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.

--------------------------------------------------------  
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.

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.