EMRS: Is Labor Finally Making Some Progress? / Hobart Poll Controversy

EMRS Lib 35 (-1) ALP 31 (+4) Greens 14 (=) JLN 6 (-2) IND 11 (-1) others 3 (=)
IND likely overstated, others likely understated
Liberals would be the largest party but Labor would make seat gains 
Possible seat estimate in election "held now" off this poll LIB 14 ALP 12 Green 5 IND 4

The final EMRS Tasmanian voting intention poll of the year is out and it provides some evidence that the Labor Opposition might be taking baby steps on the road back to government at last.  Labor is up four points, albeit from a poor base.  The Liberal government is at its lowest vote since it got down to 34% in December 2017 (a reading that I doubt was accurate given their rapid recovery months later) and the major party gap is also as low as it has been since then.  This said, Labor still hasn't been above 32% since the last "pre-COVID" poll back in March 2020 and if the ALP is going to make a serious push for government, at some point in the term it will need to break out of the very low 30s.  This is a movement in the right direction for once; let's see if it continues.  The poll comes following a quarter dominated by the Spirits of Tasmania fiasco that led to the forced resignation of Deputy Premier Michael Ferguson from Cabinet.  I suppose that yet again, as with bad polls following the 2023 defections, the Government might say that in it could have been worse.  

2022 Hobart Council Count

All figures on this page are unofficial - see TEC for official results when available.

MAYOR (Incumbent: Reynolds):  CALLED (Friday 10:30) Anna Reynolds defeats John Kelly with reduced margin compared to 2018 win.

DEPUTY (Incumbent: Burnet):  Burnet leads Behrakis and will win by very large margin (Called Saturday before final exclusion)

COUNCILLORS (11 recontesting incumbents, 12 vacancies): 

Called: Reynolds, John Kelly (off initial sampling), Zucco, Burnet (off 20% count), Elliot, Behrakis, Bloomfield, Dutta, Harvey (off 50% count)

In The Mix (for three seats): Posselt, Lohberger, Sherlock (these three leading substantially), Fox, Kate Kelly, Briscoe.

Coats, Thomas, Fox, Briscoe currently projected to lose seats.

UTAS MOVE ELECTOR POLL: CALLED No has won.

Hobart City Council Elections Candidate Guide And Preview 2022

All candidates are directed to the note for candidates at the bottom of this page. 

Introductory Waffle

As perhaps the biggest (in terms of advance action) campaign ever ramps up, here is my resource page for the 2022 Hobart City Council elections.  This guide (like my 2014 guide and 2018 guide) includes a list of candidates who are running for the Council for the 2022-26 term.    The guide includes brief bio details and links, descriptions of candidates' past electoral form (where any) and some vague speculation about prospects.  It also covers the campaign generally, polling and the related elector poll.  All sections will be updated regularly as time permits and more information comes to hand.

During the campaign period voters will get official statements by the candidates, with photos supplied by them.  The online version will include web links.  This piece is published first for the interest of those who don't want to wait for the candidate statements, but will stay up to present a less filtered view of candidate backgrounds. 

Donations to cover my time in writing this guide are very welcome - but not from HCC candidates or their direct connections during the campaign period.  There's a PayPal button on the sidebar or you can email me for bank account details. Please only donate if you are sure you can afford to.  

Hobart City Council Voting Patterns 2018-22

Advance Summary

1. Traditionally, on contested votes the Hobart City Council is loosely divided between "pro-development" councillors and councillors who stress environmental issues and/or the interests of impacted residents. 

2. This term of Council initially continued the pattern of the previous term in which councillors voted fairly distinctively and voting patterns were hard to firmly classify.

3. From around early 2020, however, the Council's voting on contested motions became far more factionalised, at the same time as such motions becoming less common.

4. As a result, while all councillors vote independently on particular motions, all councillors in this term can be classified as at least overall leaning towards the "pro-development" ("blue") mindset or its opponent ("green").  

5. Indeed, this term has seen some of the most polarised patterns in voting on contested motions in the last several terms of Council.

