This is a review piece of some themes from the just concluded 2026 Hobart Council elections. The election count just finished featured some very close multi-way battles for councillor positions with winners ducking in and out through the different distributions. Then we had the crowning oddity of the non-election of Ben Lohberger to council after he won the Deputy Mayoral ballot, which means that he now cannot serve as Deputy and the position will be filled around the table. This event has previously happened in three smaller councils, but never in a city. I now expect a lot of debate about solutions, most of which won't have been thought through. The result will for sure be used by those who think we should just ditch direct Deputy elections, a proposal I can make strong arguments both for and against. The problem has become more likely this year because of the reduction in the numbers of councillors and it could very well keep happening.
The Poll Position pod had some comments about this election along the lines of "campaigns matter", coming from a winning perspective after Brad Stansfield worked on the winning Charles Wooley campaign. And campaigns do matter, in that Wooley won the mayoralty by in effect 2.3% over a main opponent (John Kelly) who announced pretty late and then ran what looked to me like a pretty similar and lower profile campaign compared to 2022. I think that under other circumstances this result might have gone the other way. For sure Wooley had big advantages as a high profile outsider who was more able to sell himself ambiguously. I'm also far from believing all he did on the campaign trail was brilliant (especially his line about being home from council for the six o'clock news was a gaffe for the few of us who know that council meeting work is hard) but his campaign did things to keep voters interested, had good signs and made lively use of social media to cover a wide range of issues. By doing this he was able to get away with skipping a lot of the candidate questionnaires and forums as he had got the message across that he was genuinely trying and wasn't just hoping to lazily cruise in on his profile.
There was some debate between the hosts about what kind of councillor Wooley will be politically and Alex Johnston was talking about voters who would vote for Wooley who would "never ever have described themselves as blue". And it occurred to me that there was actually an obvious way to look at how many such voters there were and I should write an article about that and about how candidates matter in council elections. Because it seems really obvious, but the mechanics are worth spelling out. At this year's elections, the left side of Hobart council politics has been depleted and then failed almost completely at recruitment, and it's changed the face of the council. It's not the only thing that's done it, but if the left had more good candidates, then they would still have won five seats.
Assuming everyone now votes the way their campaigns indicated they would, the "blue"/right side now has a 5-4 majority on the council, after the left held a 7-4-1 majority through the previous term. This won't manifest on every issue (eg cable car) but it's a big change. And that was close, too. The count swung back towards the left in the last 50% with the combined Green vote going up 1.5 points, and had the left done about 1.1 points better at the end of the count then the fifth seat could have been saved.
Yes there was a general swing in public mood towards the right/"blue" side (some of it demographic in nature as low income earners are increasingly pushed north of Creek Road - heck the Greens got pretty close to two in Glenorchy in the end!) but candidate effects on the results have been at least as big a factor. From the 2022 election candidate lineup the left side has lost Lord Mayor and Deputy Anna Reynolds and Helen Burnet, while the right side has lost nobody who got that close to winning a seat then and added Charles Wooley and Harvey Lennon. And the left side has only added one new competitive candidate, Tiffany Ashdown, who was low profile at the campaign start but worked very hard over a long time, without coming super close to winning at the end.
Given that the holes created by Reynolds and Burnet not being there should have attracted more new serious left-wing contenders, where were they?
This article isn't to argue that having obviously right and left wing candidates on councils is good. Indeed in my view the very high level of factionalism in the last term was bad for Council. But it is a fact of life that many voters will want to see their side of politics represented better and this article explains a big chunk of why that, for the left, did not occur.
Why Having Good Candidates Works
One might think that having more good (in relative terms) right wing candidates or left wing candidates isn't really a big deal, after all those voters inclined to vote for either side will just spread their votes around more if there are more candidates, which might even be a bad thing? Well no.
Many voters in council elections are actually not thinking ideologically, and some who might be don't even engage enough to find out who is on "their" side. Voters can also be motivated by specific issues (Save Utas, cable car, dogs vs soccer are some recent cases) that cut across left/right lines. Some voters will know things outside of council politics about candidates that cause them to see some candidates differently to how I might see them. Some voters vote based on community or business connections to given candidates from across the spectrum. Some voters may also prefer right or left candidates but draw the line at specific extreme, badly behaved or personally annoying examples.
