Most candidates running in the NSW council elections are independents, or belong to the three big urban parties.
Over 58% of candidates running for the council election are either independent or unaffiliated. 14% of candidates were nominated by the ALP, 9.9% by the Greens, and 7.3% by the Liberal Party.
This leaves 435 candidates – 10.8% of the total – running for registered parties outside of those big three, and that’s the topic of this blog post.
These small parties are mostly an urban phenomenon. 351 of those 435 candidates are running in Sydney, and most of the others are in the Hunter and the Illawarra.
The only exceptions are the Australian Christians in Wagga Wagga, Sustainable Australia in Queanbeyan-Palerang, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers in Dubbo, Goulburn Mulwaree, Junee and Snowy Monaro, and the Libertarian Party in seven councils.
These parties fall into three distinct categories: parties that also contest state and federal elections, local parties and parties that are just a machine for a sole independent.
The Libertarian Party is running a lot more candidates than any party outside the big three. They are running 78 candidates in 18 councils, including a few in rural areas. They don’t have any incumbent councillors, and are not running in Campbelltown which is always the easiest prospect for a minor party to pick up a seat. Campbelltown has elected Greens on and off since 1999, currently has an Animal Justice councillor and indeed the Libertarians under their old Liberal Democrats name won a seat in 2012 and held the mayoralty for one year.
Animal Justice is running in seven councils. Interestingly in two councils (Campbelltown and Tweed) they have nominated sufficient candidates for an above-the-line box but failed to group them properly, so won’t have an above the line box.
Sustainable Australia is running in three councils, and Unity and Socialist Alliance are each running in two.
But while these parties are running in a bunch of councils, they generally don’t do particularly well. Of all the state and federal parties that ran for council in 2021 outside of the big three, only eight councillors were elected. Five of those eight were Shooters, Fishers and Farmers members, with only one of those seats being close to urban areas (Hawkesbury). The other three were two Sustainable Australia councillors in North Sydney and one Animal Justice councillor in Campbelltown.
The picture is very different when you look at parties that are local government specialists, usually running in just one council.
I identified 22 parties that don’t seem to run in state or federal elections. Four of them appear to be parties that are just running in a single ward and are effectively a mechanism to elect a single councillor, such as Lorraine Wearne Independents and the Kogarah Residents Association. I’m also not counting the Battler party, which is running for Cumberland but has no electoral history and is yet to prove itself.
Of the remaining seventeen, there are just two that are running in multiple council areas. Our Local Community are running in five councils. They have elected councillors in Cumberland and Parramatta, and are also running in three other councils. They also won seats in Canada Bay in 2021, but are not running there this time.
Community Voice is a new party founded by an independent councillor in Campbelltown after he won a seat for the first time in 2021, and it’s also running in Liverpool and Canterbury-Bankstown.
All of these seventeen parties have a realistic prospect of winning more than one seat in a council area, and in most cases they have already won multiple seats.
Three of these parties are now ones founded by independent councillors who won in 2021 – Community Voice in Campbelltown, Community Champions in Parramatta and Peaceful Bayside in Bayside. The Small Business Party ran incumbent councillors in Sydney and Parramatta in 2021, but only won in Hawkesbury which is their only council in 2024. The Yvonne Weldon Independents are an arguable inclusion.
But most of these parties have multiple councillors, such as Georges River Residents and Ratepayers Party, Your Northern Beaches, Serving Mosman, Strathfield Independents, Lake Mac Independents, Clover Moore Independent Team in Sydney, Residents First in Woollahra and Liverpool Community Independents Team.
The Community First Totally Independent party was recently founded in Campbelltown as a merger of two long-standing local parties that would usually just win one council seat, so they now have two incumbent councillors running for re-election.
This map shows the councils where these seventeen parties are both running and have incumbent councillors.
Every council with one of these parties ranges from Shoalhaven to Lake Macquarie, and have some areas where they have a strong presence. They don’t pop up in the areas where the Greens have a strong presence such as Inner West and Randwick. Blacktown, Canterbury-Bankstown and Sutherland remain strongly two-party, although there’s lots of others running in Canterbury-Bankstown this year. There are quite a few independents in Camden and Penrith but they haven’t coalesced into a party ticket.
It’s easier to analyse these parties where they have formal party registration but in theory a group of candidates could function as a party without having party registration. The only obvious case of this at the moment is Frank Carbone’s team in Fairfield. Frank Carbone runs a ticket in both wards of the council, and in 2021 they won six out of twelve council seats, plus Carbone winning the mayoralty. Carbone’s teams seem to functionally be part of a single alliance with the Dai Le registered party, which won three seats in 2021. So arguably the party consists of two tickets in each ward – one independent group and one party group.
I don’t know a lot about Maitland, but current mayor Philip Penfold is affiliated with four other independents all elected to council together. So it looks like Penfold’s team functions as the largest party on the council, with five seats to just four each for Labor and Liberal.
It’s plausible that Lawrie McKinna’s independent ticket in Central Coast could emerge as a local party, with a full ticket in all five wards.
These groups are far more interesting than a random independent here or there, because they can win enough seats to compete with the major parties within their local council, and as they all pick away at the major party vote in different parts of urban New South Wales, they get voters used to opting for an alternative. They are part of the complex story of the decline of the major parties which has become so obvious in federal politics.