6. A possible ordering of councillors from "greenest" to "bluest" in this term is: Burnet, Harvey, Dutta, Reynolds, Fox, Sherlock, Sexton, Briscoe, Thomas, Denison (no longer on council), Coats, Behrakis, Zucco. 

7. Each of the "green" and "blue" clusters includes both more diehard members who are usually party-associated and also a more moderate sub-group.  

Hobart City Council Tanya Denison Recount

Jan 28: Recount today, once I have seen the results and the scrutiny sheet I will update this article.

Result: COATS WINS.  Coats defeats Bloomfield by 1.77 votes

Analysis:

In something of an upset result (unless you are Simon Behrakis who was the only one who suggested to me that Coats might win!) Will Coats, the youngest of the several Liberal candidates running has been elected.  He has defeated Louise Bloomfield by the precarious margin of 1.77 votes, the closest margin in a Hobart election to my knowledge (which goes back to the mid-1980s).

The recount started with Coats in 4th place on 12.0% behind Mallett (14.7%), Bloomfield (13.7%) and Alexander (12.8%).  I have never seen a candidate win a recount from 4th place.  Merridew was on 5.6%, suggesting that without the bug he would have started fairly close to the leaders.  Christie was on 2.8% and definitely wouldn't have won anyway, and Andy Taylor (5.5%, also disadvantaged by the bug but not as much as the others) also wouldn't have won.

As the recount progressed Coats gained on the leaders on the exclusion of minor candidates (so these are basically random votes 1 for some minor non-Liberal 2 Denison or the other way around, for example).  He passed Alexander for third on the preferences of Brian Corr and passed Mallett for second on the preferences of Andy Taylor.  Taylor was excluded ninth with Fiona Irwin eighth.

Merridew was excluded in seventh, at which point he was over 100 votes behind Alexander.  This gap suggests to me that without the impact of the recount bug Merridew would probably have finished fifth just behind Alexander.  However I cannot be sure about this; what is clear is that the bug has turned what looks like it would have been a slim chance into no chance.

Female candidates Bec Taylor (Greens) and Cat Schofield (Ind) had polled reasonably well in the recount off gender voting and were excluded sixth and fifth, and as they were cut out Bloomfield's lead grew to 108.48 votes (also gender voting) with only Bloomfield, Coats, Mallett and Alexander left.  However now Bloomfield was the only female candidate remaining.  Coats gained 21.7 votes off Alexander leaving Bloomfield 86.78 votes ahead with 415.6 Mallett votes to throw.

44.14 Mallett votes exhausted, so Coats needed 61.7% of the non-exhausting Mallett votes to win (bear in mind these could be Mallett votes that went to Denison in the original count or Denison votes that could have gone to Mallett).  However Coats actually got 61.9% and won by 1.77 votes.

Effectively, the gender advantages to each of Bloomfield and Coats at various stages of the preference flow cancelled out and Bloomfield's biggest problem was not quite having a large enough share of Denison's vote at the start.   That said I would not have expected Coats to be the one to catch up!

As a result, if someone voted, say, 1 Denison 2 Mallett 3 Coats 4 Bloomfield, then that individual voter's decision to put Coats ahead of Bloomfield made the difference - but this could also apply to many other voters deciding who to put way down the list.

Of course, positions being decided by a single voter's decision is a mockery when 2021 ballot papers were ruled informal in the original count, most of them because of clerical errors by the voter that should not have prevented their vote being counted.  This very close result further underlines the critical need for informal voting rules to be reformed before the next election.

Close Result

It's important to bear in mind that this recount is not a fresh count of the ballot papers; it is just a computer calculation of ballots that were already all entered in 2018.  The original ballot process involves two data entry operators independently using computer keyboard to key in what they see on each ballot paper.  If the two operators get exactly the same result, then that is accepted as the correct vote.  If they differ then a supervisor is called to check the vote; the same happens if the data entry indicates that the vote is informal.

