very decisive, and the result became clear quite early on. In hindsight I realise I never bothered to actually call the result on my live blog.
6:00 – Polls have just closed in the Northern Territory election. I’ll be liveblogging here at the Tally Room tonight so please follow along.
Polls have just opened in the Northern Territory.
I won’t be blogging during the day, but I’ll be back at 6pm ACST to cover the results.
If you’re looking for something to do today, you can check out my election guide.
This blog is a follow-up to my post from November 2021, which tracked where the Labor, Liberal and Greens parties had run across the Greater Sydney region from 2004 to 2021. At the end of this post I’ve added posts showing which Greater Sydney wards were contested by each of these three parties over six election cycles from 2004 to 2024.
This is a solo episode, where Ben runs through all the key parts of the story of how and where the NSW Liberal Party failed to nominate almost a third of candidates for the NSW local government elections next month, covering the scale of the issue, what may have caused it, how it may affect the political balance in each council, the threat of legal action and what could be done to mitigate these issues for next election.