Wamboin Community Association

A Brief Analysis of the
2009 Palerang Council By-Election

Following from my analysis of the 2008 election count, here’s a brief run-down on the results of the March 2009 by-election. The final numbers, extracted from spreadsheets provided by the NSW Electoral Commission, were as follows:

Count 1
Primary Count

Polling Place Anne Goonan Richard Holding Mark Horan Formal Informal Total
Braidwood 156 310 552 1,018 26 1,044
Bungendore 852 784 575 2,211 101 2,312
Burra 209 165 149 523 39 562
Captain’s Flat 82 75 128 285 18 303
Carwoola 140 119 101 360 14 374
Major’s Creek 13 41 55 109 2 111
Nerriga 15 14 35 64 1 65
Wamboin 410 391 98 899 48 947
Total 1,877 1,899 1,693 5,469 249 5,718
% Formal 34.3% 34.7% 31.0% 100.0% 4.4%
Declared Institutions/Prepoll 486 371 465 1,322 33 1,355
Postal 190 119 117 426 15 441
Section/Silent 3 5 1 9 0 9
Total 679 495 583 1,757 48 1,805
% Formal Declaration 38.6% 28.2% 33.2% 100.0% 2.7%
Grand Total 2,556 2,394 2,276 7,226 297 7,523
% Total 35.4% 33.1% 31.5% 100.0% 3.9%

There were 9,513 residents on the electoral roll, making the turn out for the by-election 79.1%.

As the candidate who received the least number of primary votes, Mark Horan was excluded after the primary count.

Count 2
Preference Distribution on exclusion of Mark Horan

Anne GoonanRichard HoldingExhausted
Preference distribution 456 475 1345
Final Count 3012 2869

After the distribution of Mark Horan’s preferences, Anne Goonan was declared elected.

There are a couple of interesting observations to make from this result. First, as some predicted, Anne won the count in all of the western booths (with the exception of Captain’s Flat), supported by the rural residential population, while Mark won in the eastern booths, supported basically by the farming population. While he didn’t win in any booth, Richard ran a strong second almost everywhere, suggesting that his campaign was quite effective in gaining the vote from the broadly distributed Community First support base.

The other observation, the high number of ballots that exhausted during the preference distribution, is not, perhaps, that much of a surprise. It has been suggested that the instructions provided at voting booths were not very clear, and that many people may not even have realised that this was a preferential ballot. Whatever the reason, almost 60% of the voters who nominated Mark Horan as their first choice, provided no second preference. It is quite possible that many of these will have been people who simply didn’t care which of the other candidates were successful, if Mark wasn’t. As it was, however, if their votes had followed the same trend as those that did offer a second preference, they would not have changed the result.

It is also interesting to note that all candidates drew a respectable level of support from across the whole of Palerang. This might tempt one to suggest that any east/west ‘cultural rift’ is diminishing with time, as respective interest groups discover that they perhaps have more in common with some of their more distant neighbours than with those next door. If this is the case, it will certainly make for an interesting time as we prepare for a referendum on whether or not to introduce wards for future Council elections.

03-01-2017