It is possible (but rare) for a vote to be entered wrongly twice by two different operators.  In a 2014 report that I did for the TEC I noted that a trial of the system had found seven incorrectly double-entered ballots out of 12,000.  My report notes that actions were taken to make the errors that had happened less likely, but not what they were.

If errors occurred at such a rate in this count they would have mostly affected ballot papers that had no impact on the margin, or impacted them at a point that didn't matter, but it's always possible that there could be a wrong ballot that would have made all the difference.  In the case of a very close election, further data entry of at least some ballot papers might be considered to ensure the result was correct, but this didn't occur (for example) with the very close 2014 Tanya Denison result.  This recount is also an unusual case in that the original count was not super-close but the recount years later was.

The result has now been formally declared and the only recourse against it would be a court challenge to attempt to obtain a recount.  Courts are reluctant to overturn initial results or order recounts without evidence of errors in the original count.

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A Hare-Clark recount (that's the official name, though "countback" would be better) is coming up on Hobart City Council for the seat being vacated by Tanya Denison.  Denison, a past federal Liberal candidate for the unwinnable seat then also called Denison (now called Clark), was in her second term on the Council.  She was first elected in 2014 after surviving exclusion at one point by 3.6 votes, and then re-elected comfortably in 2018, the seventh winner out of 12 elected.

This post explains the recount and considers the prospects of the possible candidates.  The recount consists solely of the votes that Tanya Denison had when she was elected.  The fact that Ron Christie missed out being re-elected to Council by 20 votes does not make him a big chance for the recount (in fact it harms his chances, for a reason to be explained below.)  All these votes go initially to the highest placed candidate on that vote who is contesting the recount (who may have been numbered above or below Denison on that ballot paper) at the value they had after Denison was elected and her total brought down to quota.  In this recount, no-one will have anything like 50% of the total, so then candidates are excluded bottom-up, like in a single-seat election, until someone wins.  All the ballot papers are already digitally stored so on the day of the recount this will all be calculated by the computer very quickly.  The main delay before the recount is held will be allowing time for candidate consents to contest the recount to be received.

Hobart Building Heights Elector Poll

On Monday the Tasmanian Electoral Commission released the results of a voluntary postal elector poll about building heights in the Hobart City portion of Greater Hobart.  This non-binding elector poll has been something of an oddity with a lot of commentary making various claims about it so I thought I'd say a few things about it too.

The turnout

The elector poll attracted a response rate of 42.39%.  This compares to the response rate of 61.94% at the 2018 Hobart City Council election, however that was a record high turnout for Hobart, which had never been above 55.5% before.

I have found data for fourteen previous elector polls going back to the mid-1990s, of which six were held concurrently with council elections and eight were held separately.  Of the eight held separately, I have comparable data for six, and of these turnouts ranged from 83% to 109% of the previous election's turnout for that council (in many cases I have had to use raw turnout figures as I cannot find enrolment data at the time of the poll).  So this elector poll at 68% of the municipality's previous turnout has the lowest comparative turnout rate - and this would be so even without Hobart's 2018 turnout spike.  Issues in comparable elector polls included amalgamation, a proposed major pulp mill, whether to move a council's administration, whether to change a council's name, the location of a waste disposal site and options for a lawn cemetery.  To complete the set, other issues that have been canvassed in elector polls have included water supply and pricing options (including whether fluoride should be added), and the boundaries of a municipality.  It's notable that one of the three pulp mill polls occurred in Hobart, about 200 km away from the pulp mill site.

2018 Hobart City Council Count (With Some Coverage Of Other Councils)

The number above appears at the top of my coverage to highlight the final informal vote rate for the Hobart City Council councillor count, as a result of absurdly strict formality requirements. Launceston (7.94%) and Clarence (7.24%) are not far behind.  

This level of informal vote as a result of absurd legislation is a farce, an insult to democracy, and a threat to the legitimacy of seats being decided by a handful of votes.  The informal rate was 100 times the final seat margin in Hobart.

I call on the state government and other parties in the Lower House to immediately and publicly commit to fixing this problem.  The current government did not create this problem, but the problem should have been fixed after the last election four years ago.

Coverage follows below.