For any candidate that does even reasonably well, some of their voters would, had that candidate not stood, have voted 1 for the other "side's" candidates. Candidates that do well have the following effects:
Firstly, a candidate who does so well that they get a quota on first preferences gets some votes that could have gone to the other side if they didn't run, uses most of those votes' value to get themselves elected, and only passes on a reduced value. They're also reducing the value of votes that could have gone to others on the same side as themselves, but the net loss to their own side is less than the quota the candidate got in being elected.
Secondly, a candidate who doesn't get a quota but eventually gets in gets some votes (and preferences) that could have gone to the other side if they didn't run, and sucks out all those votes' value except for the exclusion they're elected on (which has a partial effect). Again, they're taking more votes off their own side, usually, but the net loss to their own side is again less than a quota.
Thirdly, even a candidate who does moderately well but loses can be useful. All that candidate's preferences are flowing on to the next candidates just as if they hadn't run at all, but if they've hung around long enough in the count, some of the other side's stars will get elected in the meantime, and votes that are 1 for this candidate and 2 for a strong performer on the other side, are then free to flow, more likely flowing back to the original candidate's side.
There's also some potential for a good candidate to help just with getting out the formal vote for other candidates on their side. Council ballots are bewildering for many voters and if a voter doesn't know or like any of the candidates they're more likely to vote informally, late or even not at all. But if they like even one candidate they've got the motivation to cast a formal vote and they may well vote for others of a similar mind, especially if that candidate has obvious alliances.
However none of this means that running just any candidate is useful for a side. If a candidate is low profile and only capable of getting, say, 200 votes or less, then their preferences won't display any preference discipline to speak of, and adding them to the field means that slightly more preferences are going to exhaust. So I suspect there's some, modest, minimum level of support at which a candidate helps rather than hinders their side by running. An obscure or low-effort candidate who gets no votes is worse than useless.
Voters and movements care about and are affected by the issues that councils deal with. But there's no point leaving it til the last few months before noticing you don't have strong candidates running on those issues and hoping the incumbents will be OK. At least from the middle of this term on, when we have an idea what this council has been like and what are shaping as the issues for 2030, people in the non-Greens left need to be looking for three or four strong new candidates to run.
Who Voted For Wooley And Kelly
Fortunately we have a good handle on the politics of voters who voted for Charles Wooley and John Kelly because both those candidates got surpluses so we can see who they put next. With one exception, we can't see how many voters for one put the other next, and I can say from scrutineering there were lots of those (maybe 20% or so of each of the two's votes). In the case of a Wooley-Kelly or Kelly-Wooley vote, the table below counts the third preference. This data has actually been available in rough form from the time the 20% count went up, but the final numbers are quite different to the 50% count.
Below I've found what percentage of each of Wooley and Kelly's votes flowed to each other candidate except each other, ordered by the number flowing from Wooley. I've also given an expected alignment based on issue positions and tickets, noting that we don't know how Wooley and Lennon will vote on council yet and either might be closer to centre than the campaign suggests.
Both Wooley and Kelly's voters sent preferences to left candidates that could have been full-value votes for those left candidates had neither of them stood. Between them in the process of winning two seats they thereby took over half a quota out of the count that could have gone to left candidates, while also taking almost a quota and a half out that could have gone to other right candidates. So these two running as opposed to both not running is in net terms worth more than a quota - ie a whole seat - for the right.
The preferencing behaviour of Wooley voters is clearly broader with 31.2% flowing to a candidate I've flagged as left while in Kelly's case 21.5% did so. Lohberger (who has a degree of cross-factional appeal because of his strong position on Save UTAS especially) did better off Kelly than off Wooley but every other substantially polling left candidate did better off Wooley. Kelly's preference flow was more heavily concentrated with Zucco, Lennon, Elliot and Behrakis (the four main remaining "right" candidates) and also Bloomfield and Johnstone did better off Kelly presumably through Hobart business circle links. So Wooley did draw a measure of support from all over the place - more so than 2026 model Kelly anyway.
In 2022 Anna Reynolds (left) and Kelly got quotas on the first count. Noting again that these flows exclude preferences that flowed between these two, 18.9% of Reynolds' preferences landed with candidates who might (tenuously in a few cases) be placed on the right while 30.8% of Kelly's landed with the left. If Reynolds had been available as someone who could get Kelly preferences, this figure would have been even higher. So there is no doubt Kelly's voter base has shifted to the right for 2026, most likely by him losing some of the lefter end of his support base as his voting patterns on council became wider knowledge. He probably picked up some new friends on the right at the same time.
