1991 in Gawler’s Election History

We’ve reached 1991; any Council elections prior to this one will have taken place before I was born in 1990. The winner of the Triple J Hottest 100 that year was “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana, and since the previous 1989 elections, there had been major geopolitical changes; in fact, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the end of the Cold War had been declared.

Did that stop people in the Bunyip’s Letters to the Editor section from referring to everything they don’t like as “Socialist”? Absolutely not.

The Mayoral Election

The Bunyip, April 4th, 1991.

This is going to be a short segment most of the time. Mayoral elections in this time period mostly seem to happen when a Mayor retires, not during their term. There are exceptions, but Bob Bartlett had just come off a very strong win to become Mayor two years ago.

The Ward Changes

Before we go further, I should explain the new election rules we’ll be working with.

On the left is the ward map we’ll be using for this election. On the right is the ward map we used for the 1993, 1995 and 1997 elections.

Here is a basic summary of the differences between them: in 1993 an extra ward, Coombes, was added. It took most of Carleton Ward’s original space, so Carleton shifted southwest and the other wards adjusted slightly to compensate.

For this election, as well as for the 1989, 1987 and 1985 elections, we will be using the map on the left, which will be accompanied by the election of three Aldermen.

The Candidate profiles

We have 15 out of the 20 total candidate profiles available this time around, which is indicative of a few quite competitive elections. As always, I’ve made them clickable so you can zoom in and take a look.

The Bunyip, May 1st, 1991.

So, what is an Alderman anyway?

Under the system in place in 1991, Gawler Council voting consisted of three different ballots.

The Mayoral ballot: well, not this year because the Mayor was re-elected unopposed, but speaking more generally.

The Alderman ballot: Everyone received this ballot, just like the Mayoral one.

The Ward Councillor ballot: Only residents from the ward in question would receive this ballot.

Alderman elections were to elect the type of Councillor that Gawler has used exclusively since 2000: Area Councillors, not bound to a ward. The difference here is that under this system, only three were elected, and they co-existed with Ward Councillors.

These would be the last Alderman elections in Gawler; after this election, Councillors received a report that a) Aldermen were no longer needed, and b) that the wards were out of balance population-wise and needed an update. Hence, the change to the six-ward system in 1993.

But for now, there was still one last Alderman election to hold.

The Alderman Election

We kick off our Alderman election coverage on this blog with quite an interesting example; this is the first election that I’ve covered for a while that will require an explanation of the results. There were four candidates for three positions.

Gil Harnett, who had spent 11 years as Mayor before taking a step back into an Alderman role in 1989, had just been knocked out of Council.

The Bunyip, May 8th, 1991.

Ron Folland with 267 first preference votes defeated Gil Harnett who had 416 first preference votes.

This is a little easier to explain to those of us from the modern era where the preferential vote system has been around for a while, but many at the time were shocked.

What happened here is that the flow of strategic preferencing here was quite heavy; both Tony Piccolo and Ron Folland ranked Gil Harnett last on their how-to-vote fliers, and Gil Harnett returned the favour in his own campaign.

Gil Harnett ad in The Bunyip, May 1st, 1991.

If you’re wondering about the logistics here, I can explain it all in more detail.

Here is a full mathematical breakdown of where Tony Piccolo’s votes went, for the numbers nerds out there:

• 2045 legitimate votes were cast (956 + 406 + 267 + 416).
• We need to elect three Aldermen, so the quota is 1/4th of the vote (plus one). Round down any fractions and you get a quota of 512. Meaning, once a candidate hits 512 votes, they are elected.
• Tony Piccolo’s 956 votes mean that he is 444 votes over quota; since he already hit 512, any remaining votes now need to be redistributed to the other candidates.
• Randomly picking out 444 of his votes to redistribute would create a different result every time we do it, so we need to redistribute all of his votes but at a fraction of their original worth.
• Those extra 444 votes made up about 46% of his total vote, so each of these ballots should now only be worth ~46% of a vote when they are redistributed.
• 238 votes worth of preferences went to Ron Folland, 132 to Betty Jacob, and only 72 to Gil Harnett. Two votes have gone missing here as this only adds up to 442, but I assume this is the result of some vote fractions that are being rounded down into whole numbers.

