Kevin Bonham

THE “Sandy Bay right”, once a dominant cabal in Hobart council politics, is now a faded force.

The remarkable loss of not one, but both of its sitting aldermen in this year’s council elections suggests that there are no longer many votes in being a “traditional conservative”. To get elected as a non-left-winger in this city you now need something different – a maverick flair, a higher profile, chameleon tendencies, an ability to confuse the issues – anything that might make enough voters reckon you’re really not so right-wing after all. Let’s not blame them, let’s just face it – every other election shows that Hobart is a left-wing city.
I mentioned in a comment that Ruzicka was elected DLM on Wednesday morning – outpolled marginally by Burnet on primaries, she easily caught up on preferences and eventually won by a reasonably comfortable 54:46 percentage margin. However, the Greens getting that close to winning a leadership position on the council is itself a remarkable result.

This year’s distribution of preferences started at 9am on Thursday and was finished a little over twelve hours’ later. I watched half of this, and it was another very dramatic cutup. As previously noted, Elise Archer held a strong lead on primaries over incumbents Hayes, Christie and Lyn Archer, at least one of whom seemed likely to lose, but which one? The other unclear question was whether the Greens’ Bill Harvey could get up on the preferences of team leader Philip Cocker, who topped the poll, and his two team-mates Elizabeth Perey and Corey Peterson.

Things went as expected through the early stages of the count. The Green ticket held an impressive 88% of Cocker’s surplus, while Ruzicka’s went all over the place. The background noise of Smith, Winter and Shea was duly scattered, then Perey’s preferences, as is typical for minor green candidates, only boosted Harvey slightly. When Rod Force’s preferences favoured Elise Archer, moving her 310 ahead of Christie and 355 up on Hayes, it was clear Elise would not be beaten and I therefore “called” her seat, reducing it in my mind to a four-way battle for two.

Ron Christie had started 22 votes ahead of Eric Hayes and had stretched that margin out to 69 votes when Peter Donnelly was excluded. At that exclusion, Hayes closed the gap to 29.5 votes and was still in the race if he could catch Christie (or Lyn Archer) on the preferences of Peterson and Foley. But there was precious little to anyone in Peterson’s bundle except for Peterson’s running mate Harvey. The massive 61% preference flow from Peterson to Harvey (way higher than similar flows from excluded minor green candidates in the past) was the crucial boost I suggested Harvey needed, and from a tenuous position up til then, the second Green was suddenly in the box seat, six hundred votes up on his rivals with only a couple of exclusions to go.

After Peterson’s exclusion, Leo Foley was just seventy votes behind Eric Hayes, although getting just past Hayes would probably not have been enough for him to be elected. Foley’s preferences would therefore decide both which sitting alderman would lose first, and what kind of lead Bill Harvey would have as their preferences, which would mostly go to anyone but Harvey, were thrown. Harvey did respectably on Foley’s surpluses and would only need a tiny leakage from the last exclusion to win, but meanwhile Christie had scored 100 more than Hayes, who had also failed to catch up to Lyn Archer, and Eric Hayes’ two-and-a-bit term career on Hobart Council ended with him in eighth place, just 84 votes shy of outlasting Lyn Archer.

The preferences of Hayes, and the subsequent surpluses, would now determine which of the remaining four candidates (Elise Archer, Christie, Harvey and Lyn Archer) would miss out. Harvey needed less than ten percent to cross the line, and although he was getting far less than the remainder, there was never any doubt that it would happen. I missed the final hour and a half, for based on my sampling Lyn Archer looked likely to lose by over a hundred with Harvey likely to be elected fourth. However, Elise Archer must have picked up, crossing the line fourth on Hayes’ distribution, and at that point the name connection may have caused her surplus to flow the way of Lyn Archer (no relation). In any case, it was still too little – just – as in the end Ron Christie retained his seat at the expense of the veteran by the precarious margin of 8.96 votes. I am strongly reminded of the 1996 count drama when Dee Alty, who was widely given no real chance of re-election, missed out to the late Barry Fisher by even less. It confirmed my suspicion that even with his vote imploding as predicted, Lyn would not go out without a struggle.

What can be read into all of this? Firstly, it’s a fantastic result for the Greens, whose massive campaign effort including cinema and radio advertising has paid off with the election of a third seat on HCC for the first time. Given that the turnout increased by over a thousand voters, it is possible the pulp mill plebiscite did drag more voters out, and that those may have been disproportionately Green-leaning. If so, Jeff Briscoe has been hoist on his own petard – the populist plebiscite he championed may have led to the election of another Green to council, at the expense of a fellow “conservative”. However, I believe the main reason the Greens polled so well is not the mill, but simply that they campaigned much harder than most other candidates.

Then there was Lyn Archer’s curious decision to recontest. I know nothing of his current health beyond that it caused him to be unable to campaign, but it is mysterious that no-one else attempted to do so, or even just explain to voters what was going on, on his behalf. It is likely that Lyn Archer’s preferences would have supported Eric Hayes over Ron Christie, and perhaps had Lyn not stood then Hayes would have eliminated Christie.