Women and toxicity
In the end Hobart elected two women out of nine, but went within 64 votes of not electing any, and two out of nine is still not good (Glenorchy to our north elected five!). One of the two is also facing possible dismissal, which could reduce the number of women on council to one depending on whether there have been other recounts in the meantime. Two out of nine is the lowest female proportion on the council since before Doone Kennedy and Dee Alty joined Dora Thomson from the 1982 election. Women recorded only 17.3% of the vote in 2026, down from 38.2% in 2022. I do not know when that was last that low, perhaps a similar time ago.
The new Lord Mayor created controversy by saying the result happened because women didn't vote for women, and said that he has "turned [the question] back on them" when women have asked him about it. He seemed to be saying that female voters were very harsh on other women's failures and hence readily didn't vote for them if anything had gone wrong during the term. In isolation, women mostly not voting for women this year must be true, but it ignores the fact that there were very few to vote for, and that in my view is the core of the problem. There were only seven in a field of 32 (down from 14/42 in 2022 and 11/36 in 2018). Of these two were controversial during the previous council and two were low profile, and most female voters won't just vote for any female candidate because they're female.
Now this could be just isolated decisions in the face of the reduction deterring new candidates (though as it turns out plenty of new candidates around the state did win); the ratio difference from 2022 to 2026 is not statistically significant. But alongside the financial cost of running, toxic political environments are one of the factors that can deter many women from running for local government, especially if they're not already there. Women accounted for only 3/20 Hobart candidates without previous representative experience, compared to 10/29 in 2022. And one of those three was a previous state candidate while another was a parliamentary staffer.
Quite aside from (though not entirely independent of) the constant bickering between councillors and council incidents during the term, the social media environment surrounding council now seems way more intense and worse than even a few cycles back. In particular, there's a coterie of misogynist trolls attracted to the cable car and stadium movements (some of these are also big fans of certain Liberal MPs, who might want to reflect on that a bit). But I've also seen some left accounts say things about women on the right (particularly Elliot) that they'd not say in such terms about a man of similar views and actions.
I don't know what the answer is here and I am always very wary of politicians seeking to exploit complaints about social media in order to suppress it. I do however suspect in this term there will be more anger about council's performance and antics directed at blokes (yep it's starting already and the new Council hasn't sat yet) and the environment for new female candidates will not look so obviously hostile. Will this council overall be behave itself? We'll see. Many of the better behaved councillors in the last term were either voted off or retired.
Governance Matters
Hobart council was long dominated by the "blues" on a councillor numbers level - for as long as my memory allows, and I suspect back even further. This has been so even though they have often not held the leadership positions in recent decades. In the 2014-8 term they had only a slight edge, 2018-22 was pretty balanced and 2022-6 was the council's first ever clear green/left majority. The following is a rough assessment for the terms for which I've compiled voting patterns data.
These things are relative - a right-wing councillor by Hobart standards could be centre or even moderate left in other parts of the country or even the state. And they can be influenced by the mix of issues and motions that come up in a particular council.
In any case the left majority has coincided with a nasty and contentious term which has contributed to the swing against it, as well as the candidate factors described. But one thing I will add to this is that the culture on the left side of the council, and at times seeping into some council staffers, too often gave the righties both on council and on social media free kicks. Incidents like the blocking of Elliot's Town Hall booking on a spurious pretext, at least three separate issues on which councillors voted while conflicted at least by pub test standards, the Property Council forum incident and even the infamous if overblown "snackgate" reflected the lack of an overall culture that said, we're in effect the government here and we need to be not giving the other side this stuff for free if we would like to stay that way. With one exception I don't remember past left Hobart councillors being prone to such things. Of course, some of the "blues" (the notional opposition) behaved badly or worse, but the next time the voters elect what appears to be a left-majority council the first order of informal business should be working on the sorts of standards that will earn more respect across the spectrum (or at least not lose it from one's own side) and keep it there.
This may conclude my council coverage for now; I really need to move to the Victorian election which I've lacked time to do things on! As usual the interest level in the council coverage has been amazing and in fact there were slightly more page views here last Wednesday than on the Sunday after the 2025 Tasmanian election, which is extraordinary. I was too busy to put in a donations reminder on the live count pages but donations to support the work I do are always welcome; details in sidebar (if viewing on mobile scroll down and click "view web version" to see it.)