The new situation after Tony Piccolo’s preferences have been distributed is:

Betty Jacob: 538 votes (that’s past the quota so she’s now elected),

Ron Folland: 505 votes

Gil Harnett: 488 votes

Ron Folland is ahead now, but neither he nor Gil Harnett has hit quota yet, so Betty Jacob needs to redistribute her extra votes past quota (she has 26 extra votes). Those split 10 to Folland and 15 to Harnett (and one vote that’s invisible due to rounding down into whole numbers).

Thus, Ron Folland leapfrogged Gil Harnett to win the final seat, despite starting 149 votes behind.

Addressing the Preferential Vote Controversy

I’ve mentioned Bunyip columnist Cit before in passing, but I’ve never explained what he is, exactly. Cit is a persona, not a person; various people have taken on the role of Cit at The Bunyip since at least as far back as the 1890s, so this certainly won’t be the last we hear of him.

In any case, this particular iteration of Cit was not happy with the result of the Alderman elections (in the first column on the left).

The Bunyip, May 15th, 1991.

Cit claims here that “in a first-past-the-post system of voting Gil Harnett would have been easily re-elected”. To be clear, this is not because the first-past-the-post system is fairer, but because under that system, over 400 of Tony Piccolo’s votes would have gone to waste because he was too popular and got more votes than he needed.

Here’s another way of thinking about the result: of the first-preference voters, 416 picked Gil Harnett and 1629 picked someone else. He got only 20% of the vote when he needed 25% to reach the finish line. What the later preferences tell us is that, of the 80% of voters who didn’t give Gil Harnett their first preference, most of them didn’t want him as their second preference either. As a result, he never hit that 25% threshold even after preferences.

In other words, this couldn’t have happened if Gil Harnett had both a strong first-preference voter base and high popularity outside of that voter base. He had a loyal following, but the people who weren’t part of that following ranked him last. The final result was not an example of a fault in the system but of the system working as intended.

I wasn’t the only one with something to say about Cit’s column here; in the following week’s Bunyip, he received a roasting from this Letter to the Editor:

The Bunyip, May 23rd, 1991.

R. Mercer from Willaston here (almost certainly the Robert Mercer who unsuccessfully contested Willaston Ward at this election, given the similar sentiments in his Bunyip candidate profile) also hates the preferential vote system and believes it is why Australia keeps electing “Socialist governments” (Labor had been in power at both federal and state level for years).

Mercer has a different critique of Cit’s column than I do: basically, he thinks that Cit is biased toward Gil Harnett, who he thinks has been in for too long. I bring this up because we tend to smooth out the rough edges of history and presume that if someone like Gil Harnett was Mayor for 11 years then it means that he just remained equally popular forever.

in reality, people who have been in power for a decade often start to lose momentum; after all, if you’re in charge over a long period, then everything that went wrong in that time falls on your shoulders, and that burden just gets heavier and heavier over the years.

Eleven years is at the upper end as Gawler Mayors go – the longest-serving Mayor in Gawler’s history was William Henry Cox at 16 years, but he bypassed the “been in for too long” issue by having six separate non-consecutive terms as Mayor, at one point taking a 15-year break.

Here we see a reflection of a mood for change that led to some highly contested races this year, which might be helpful in understanding the surprising results of this Alderman election.

The next week, another person wrote in to The Bunyip, this time to argue with Mayor Bob Bartlett, who had been defending the preferential voting system.

The Bunyip, May 29th, 1991.

The type of voting system described here, where you have multiple full votes to give to various candidates, has also been used in the past (we might get into it someday if I decide to cover state government elections), and it’s true that it’s easier to explain, but it does have several problems of its own. Also, in this particular situation, it would just lead to a more exaggerated version of the same result.

I’m not unsympathetic to critiques of our preferential voting system; as I’ve mentioned several times while covering Area Councillor elections, a candidate can, for example, win by being at the top of the ballot papers. It’s just that I don’t buy these particular arguments.

There’s a lot more I could write here, but let’s move on to the rest of the Councillor elections.

Willaston Ward

Willaston Ward had five candidates for two positions:

Winner (275 votes): Phyllis “Penny” Hopper

• New.

