Voting, donations reform will make for better council elections

Melbourne’s CBD is in many ways a space apart. In the years since COVID-19, when health restrictions made it a ghost town, it has struggled to re-connect itself to the wider metropolis, to the extent that mayoral candidate and former AFL star Anthony Koutoufides has made getting CBD-based employees back into their offices part of his policy platform.

Rate-paying businesses have two votes in the Melbourne City Council elections, while individual residents receive just one.Credit: Eddie Jim

But with October’s Melbourne City Council elections approaching, another troubling disconnect has resurfaced: that between how voting works in the council and everywhere else in Victoria. As our city editor Cara Waters has reported, while councillors nominate individually, they can agree to form groups identified with a particular mayoral candidate on the city’s ballot paper. With the mayor being chosen in a separate ballot, there is considerable potential for unintended outcomes.

Since the time of the Kennett Coalition government, Melbourne City has operated a system where rate-paying businesses have two votes for council elections, while individual residents receive just one. While Sydney City now has similar rules for its polls, its larger council area means residents remain the majority of voters there. Melbourne’s smaller and more commercially focused council area — another legacy of the Kennett era — means that the electoral roll in 2020 was 55.09 per cent business owners and out-of-area property owners and 44.91 per cent residents.

There are those who argue that the special status of the CBD, with its concentration of major business interests, has always required special rules. In the 19th century votes in the city were only for ratepayers (up to three, depending on the value of the property), and it wasn’t until 1982 and the Cain Labor government that all adult residents could vote in council elections. Indeed, some years ago then councillor Stephen Mayne warned that a residents-only system would produce “an anti-business left-leaning Green council”. Be that as it may, the terms of the 2001 City of Melbourne Act were always intended to accommodate businesses and developers as stakeholders in the city’s direction.

Where the difficulty has repeatedly arisen is that the nexus between Melbourne City Council and business goes beyond votes and into the financing of campaigns. At this election, a number of mayoral candidates — notably independent councillor Jamal Hakim and the Greens’ Roxane Ingleton — have pledged to disclose their donations in real time, a key recommendation that the anti-corruption probe Operation Sandon made for local and state government. It is one that The Age has supported.

As things stand at present, we have seen key office holders — including former lord mayor Sally Capp, her successor and current mayor Nicholas Reece and his running mate in this election, Roshena Campbell — having to recuse themselves from consideration of matters brought before council on the basis that their donors are involved, most recently regarding the possibility of heritage protection for a South Yarra apartment building. In years past there have been instances where so many councillors took this step that the meeting could no longer reach a quorum to consider the issue at hand.

Greens Councillor Rohan Leppert, who has called the council’s voting arrangements “the worst electoral system in the country”, believes such cases demonstrate the need for a ban on all developer donations. Whether a blanket prohibition aimed at one class of donation would be workable is a valid question, however it can surely be agreed that the greater the transparency and immediate knowledge there is of such donations and who is making them, the better it would be both for the conduct of elections and for keeping the public properly informed of what goes on in the corridors of power.

This is not a minor consideration, given the declining faith in the political class over recent years and the copious evidence of dysfunction and corruption that has emerged from other councils across the state.

In the city itself, the 2020 council election saw 20 real estate agents warned by the Local Government Inspectorate after admitting they had completed ballot papers on behalf of landlords whose properties they managed. The votes submitted — 216 in all — were set aside, with estate agents telling investigators that their clients, many of them owning property in the CBD but living abroad, “were not interested in the election”.

While the LGI’s investigation did not reveal “any systemic or intentional ballot fraud”, the concerns raised for the integrity of future elections prompted councillors to call for a review of the City of Melbourne Act. It is a call that the state government has acknowledged repeatedly but is yet to act upon.

When mayoral candidate Arron Wood told The Sunday Age that his running mate, multimillionaire bikini entrepreneur Erin Deering, “kept saying, ‘I don’t know much about politics’” and he added, “I think it’s really good because there is a pretty dim view of politicians”, he may have been speaking tongue in cheek. But reform to the donation and voting systems might be a big part of changing that view for the better, especially for those who call the city home.

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