Tally Room mail - Brisbane, Tasmania and council wards (Patreon)

March will be a big month for elections, and two in particular have grabbed my interest - our largest council and our smallest state both go to the polls one week apart. Both are experiencing an increase in multi-party politics, but the major parties are yet to get on board.

Also in this newsletter I touch on the issue of single-member wards for local councils, and what I'm reading.

I'm releasing this newsletter every fortnight for Patreon donors, and it will be available for non-donors later that week.

Tasmania and Brisbane's multi-party politics

Tasmania and Brisbane City Council in one sense look very different to each other. Tasmania is a state, with all of the privileges and powers that come with that. The City of Brisbane, while the most populous local council in Australia and with some powers that smaller councils don't have, still remains just a council. Tasmania's House of Assembly is elected using the proportional Hare-Clark system, while the Brisbane City Council is elected using the very majoritarian single-member ward system (with optional preferential voting). But I think they have some parallels and both tell us things about how Australia's party system is evolving.

Tasmania's lower house had elected 25 members from 1998 until 2021, which was roughly the same number as Brisbane's 26 elected councillors. Yet the difference in electoral system had meant that the two systems worked quite differently. Tasmania had a strong third party in the Greens, and the proportional system meant that they consistently won seats, and major parties would have to win a sizeable lead over the other party to win a majority.

In contrast, Brisbane City has a voting system much more like a mainland state parliament. Single member wards until recently were monopolised by the major parties, with the Greens breaking through in their first ward in 2016.

Both party systems have seen an increasing diversity in recent years, as we have also seen at the federal level. The Greens now hold two state seats and three federal seats overlapping with inner Brisbane, and are now competitive in numerous council wards. In Tasmania, the Jacqui Lambie Network are running candidates in a number of electorates, although it's hard to say how seriously to take their chances.

We've also seen a lot more independents emerging in Tasmania. At least two credible independents contested the seat of Clark in 2021, and both would have won if seven members had been elected. This time around we have ex-Labor leader David O'Byrne, two ex-Liberal independents and Kristie Johnston, who was elected as an independent in 2021.

The big change in Tasmania is the expansion of the House of Assembly from five districts of five, to five districts of seven. Political science theory tells us that both the average district magnitude and the total size of the assembly have flow-on effects to the effective number of parties - how many parties put up their hand, and how voters decide who to vote for.

This can help explain why Tasmania has always had so much more diversity in its politics than Brisbane, despite a similarly-sized representative body. It's a bit early to say, but I think we might be seeing some evidence that the field is expanding in anticipation of the larger House.

And we're now seeing some interesting parallels in how these two election campaigns are playing out. In both jurisdictions the Liberals are scare-mongering about the prospects of a "coalition of chaos" on the left. In Brisbane, the threat of the Greens potentially overtaking Labor has been considered, and it's certainly true that any progressive majority would have to include a substantial Greens contingent, not a Labor majority. This sort of rhetoric has a much longer history in Tasmania, but has now expanded to include raising fears of a "traffic light" coalition of Labor, Lambie and Greens. In Brisbane, the LNP is presenting Labor mayoral candidate Tracy Price as a puppet of the Greens.

Tasmania has a long history of both major parties insisting they won't do any deals to govern in minority or coalition, appealing to a group of voters who swing between the major parties but don't like the Greens. In 1996 (the last election with a 35-seat House), this led to Labor refusing to form government with the Greens and led to a new Liberal premier to allow the party to continue to govern in minority. Right now it's hard to see either major party winning a majority, but whichever side can convince these voters that they are the best prospect of a majority government will probably get a boost.

In Brisbane, I suspect the LNP could well hold on, but a uniform swing of under 5% would see Labor or the Greens gain the seven seats needed to produce a progressive council majority. Right now, however, Labor is not interested in doing deals, instead planning to exhaust their preferences. It's hard to see the LNP losing their majority in those circumstances.

Single-member wards

There were two stories last week about the problems of single-member wards.

Nominations closed for March's Queensland council elections, and in Moreton Bay, the third-most populous council in Australia, five of the thirteen contests, including the mayoralty, were uncontested.

I squarely put the blame on single-member wards, in combination with a lack of organised parties. When many races are uncompetitive, candidates don't put up their hands. We see this in NSW, where councils like Shellharbour saw much less competitive elections when they moved from an undivided council to two-member wards.

Meanwhile in Victoria we've seen the culmination of a four-year push to eliminate proportional representation from urban councils. This change will make Victorian council elections far less representative, with absurdly tiny wards elevating hyper-local representation over any other representation.

Victoria's councils had been gradually improving their electoral systems for fifteen years from 2004 until 2019, but since 2019 the average number of councillors per ward has collapsed. I expect we will see much smaller ranges of candidates, and many uncontested wards. In councils where identifiable parties are easier to see, I think we'll see more wipe-out results where a party wins every ward. Victorians should be embarrassed that their voting systems have gone so far backwards.

I have never made election guides for Victorian local councils. Part of my resistance has been the complete use of postal voting and the patchy presence of parties. But if I find myself with some time after the March wave of elections, I might try out writing a few guides for the biggest councils.

What I'm reading

I'm close to finishing The Coalitions Presidents Make by Marcus Mietzner, my guest on yesterday's podcast about the Indonesian election results.

Mietzner is an Indonesian politics expert and his book looks at how Indonesian presidents have maintained control of the political system since the first direct presidential election in 2004. The two presidents who have each served two five-year terms since 2004 have come to office and quickly established a dominant position in the political system.

They have managed this by bringing parties, legislators, the military, police, bureaucrats, oligarchs and Muslim organisations into their governing coalitions, with a give and take that disciplines and rewards those who could otherwise have the ability to bring down a president or at least prevent them achieving their agenda.

Indonesia is an enormous country (the fourth most populous in the world) with fascinating politics, right on Australia's doorstep. But it doesn't get a lot of attention. If you're the kind of person who reads my work, and probably knows all about American and Australian elections, you could try learning a bit more about Indonesian politics, starting with my recent podcasts or Marcus' book.