Clarence Council Voting Patterns 2022-6

Advance Summary

1. Voting on the Clarence City Council in 2022-6 was much less factional than on Hobart council, with also far fewer seriously contested motions. 

2. The overwhelming feature of Clarence council voting patterns in this term is not a right vs left axis but rather the tendency of certain councillors (particularly Richard James) to dissent more frequently than others, while most others seem to vote in a more consensus-like manner even if their views may differ somewhat.  

3. To the extent that there are groupings on the current council there might be considered to have been a slightly right-leaning grouping containing Mayor Brendan Blomeley, Deputy Mayor Allison Ritchie, Daniel Hulme, Wendy Kennedy and Emma Goyne.  There is also a left-leaning grouping containing the two endorsed Greens Beth Warren and Jade Darko, and debatably Bree Hunter.

4. Heather Chong does not fit easily into either grouping as she often votes with the right-leaning grouping but also often votes with one member of the left-ish grouping (Hunter).

5. Removing votes involving the most frequent dissenter (James) does not create a much clearer left-right picture, and indeed shows that the council more has some pairs of councillors who often vote with each other, rather than strong clusters.  

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I wish I had time to do guides for more councils than just Hobart this year, but the bad timing of the 2026 FIDE Congress has alas made it impossible.  What I do have time to do is have a very quick look at voting behaviour on Clarence council in the last four years, mainly because it is such a spectacular contrast to Hobart.  Indeed, in my 2018-22 Clarence article, I noted that Clarence was less factional than Hobart.  In 2022-6, as Hobart has become more and more factional, Clarence has become less so. Ideological differences exist, but they are weakly realised, and tend to be overshadowed by whether a councillor is consensus-oriented or a born dissenter.  With Clarence's number 1 dissenter off council (Richard James has moved to Oatlands and is running for Southern Midlands) perhaps we'll see much clearer patterns in the voting in the next term - or maybe not.

I've never actually lived in Clarence but I have family there, I often work there and in a strange sliding doors moment in early 2023 I came within possibly about ten minutes of moving there but then it didn't happen.  There's a fair chance that I am a future resident (someday!)

To be able to write this article at all, and such as it is given a horrible shortage of time, I'm completely indebted to Thomas Chick who has sent me a wonderful set of colour-coded Clarence spreadsheets to which I hope my comments will add value but which I know they won't fully do justice!  

Thomas's spreadsheets record all divisions except for some relatively minor ones which I tested last time and found did not much affect the overall patterns.   I should note again at the start of this article that Clarence council has a culture of frequent "abstentions" - unlike Hobart where abstentions were virtually never seen until they started to creep in in modest numbers in the current term.  When one remains in the room but does not vote for or against a motion, this "abstention" counts under the Local Government Act as a vote against whatever motion is being moved at the time, and councillors know this.  They can abstain instead of voting against as such to signal things, such as that they liked the motion in principle.  I have treated all such "abstentions" simply as votes against for votings patterns purposes.  Leading "abstainers" in this term in the motions supplied to me were Richard James 19 times, James Walker 18, Emma Goyne 8 and Jade Darko 6.  Daniel Hulme was the only councillor not to record any.  There were 67 in all.

In all for the 2022-6 term Thomas records 222 non-unanimous council motions of which 128 had two or more votes on either side.  The latter are the motions I lean on most heavily in looking at council voting patterns and the first thing to note here is that 128 really isn't a lot.  It's only about half the number of the previous term, and that in itself is quite remarkable. (I'm not sure why it has come down so much.)  So this is the first sign that compared to Hobart this is not such a frequently acrimonious council - which isn't to say that the fur never flies.

Of the 94 lone dissents veteran Richard James led the way with a massive 56, with James Walker recording twelve, Tony Mulder ten, Emma Goyne seven and all others one or two each except Wendy Kennedy who didn't have any.

A similar pattern flowed through to multiply contested motions where the most common number of votes on the losing side was two and many of these were James plus somebody else.  So this is quite different to Hobart where it's very common to see four or five councillors on the losing side.  

I have done the same thing I usually do in forming an agreement matrix for the councillors to see, of the votes that had two or more councillors on both sides (including "abstentions" counted as votes against.) I've used my usual method of identifying clusters (based on agreement percentages of ideally 75+%, failing that 70+%), finding ratios of agreement with the different clusters, and sorting based on these ratios.  However the results were pretty weird and required me to take a somewhat new approach:

(A score in blue means more right than left, a score in green means more left than right.)