Winner (161 votes): Neville Elphick

• New.

Missed out (54 votes): Ian Kellett-Southby

• New.

Missed out (49 votes): Wayne Yeend

• New.

Missed out (24 votes): Robert Mercer

• New.

24.87% turnout. Neither incumbent re-contested; Barry Lewis retired, and Ron Folland, as we know, ran in the Alderman election instead.

Both Penny Hopper and Neville Elphick would continue to hold this ward for the next six years.

Martin Ward

Martin Ward had three candidates for two positions:

Winner (239 votes): Bronte Brodie

• Incumbent.

Winner (78 votes): John Moore

• Incumbent.

Missed out (117 votes): Duncan Johnstone

• New.

18.42% turnout. Another election decided by the preference flow of the biggest winner. By my calculations, the quota would have been 145, so Bronte Brodie would have blown past it by 94 votes.

Carleton Ward

Carleton Ward initially had one candidate for two positions:

Winner: Dianne Field

• Incumbent.

John Thorpe, ward incumbent and local cinema owner (this will come up later) did not re-contest. Not enough candidates applied to fill all the positions, so they opened for nominations again.

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In the supplementary election, there were three candidates for one position:

Winner (271 votes): Trevor White

• New.

Missed out (120 votes): Jean Ashcroft

• New. Not to be confused with John Ashcroft, who’s in Turner Ward (even if a French person might pronounce them both the same way).

Missed out (98 votes): Tristam Roennfeldt

• New.

19.91% turnout. One of these three candidates could have made it a lot easier for themselves if they had just run in the original election.

The Automatic Winners

We’re four elections into the ward system now, and yet we’ve never seen an election where every ward was contested. In fact, we won’t be seeing that rare occurrence until 1985.

Winners (Turner Ward): David Taplin (new), John Ashcroft (returning but not incumbent)

• John Ashcroft had been away from Council for six years. The two ward incumbents, Michael Johnson and Mark Boon, did not renominate.

Winners (Reid Ward): Tony Gill (incumbent), Neville Joyce (new)

• Incumbent Paul Little did not re-nominate, though he would be back in both 1997 and 2018, and would run for Mayor in 2022.

Altogether, there would be six changes to the Council.

The Bunyip, May 8th, 1991.

Cinema Chaos

March 6th, 1991.

This is a nostalgic one for me, because one of the first contentious decisions I remember making as a Councillor after my election in 2018 was a debate over whether a business should have to pay the Council’s car parking fund.

There are a few things going on here. This was a couple of months before the elections, so John Thorpe (the cinema owner in question) was still on the Council; there’s a mention of him having to step out for this discussion due to a conflict of interest.

Piccolo and Harnett are also mentioned as “unlikely allies” in supporting the car parking funds condition, which provides even more context as to why they would preference each other last in the Alderman elections.

As for the creature in the Bunyip’s political cartoon, that’s their short-lived mascot, B.Y.O. the Bunyip. We’ll learn more about him next time.

The Green Belt is here

The Bunyip, May 8th, 1991.

Here we see planning for the enforcement of an official “green belt” in Gawler’s southern rural areas. This was state government policy – as of 2006, green belts were still in use in several regional towns, including Gawler, Mount Barker, Littlehampton, Stirling, Willunga and McLaren Vale. How all those other towns are going in regards to their green belts in 2023 I’m not sure; I’ll have to look into it further when I get the chance.

Maintaining a green belt was important symbolically to Gawler from as far back as the 1950s (when the major new developments started at what we now know as Elizabeth), as many were worried about maintaining Gawler’s identity as a unique town and not just part of the urban sprawl. Project leader and recurring planning advisor Michael Wohlstadt (who also appeared last time in the Hewett development debate) urged Council to encourage “wide and active debate” on the best option.

The green belt is still here today, though it has led to some strain over the years between some of the people living in these areas, who have chafed under restrictions on subdividing their land, and other parts of Gawler, who want it kept as a symbolic barrier that separates Gawler from Munno Para and gives people a “sense of arrival” to Gawler.

Next time, we will cover Bob Bartlett’s first Mayoral election, as we reach 1989.