Requiring Local Government Candidates To Declare Party Membership

As you're voting in the Tasmanian council elections there's a fair chance that some of the non-Greens candidates on your ballot are also members of a party.  You might have a good idea who some of them are, because they've run in or tried to run in state or federal elections recently, or because they're very open and loud about their party membership (this is the case with a few One Nation members at the moment).  Beyond that it can be hard to find out.  I've listed several of them for Hobart to the best of my knowledge but there are a few I'm not sure about, and there is only one of me and I don't have time to do this work for every council.  

For some councils there will be local coverage of community forums or candidate surveys where candidates may have been asked to disclose if they are a member of any party, and most candidates will actually be upfront about their memberships when asked.  However for the average voter who doesn't know where to look, this information can be difficult to find.  Tasmanian Times has asked candidates what parties they are a member of but several have not filled out the survey, have declined to answer the party membership question, or in a few cases have claimed to be independents when I strongly suspect they are actually party members.  In total, eleven Liberal, eight Labor, two One Nation and one Nationals members have so far publicised their unendorsed party status on the TT survey but of these 22 candidates, nine had recently run as endorsed candidates at other levels.  

In the absence of firm information there are also some graphics doing the rounds that, for instance, purport to list candidates with Liberal links running for Hobart.  These links can be as weak as having shared a ticket or agreed to be on a how to vote card with a known Liberal (it is not rare for tickets to include members of more than one party) and my understanding is that some of those listed on the Hobart version have never been members of any party.  

It is worth stressing that when party members do run in elections without party endorsement, they are typically not bound by any kinds of conditions that affect how they vote on council matters.  Even endorsed Greens who are elected to councils do not reliably caucus and will sometimes vote differently on some very significant issues.  For those councils where I've looked at votings patterns, given Liberal Party members will appear anywhere from the hard right to the centre (even sometimes they may be slightly left of a council's centre) and given ALP members can appear anywhere from the hard left to the (usually moderate) right.  Party membership is therefore not a very good predictor of how a candidate will vote if elected.

So why do some voters care?  Part of the reason is that voters may have such strong aversions to particular parties that they don't want to knowingly or unknowingly vote for anyone who is a member of that party.  This might not be necessarily tied to any particular issue.  A non-right-wing voter who is averse to Liberals may nonetheless readily vote for an independent who is as conservative or more so (as can also be the case in state politics in some parts of the country).  Voters also don't like it when someone they voted for for local council appears as a candidate in a state election for a party they don't like; they feel like they've been duped into helping that candidate raise their profile.  That said, this can happen anyway; some councillors with a history of formal independence will be recruited by political parties when an opportunity arises.  

Some other voters don't necessarily object to party members but object to candidates posing as independents when they are actually members of a political party, albeit unendorsed - which voters might prefer to have labelled as Independent <insert party>.  And this is a very valid thing for voters to object to, because a voter who will pose as an independent when they're not probably shouldn't be trusted with the job of councillor.  But also for a lot of voters party IDs are just a useful way of having some information to use in sorting the pile and not feeling like they don't know anything about any of these people really.  

The question that arises is: should local goverment candidates be required to declare their present and recent political party memberships, for this information to be publicly displayed (even if only briefly and perhaps not very prominently) as part of the membership process?

What happens in other states

At least two other states do now require candidates to declare party memberships when running for local government or at least after election.  As far as I can tell the remainder don't (I've seen claims that NSW does but I was unable to confirm this.)

In Queensland, under Schedule 1 Section 3 of the Local Government Electoral Act 2011:

(1)If a candidate is, or has been within the previous year, a member of a registered political party or trade or professional organisation, the nomination must contain, for each party or organisation—

(a)the name and address of the party or organisation; and

(b)the date on which the candidate became a member and, if the candidate is no longer a member, the date the candidate stopped being a member.

(2)If subsection (1) does not apply, the nomination must contain a statement that the candidate is not, and has not been within the previous year, a member of a registered political party or trade or professional organisation.

Disclosures as a result of this enabled the ABC to publish this article re the 2024 field, noting that the change was made in 2017 following problems with party factionalism in notionally independent councils.

In South Australia, a similar change was made to the Local Government (Elections) Regulations in 2021:

(f) the profile must contain the following information:

(i) whether the candidate is, at the time of their nomination, or was, at any time in the 12 months preceding their nomination, a member of a registered political party (within the meaning of the Electoral Act 1985);

(ii) if the candidate is or was a member of a registered political party in accordance with subparagraph (i)—

(A) the name of the party; and

(B) when the candidate ceased to be a member of the party (if relevant).