There are two recognisable clusters: one involving Deputy Mayor Allison Ritchie, Mayor Brendan Blomeley, Hulme, Goyne and Wendy Kennedy, and the other involving Bree Hunter (who ran a teal-style campaign) and endorsed Greens Jade Darko and Beth Warren.  (Interestingly Kennedy was slightly in the left side in my analysis of the previous term).  But Heather Chong while having a high enough agreement percentage with the Blomeley/Ritchie cluster also has a very high agreement percentage with Hunter.  Then there is Tony Mulder who doesn't have an especially high or low percentage with anyone, James Walker who tends to have fairly low percentages (weirdly lowest of all with Mulder!) and Richard James who is well below 50% with everyone except for being just below 50% with Mulder and Walker.  

The members of the two clusters tend to have well above 50% agreement with each other and therefore the approach I've taken is to add a "Mode" column that measures whether the councillor has tended to vote with other councillors irrespective of orientation or to dissent.  On this basis I classify most of the council as consensus-oriented (especially given the very low number of multiple contested votes) except for James who I classify as a habitual dissenter and Mulder and Walker who are intermediate.

The ratios of agreement with the Blomeley cluster and the cluster including the two Greens are very weak and the councillors generally come out as only mildly leaning to one side.  I also had a look at stats specifically confined to planning motiond but didn't spot anything immensely different.  

I did however wonder about how much this weak pattern was driven by James' extremely high dissent rate so I did another one with James removed to see if it would reveal a stronger right/left divide.  Thus this one only included 87 motions which had at least two votes on either side, not counting James.  

(A score in blue means more right than left, a score in green means more left than right.)

What happens when I do this is that the ratios between the two "sides" increase - somewhat - but rather than the agreement percentages within the clusters increasing, a lot of them go down.  In the matrix without James there are only five agreement pairs of 75% and above - Ritchie/Goyne, Blomeley/Chong, Kennedy/Mulder (now the highest!), Hunter/Chong and Darko/Warren, plus a few 70-74s, but the appearance of well defined clusters actually goes away instead of strengthening; it is more like there are scattered pairs of councillors who vote with each other a lot but that the "right" of council is a scattering of different ideas that usually win in combination but with no real factional structure or control.  And also given that the number of votes involved in this de-Jamesd re-sample is so small, there's basically nothing you can do to say that Clarence has well defined factions because it just doesn't.

It's also notable again that party backgrounds are a poor predictor of anything on Clarence outside of the Greens.  Hulme and Chong both have Labor backgrounds, Walker is a recent Liberal candidate, Goyne is a recent One Nation candidate and Blomeley was in the Liberal Party until being deemed to be not a member after missing Senate preselection then entertaining media speculation that he might run as an independent.  Both Blomeley and Ritchie, who has a colourful past history with Labor then one of the Tasmanian Nationals incarnations, have been speculated about as potential One Nation candidates.  Mulder is also a former Liberal who became estranged from the party and ran against it. These affiliations fall all over the place in the council's voting patterns.

2D weirdness

As usual I like to do a Principal Components Analysis graph to depict the councillors in two dimensions.  The results of this exercise were quite weird.  Normally when I do this for Hobart council or Legislative Council a single dimension which is basically the left-right axis captures almost everything and what's left over is one or two councillors' weird behaviour.  In this case the primary axis is how agreeable the councillor is with the right-ish cluster (Blomely, Ritchie etc) - whether or not this is ideological agreement - and the second component that comes up is just some weird axis that asks if you are Mulder or Walker.  This is a graph of the first component against the third component (which is slightly weaker than the second but is doing a somewhat better job of picking up a left/right kind of dimension).

I have been planning to do another one of these for another council this week but we will see if that happens or not!

The next Clarence council will be quite different with arguably the entire left from this term (James, Hunter, Darko and Warren) all retiring as the council shrinks from twelve seats to nine.  Presumably the Greens (running Carly Allen and Owen Fitzgerald) will at least get one seat, and anyone else coming in beyond that will need to dislodge an incumbent.  You can see the 23 candidates who are running, including a few familiar political faces, here.