Note added Saturday night: I will be mostly offline for the coming week (Nov 4-10) so comment clearance will be slow.

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Introduction (from Tuesday)

Welcome to my live coverage thread for the Hobart City Council count, which will also have some comments on other councils when I find time to look at them.  My Hobart candidate guide and preview was here and has probably been viewed by about 20% of Hobart voters.  Updates will be added below the dotted lines; check back regularly through the week for comments.  These introductory comments will stay at the top, there are also some more detailed introductory comments at the bottom.

Ways To Improve Tasmanian Council Elections

On Tuesday I voted in the Hobart City Council elections.  (By the way, if you haven't voted yet, you might want to take your vote direct to your local council centre.) After following this election for months, including researching the candidates and writing a guide to the election it still took me 70 minutes to fill out my ballot papers, albeit with a little live tweeting of my thought processes on the way.  I'm not even convinced I did all that good a job of it, and suspect it would have taken me 3-4 hours to come up with a vote that was the best I could possibly do.  If it wasn't for the fact that there are always people who need putting near the bottom, I would have been wondering why I even bothered.

Council Voting - Please Be Careful!

I've already made this point in my Hobart guide but I thought I should make it prominently in a separate post to cover all councils.  Please feel very free to share and spread widely.

A scourge of Tasmanian council elections is the high rate of informal voting.  Informal votes are votes that are returned but cannot be counted as they are not valid votes.  The main reason the informal voting rate is high is that voters make mistakes and the rules concerning this are stupid.  The reason the rules are stupid is that governments have failed to fix them.  The previous Labor/Greens government ignored warnings that bringing in all-in all-out elections would cause a high informal voting rate under the current system. The current Liberal government has so far done nothing to fix it.  The Local Government Act needs to be reformed to provide savings provisions for voters who make honest mistakes.

Hobart City Council Elections Candidate Guide And Preview 2018

Note added 30/11/22: this page was unpublished by Blogger on 28/11/22 after, as best I can determine, an unknown link was found to go to a site that now contained malware.  I have resubmitted the page with all external links removed for posterity.  A version with links is available on the Wayback Machine (access at own risk) or can be supplied by email (ditto).

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All candidates are directed to the note for candidates at the bottom of this page.


Introductory Waffle

With some rather expensive looking corflutes already cropping up in parts of the city, it's time to start my resource page for the 2018 Hobart City Council elections.  This guide (like my 2014 guide) includes a list of candidates who are running for the Council for the 2018-22 term.    The guide includes brief bio details and links, descriptions of candidates' past electoral form (where any) and an attempted assessment of prospects.  All sections will be updated regularly, but there will be lags of a few days at times between Sep 25 and Oct 7.

During the campaign period voters will get official statements by the candidates, with photos supplied by them.  The online version will include web links.  This piece was first published for the interest of those who don't want to wait for the candidate statements, but will stay up to present a less filtered view of candidate backgrounds.

Donations to cover even some of my time in writing this guide are very welcome - but not from candidates or their direct connections.  There's a PayPal button on the sidebar or you can email me for bank account details. Please only donate if you are sure you can afford to.

Threatened-Listed Species And The Proposed Cable Car

The debate about the proposed cable car on kunanyi/Mt Wellington has already been a dismal spectacle of false claims and questionable standards on both sides.  On this site I have already dealt with claims that concern polling or other poll-shaped objects that claim to mention public opinion (see the rolling Polling on the Mt Wellington Cable Car Proposal article and the earlier Public Opinion and the Mt Wellington Cable Car.) 

Now it is time for me to post a new article covering the already suspect claims in the area of threatened species impacts, in the hope of deterring any more threatened species nonsense and encouraging everybody involved to actually do some research.  While this is mainly a psephology site, most of my professional income comes from working on invertebrates of the non-political kind, and I am Tasmania's only living expert on native land snails.  I also have a keen amateur interest in native orchids, and have worked on or surveyed for a range of threatened species of various kinds.

