After every mayoral election, regardless of which political colours emerge victorious, two questions abound: is it purely political leanings determining who becomes mayor, and should the Ballarat public get a say?
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Cr Samantha McIntosh was re-elected as Ballarat’s mayor for the third straight year on Monday, while South Ward’s Jim Rinaldi was voted into the deputy position for the first time.
Both received five votes out of the requisite nine, with their own votes and the support of Liberal councillors Amy Johnson and Ben Taylor, and North Ward independent Grant Tillett.
Councillor Daniel Moloney, who stood down as deputy mayor to challenge Cr McIntosh for the top job on Monday, said while he had full faith in the mayor, City of Ballarat is “indisputably a Liberal-led council”.
“I have absolute confidence in [Cr McIntosh] because she does such a fantastic job, and anyone who says otherwise is clearly not paying attention,” he said.
“The only disappointment is consistently the same five people voting exactly the same way three years in a row now as a Liberal-independent bloc.
“The difficulty is in talking about a bloc, you risk coming across as a bit of sore loser.”
But new deputy mayor Cr Rinaldi denied the council was being led by an conservative voting bloc, saying the council was “diverse” and worked well collectively.
“Sure there are differences with politics,” he said. “But this is not a bloc of councillors. We don’t collaborate with anybody. I just work out what is best for our city, I listen to the people I represent and I do my best to follow through with that.”
Whether a popular vote – encouraged by many a political punter on social media – to quell these concerns is worth the financial and bureaucratic hassle is yet another unanswered question.
A spokesperson for the Municipal Association of Victoria confirmed the leadership body did not have an official position on whether mayors should be elected by residents or by fellow councillors.
Melbourne City Council is the only Victorian municipality with a popular vote system, with Sally Capp becoming Lord Mayor in the May by-election this year.
The direct mayoral vote system had also been in place in Geelong, but was scrapped after the state government sacked then mayor Darryn Lyons and the council, which it labelled dysfunctional, in 2016.
Councillor Lindsay Ellis told 3AW the direct election of a mayor in Geelong had been a failed experiment, and “bloody hopeless” in terms of governance.
The Melbourne mayoral election has faced different issues, with the vote failing to engage thousands.
More than 30,000 voters failed to cast a ballot in Melbourne's election, with the participation rate of just 57.93 per cent.
"Melbourne City Council is a small-scale representation of the US Congress model, or the French model, with a directly elected president,” Monash University political scientist Nick Economou told Fairfax Media earlier this year.
"You can vote for the president, and the president's party as well, but there's a fair chance they won't get a majority.
"All the other councils are classic Westminster."
"I wonder if we might not be beginning to see a change in how Melbourne City Council is elected," Dr Economou said, stating he believed that “the future of the system hangs in the balance” of how Ms Capp is able to “manage her affairs”.
- With The Age