Indeed, the whole election was a shambles for the non-left side of Council. They were thrashed in both the Mayor and Deputy races and lost two aldermen for the price of one. The replacement of two veterans with an ambitious thirtysomething lawyer and a third Green will give the council a serious shakeup. Not only did Ron Christie almost lose at this election, but also John Freeman’s seat will not be safe in 2009. Freeman, if still interested, will need a better campaign strategy than his minimalist effort last time, and if Christie wants to win again in 2011 he may need to not only make a bigger effort, but also reconsider his approach to Council politics. I was actually quite surprised at the strength of his tendencies in my analysis of Council voting records, and I wonder if he is too easily convinced to act as headkicker for certain other aldermen.

Jeff Briscoe and Marti Zucco can take heart from the result, however – Briscoe because while his evidently token campaign for the mayoralty received its predictable drubbing, his aldermanic vote was reasonably strong and if he continues to make an effort then his seat will be secure. Zucco’s vote for DLM, with no campaigning apart from the odd irrelevant-to-Council appearance in the paper, was stronger than expected and suggested that he should not have too much trouble getting his usual several percent of the vote as an alderman next time around.

Fear of a Green Council

The Greens winning two seats in this Council election is not necessarily an anomaly that can be written off as “just a pulp mill thing”. They did it in 2005 as well (when there were seven seats up for grabs) and were not so far short in 2002. I have not checked the exact figures, but I suspect the Greens poll just over 30% in those booths within the boundaries of Hobart City in a state election. This election they polled 26.5% of aldermanic primaries. If they can consistently match their state result at local government level, then in 2009, who is to say the HCC will not have four Greens on it? Beating the Greens, and in particular their way of mobilising supporters who will follow a ticket strongly, is a serious challenge for the remaining aldermen on Council. Will this result provoke more formal interest from other parties in local government? We shall see … and in the meantime … the awards!

Strongest result: Philip Cocker – from scraping over the line on preferences with less than 300 primaries to topping the poll with more than ten times that many, ticket or no ticket, is a great effort.

Worst result by a serious candidate: Eric Hayes, unlike Christie and Lyn Archer, actually appeared to be making a serious effort in the campaign, but could only finish eighth.

Best result by a newcomer: Elise Archer’s 1391 primaries is the highest vote in HCC by a candidate who had not stood before since the advent of postal voting. Honourable mention: Corey Peterson,

Sponge award for soaking up preferences: This has to go to Bill Harvey, who not only attracted brilliant preference flows from two of his three team-mates, but continued to pick up quite healthy leaks from the conservatives – not bad for a low-profile #2 who polled just 125 votes last time!

Justice is the aim. There isn’t any: Leo Foley’s 1062-vote primary would have won him a seat with ease at many elections. In this case, the even distribution among the conservatives a whiff ahead of him, and the unusually high vote to the Greens, left him high and dry with nowhere to get a decent preference flow.

Most pointless campaign: The mysterious TJ Smith can be excused as a first-timer, but Shea and Winter should have got the message in ‘05, yet appeared to be doing even less this time around.

Biggest rookie error: Rod Force’s admission of having donated money to Family First could well have cost him several dozen votes. With more experience he’ll know one shouldn’t shoot oneself in the foot, especially not while over-answering the question asked!

Biggest understatement: Jeff Briscoe, who after being towelled by worse than two and a half to one for Mayor, found the psephological insight to admit Rob Valentine was a “hard man to beat”.

AWOL Award for least effort by a serious candidate: Doing nothing for medical reasons is cheating, so this one will have to go to Christie.

Best result for minimum effort: Zucco (see above).

Don’t let the door: Aaaaah, but that would be quite biased! (There are two recipients; they were not both sitting aldermen.)

Finally, from the reporting above I may have given the impression that this was an exciting campaign. The count was a cliffhanger, but the campaign was narcoleptic and Hobart is lethargic at election time compared with almost any other municipality in the state. I can only wish my 2005 reports had not already used up the description “remarkably boring and bland”, since compared to the 2007 snoozefest, 2005 is starting to look, in retrospect, like Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail ’72. Most of the blame for this goes to many of the candidates themselves, and most of the rest of it goes to the local rag for giving the elections stuff-all publicity beyond the recycling of the occasional boring press release (itself in many cases recycled from the candidate’s official 150-worder).

At one point I went looking online for media coverage of the Hobart City Council elections, and this came up as my very first hit:

Hobart voters to decide on nearly full slate

“From residential tax abatement to creation of a Hobart sanitary district, there is a lot to talk about on the campaign trail.” The piece goes on to talk about the incumbents, their policies, their challengers, the issues, and the history of various candidates – what parties they associate with, how long they have been there. It is neutrally written, informative, and 577 words long, and reading it the voter can learn much about the elections for the Hobart City Council … of Indiana, USA (pop 25 363).

If a city barely bigger than Devonport can at least get that much council reporting in its local newspaper, then the Hobart, Tasmania equivalent needs to get serious about its local area, instead of focussing on federal shenanigans covered in far more depth by other sources. If not, its loss shall be this website’s gain!