The catalyst for the current burst of threatened species claims is a proposal by the cable car proponent, the Mt Wellington Cableway Co, to have its proposed cable car depart from a site on Main Fire Trail.  This proposal includes a new road from McRobies Gully (see route maps here and here) in an area of bushland that includes extensive areas of a state-listed threatened vegetation community (Eucalyptus tenuiramis on sediments.)

Hobart City Council Voting Patterns 2014-8

Advance Summary

1. Traditionally, the Hobart City Council  loosely divided between "pro-development" councillors and councillors who stress environmental issues and/or the interests of impacted residents. 

2. This term of Council has continued a trend from late in the previous term in which voting clusters have weakened and the voting of individual councillors has become much less predictable.  

3. Despite this most councillors can at least be classifying as leaning towards the "pro-development" ("blue") mindset or its opponent ("green").  

4. The results of votes on this council have been very unpredictable because of the weakness of the voting patterns observed, the narrow advantage in numbers for the "blue" side over the "green" side and the frequent absence of various councillors from meetings.

5. A possible ordering of councillors from "greenest" to "bluest" in this term is: Cocker, Burnet, Reynolds, Cooper (no longer on Council), Harvey, Ruzicka, Sexton, Briscoe, Thomas, Christie, Hickey (no longer on Council), Denison, Zucco.

6. Possible causes of the weakening of vote clusters include personality clashes within the "blue" side, a lack of solidarity or a common approach to most council issues among endorsed Greens, and genuine changes in the views of some councillors over time.   

(Note: This article is long and in places very mathsy, but I've cut out some of the really arcane stuff from past editions, mainly because the data entry was such a massive job by itself!)

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In the leadup to each set of Hobart City Council elections I post a detailed account of voting patterns on the Council in the previous term.  My findings for the 2011-14 term can be seen here, and that piece includes links back to older pieces.  Now that terms are four years long, this is a much bigger job than it used to be, but at least it only needs doing every four years.  Entering in the data from something like 84 meetings, every single one of them with at least one contested motion, took me much of the last few days.  But it was worth it; the results are rather interesting.

Tas Councils: Is The Deputy Election System Dudding Us?

This article is not so much brought to you as provoked by Hobart's Lord Mayor Ron Christie, who today caved in to a campaign from sectors (by no means all) of the Tasmanian and interstate religious right.  Following an outcry about upside-down red crosses on the Hobart waterfront, Christie criticised the Dark Mofo music and art festival, suggesting it was no longer "family friendly" (was it ever?) and that the Council may cease funding this very successful visitor drawcard.  It doesn't appear Christie necessarily speaks for the Council on this matter, and certainly nor did he when he became remarkably keen on a proposal for co-naming Hobart "nipaluna" (a stance rather at odds with his opportunistic criticism of Mike Parr's three-day burial performance by the way, given the intended meanings of that artwork).  The Ron Christie I knew a little in the early 2000s was quite the zany freethinker and I suspect would have loved Dark Mofo to bits.  I can only wonder what has occurred!

Hobart Council's Leaders Have A Batman Problem

Not quite your average fetish-goth website

If you look for Hobart City Council on Facebook, and you haven't done so before, you're in for a big surprise.

The page you might expect to be the council's Facebook page (linked for information only, not as an endorsement) is in fact a derogatory spoof page full of fictitious material and political attacks on aldermen and run by an anonymous person who often uses the alias "Batman".  Reactions to this site from its primary targets have been front page news in Hobart in the last few days.  The site has become not just a commentary on Council political issues but a Council political issue in itself, one that is becoming a serious distraction.

I normally only cover council politics in the leadup to an election, but I've decided to make an exception for this one, which may be of interest to audiences of council politics nationwide as a study in social-media (mis)management.  At the last election, Alderman Sue Hickey, a well-known business figure and former Liberal preselection aspirant, ran for the mayoralty against the then Lord Mayor Damon Thomas.  Hickey beat Thomas, and seemed set to follow the pattern of previous long-term mayors Doone Kennedy and Rob Valentine in that if you are popular enough to wrest the office from an incumbent mayor who rubbed people up the wrong way, the job is basically yours for life.

