DOUBTLESS you will read in some shallow mainstream effort that Alderman Darlene Haigh is in danger of losing her seat on account of her running a miserable eighth on primaries.
In fact, the most likely outcome of the current Hobart Council cut-up based on the primary votes on Tuesday night is that all six sitting aldermen will be returned, with a close fight for the final seat between Phillip Cocker, Leo Foley and Peter Donnelly.
In my second piece on these elections (Council: A verdict) I wrote: “my track record in previous years has normally been to be quite close for most predictions but well off course for a couple.” This is about the way it has panned out, with only one result (Freeman’s) massively different to what I expected.
Lord Mayor (Winner: Valentine, outright majority)
In my first piece (Council: A mildly-biased primer) I predicted Rob Valentine would most likely outpoll Briscoe and Zucco combined and might poll in the high fifties. In the second piece I predicted Briscoe would be a clear second. All panned out as I expected except that Valentine’s vote (63.5%) was slightly higher than predicted and Zucco’s (11.1%) was slightly lower (offline, I thought he’d poll around 15%.) Note that I suggested Zucco wasn’t trying all that hard — based on this result either I was right or else the proportion of voters willing to support him is so low that any amount of effort would be futile.
Deputy Lord Mayor (Winner: Ruzicka, on preferences over Sexton)
In the first piece I predicted this would be closer, that Sexton would outpoll Christie and Haigh, and that Sexton would do well on Christie’s preferences. In the second one I hedged a bit (and the closeness of the result shows why I did this) but said that the relative lack of visible effort from Sexton made Ruzicka’s chances healthier and that she could even win comfortably. In the end Ruzicka did win, with a margin over Sexton of close to 55:45, a very small increase on her margin over Archer last time. Significantly, Ruzicka again benefited from the preferences of Darlene Haigh. This is around the midpoint of the wide range of results I thought was plausible for this position.
Aldermen (7 vacancies) (Unchecked final primary tallies in brackets).
Rob Valentine (6438): Elected first on primaries. I expected his personal vote to increase by several percent (as had that of other mayors in similar career positions) but it actually remained about the same as in 2000 despite his strong mayoral performance. Possibly there were other factors (such as loss of competing aldermen) pushing up the votes of the others who I used as models, or perhaps Valentine has lost a few votes to the Greens or to likeminded candidates.
Helen Burnet (2634): Elected second on primaries. While I expected Burnet to be third or fourth elected, she will actually be second. The Greens have succeeded in massively improving the proportion of their voters that vote 1 for the top candidate, from 43.5% for Mat Hines in 2002 to 76.4% for Burnet this year. Partly this is because Burnet was a sitting alderman (albeit briefly) and a far better candidate, but the Greens have also strongly pushed voting in ticket order this year. This means Burnet has ended up with 15.0% of the vote — well over a quota — in her own right, and will have a small surplus.
Peter Sexton (1161): Will be elected, almost certainly third. His primary vote has nearly doubled from 3.7% in 2000 to 6.6% this year. Also, while he lies fifth on primaries, sampling shows him getting a massive 22% of Valentine’s surplus, which would place him on around .93 of a quota after Valentine’s surplus. This is a slightly better result than I expected — although the main reason he is in line to come third rather than fifth is the poor performance of two who I expected to be ahead of him.
John Freeman (1191): Will be elected, almost certainly fourth or fifth (probably fourth). This is the one real shock result from the count. Although Freeman will be returned there is no word for his vote other than “abysmal”. I predicted his vote might decline, but thought he should still be over a quota — in fact he is barely over half a quota (.54)! It is truly incredible that a sitting alderman, even while doing relatively little during the campaign, can crash from a primary vote of 20.0% in 2000 to 6.8% now — nearly two-thirds of his former voters have gone elsewhere. I suspect that the other doctor, Sexton, has picked up most of those votes.
Marti Zucco (1256): Will be elected, almost certainly fourth or fifth (probably fifth). Zucco’s primary vote has increased slightly (from 6.2% to 7.1%) but he is not doing as well on Valentine’s preferences as Freeman, or nearly as well as Sexton, and the unexpected lack of a Freeman surplus will slow him down. After the Valentine and Burnet surpluses he should be on about .75 of a quota. Running for Lord Mayor (while doing very little that was publicly visible about it) seems not to have boosted his vote, which rather seems to refute the widespread view that the reason Freeman’s vote was so bad was his lack of a mayoral run.
Darlene Haigh (652): Will be elected, probably sixth. Haigh’s primary vote has again, provisionally, gone down slightly (as I expected), from 3.9% in 2000 to 3.7%. However, sampling shows her polling around 17% of Valentine’s preferences, which will bring her to around .61 quotae after the two surpluses. While this is the weakest position she has yet been in, she should have around 400 votes’ break on the next candidate, and is therefore unlikely to be caught for sixth place.
Thus the six sitting aldermen will all be returned for four years and the fight will be for the seventh seat (a two year spot), as I predicted. The six candidates I assessed as being in some sort of contention have all polled higher than any of those I did not expect to do so well, but only three of these, Philip Cocker (281), Peter Donnelly (666*) and Leo Foley (678) are in contention.
Cocker and Donnelly appeared to be getting more of Valentine’s surplus than Foley, and although my sample was too small to be confident about that, it’s consistent with what I would expect based on community profile and Valentine not endorsing a candidate. Importantly for Cocker, he will get an excellent preference flow from Burnet (about 80%) and will gain a few hundred votes on the others out of her surplus.
My rough projections currently show Donnelly leading Cocker and Foley by close to 100 votes each after the two surpluses. From that point on Cocker will get high proportions of preferences from the other Greens, although not as high as from Burnet. However he may also struggle to gain preferences from the rest of the field. At this stage I think Cocker has just slightly better chances than Donnelly. Foley, despite his strong primary vote, is in a more difficult position than the other two. However the fight between these three for the final spot will not be resolved for days and could be very close, so I am nowhere near calling it. In fact as I sampled preferences through Tuesday night, I swapped over Cocker and Donnelly in favouritism a few times.
Margaretta Pos (428), David Edwards (425) and Heath Michael (350) have all polled reasonably but will be hundreds of votes behind the others after the surpluses. Leads this size simply are not caught so unless Pos or Edwards can do much better on Valentine’s preferences than sampling indicates, they will remain in the count for a while but will not make it.
The rest: Of the Briscoe-endorsed candidates I thought Reshma Dutta (264) might poll respectably; actually she polled about the same nondescript vote as Michael Shea (268). Obscure candidates Winter (136), Thwaites (131) and Furmage (65) have predictably competed strongly for the wooden spoon, although I was not expecting #3 Green Bill Harvey (123) to be outpolled by two of them. Of the other Greens, Helen Hutchinson polled 186 votes and Robert Vincent 223.
The final result will hopefully be known on Friday evening.
* Unable to forget some anti-gay responses by this candidate in an old TGLRG booklet, I do find this provisional vote tally for Donnelly most amusing.
Kevin Bonham would know his own thought patterns anywhere and requests that any journalists using this article as source material credit their source. DISCLAIMER: The above comments are made on the assumption that all vote totals supplied during counting have been quite accurate and that no large (100+) vote parcels will be found in the wrong place during checking of primaries.