This change came into effect from the 2022 council elections.

Objections

When I said that I couldn't see any reason why we shouldn't adopt something similar on social media, several possible reasons were suggested; here's a selection.  I don't think most of them are very strong objections, and here's why.

But what about membership of ... (insert association/religion/sports club here)?

The argument here is that membership of a professional body or union or a community organisation could be at least as big an influencing factor for a councillor as being an unendorsed member of a political party.  I think this actually misses the reasons why many voters want to know who is a party member and who isn't.  They probably take it for granted that someone who works in construction or architecture or health services or whatever is pretty likely to be a member of a professional body or union, but even if they don't, the candidate never pretended they were not a member of such things.  Indeed to the contrary, candidates who are members of some ostensibly apolitical community or service organisations like speaking groups will typically never shut up about it.  And the odd council candidate may have weird religious beliefs that they don't bang on about it, but that doesn't mean they pretend to be atheists.  But the candidate may well have pretended to be a true independent when they're not.

Also here I would see no problem with the legislation requiring a wider range of memberships to be disclosed, as Queensland already does.  But even if it doesn't, this could be a perfect-is-the-enemy-of-the-good situation.  If it is good that candidates be required to declare party memberships, is that not a good thing just on account of there being no requirement to declare others?  I'd suggest it's only not a good thing if candidates are getting an advantage over party member candidates from those non-declarations, but I don't think they do.  

Freedom of association

Being required to declare a party membership when running for a local council in no way interferes with freedom of association.  You're still free to associate as a party member as much as you like.  It just happens that a condition of seeking a certain kind of employment has been placed on you, that you disclose your party status.  And there are plenty of jobs - for instance in election counting - that not only require you to declare your party status but also exclude you from doing that job for very good reasons if you have one.  That's not a breach of freedom of association either.  Indeed if freedom of association demands that one can run for office without declaring a party membership then it also demands that one can run for office without declaring any donations or spending and without any caps on either, yet it seems to be mostly agreed that at local council level spending caps are a good thing.  

We don't do this at state or federal levels

We don't need to.  Maybe there is the odd closet party member still kicking around without declaring it as an indie in state and federal elections but these levels are so politicised (even these days in the Tasmanian Legislative Council elections, the days of the "closet Liberals" are over) that it's basically a non-issue.  In contrast in local government unendorsed party candidates are common.

It might increase party politicisation of local government

I don't care if it does!  With Tasmania adopting compulsory voting in local government, a lot of voters are struggling for information cues to sort the field, with a risk that they'll do silly things like vote for celebrity candidates who aren't serious. For low information voters (not that Tasmania has vast numbers of those) to be able to easily vote for who they vote for normally would probably be no bad thing.  The experience from the states that now require disclosure is (admittedly after not very many years of the system) that the vast majority of council winners are still independents anyway.  There is some concern that more party involvement might lead to more party blocks voting together, but this doesn't happen even when the Greens have three councillors on a council at once; there is no reason why parties would have to impose caucusing on local councillors.

It might cause discrimination (or the fear of it)

If any argument against has any bite it's possibly this one.  Tasmania is a small place where everyone knows everyone and some people might be reluctant to run for local council if it involved admitting to their party memberships because there could be a backlash at their work or in their social circle.  Or even their local cafe.  However the same argument was made against bringing down the donation threshhold for state elections, we've tried that and the sky hasn't fallen.  

I have a personally limited degree of sympathy for this one because commenting on the range of political issues that I do actually excludes me from a wide range of employment in this state because of the nebulous requirements of the State Services Act, so I think anyone who's worried about disclosing their party membership to run for local council can just suck it up.  There is though a question of whether such a requirement might make it more difficult to fill smaller councils, though this in turn plays into the question of why the hell Tasmania still has so many suboptimally tiny councils and when anything will ever be done about this.  Also for those concerned about increased party polarisation (point above), if party members are really disinclined to run if they have to disclose their party, then surely that cuts against that.

Could this happen?

I've actually not seen this issue discussed prominently for Tasmania before.  In some other states there has been discussion of it for several years either before it happened or without it happening yet.  My suspicion is that any debate on it here would probably run for some time before it got anywhere, but I hope this article will get people thinking about it.  The reform has been introduced by both Labor (Qld) and Liberal (SA) governments interstate.