Hobart City Council Count (Includes Some Coverage Of Other Councils)

Wrapup (Saturday Nov 1):  

With the pressing of the final button in Launceston a few hours ago it's pretty much time to bring a close to my coverage of the Hobart and other Tasmanian local government elections and turn my attention to the deluge of Victorian and other state polls that I've neglected while this has been on.   If there are any post-count resignations then I will put up separate threads for the recounts to fill them.

Interest levels have been tremendous with both this page and the Hobart guide logging nearly 8,000 pageviews so far, each from nearly 3,000 unique visitors. Unique pageviews on Tuesday and Wednesday were at levels comparable to the busiest days of the federal election campaign.  I think this all says something against the idea that people are not interested in local government.  I'd like to thank readers for their interest, especially those who threw in a few hundred dollars in donations between them, which I definitely felt like I'd earned after 13 hours working more or less flat out on Tuesday.  It would be great to provide this level of coverage for more councils in 2018, but to do that there need to be more of me!

So what have we found out, especially from Hobart but also from the other results?

Hobart City Council Elections Candidate Guide and Preview 2014

This election is now being counted - go here for counting commentary.

Introductory Waffle

I hope this piece will be a useful resource for readers in the Hobart (Tasmania) area.  Along similar lines to my state election and Legislative Council candidate guides, this guide is intended as a list of candidates running for Hobart City Council in 2014.  It includes a description of their past electoral form (if any known) and an assessment of prospects.  Obviously there is far more known form for the incumbents.  For this reason I've decided to split the guide into three sections - firstly the candidate list, then the form guide, then an assessment of prospects.  All these will be updated regularly.

During the campaign period voters have received official statements by the candidates, with photos supplied by them.  An online version includes web links.  This piece was initially published for the interest of those who didn't want to wait for the candidate statements, but I hope it will still be useful in presenting a less filtered view of candidate backgrounds.

If there is one suggestion I would send to voters, it is to not just automatically vote for all the same old names. By all means if you think an incumbent is doing a good job, vote for them.  But some voters just pick all the names they've heard of whether they have any good impression of that person's performance or not, and this makes it a little bit harder for new entries than it should be. 

This year we have a new election system with all sitting aldermen (except John Freeman, who has retired) facing the people at once and hence a much lower quota but also a much more competitive election.  We're also electing a Mayor and Deputy for the next four years instead of two.  These changes will mean the election is harder to predict, and I aim to post a lot about the counting when it happens.

Hobart City Council Voting Patterns 2011-2014

Advance Summary

1. Traditionally, the Hobart City Council is loosely divided between "pro-development" aldermen and aldermen who stress environmental issues and/or the interests of impacted residents. 

2. The current term of Council was expected to be dominated by the "pro-development" grouping which I refer to as the "blues".

3. The first half of the current Council term supported this expectation, with seven aldermen displaying a blue voting pattern and an eighth displaying a tendency to support them.

4. An ordering of aldermen from "greenest" to "bluest" up til the end of 2012 was: Cocker, Burnet, Harvey, Ruzicka, Foley, Freeman, Thomas, Sexton, Hickey, Briscoe, Zucco, Christie.

5. In the 2013-4 half of this term of Council voting behaviour changed, with both the Green and the blue voting clusters becoming much less cohesive, so that it is not even accurate to classify some aldermen as still in the blue cluster.

6. An especially notable shift in this period was that both Jeff Briscoe and Ron Christie moved away from the "blues" and became much more Green-friendly than before, while John Freeman became more hardline.

7. An ordering of aldermen from "greenest" to "bluest" since the start of 2013 is: Cocker, Burnet, Harvey, Ruzicka, Foley, Christie, Briscoe, Sexton, Hickey, Thomas, Freeman, Zucco.

8. Some of these changes are explained by changes in the issues mix, but by no means all.  Positioning for the upcoming Mayoral contest may explain some of the others.

(This article is long and some bits are technical.  However the really scary stuff has been shuttled off to a PDF link buried in the dark recesses of Tasmanian Times.)