2014 in Gawler’s Election History

It’s time now for the November 2014 Gawler Council Elections. This was a busy year for Council nominations, featuring three mayoral candidates and a record twenty-five Councillor candidates.

This post will have fewer essays about how elections work than usual, so instead let’s set the scene for the election to come.

Setting the scene

It was the end of an era for the elected leadership of the Gawler Council. In August 2014, Mayor Brian Sambell announced his retirement from Council.

The Bunyip, August 6th 2014.

Brian Sambell had been Mayor for the past two Council terms, from 2006-2014. As you might know from reading my previous posts, this retirement didn’t last very long and he would return (as a Councillor rather than a Mayor) in both 2018 and 2022. But for now, it meant that there was a power vacuum in the Gawler Council leadership.

Was there any interest from the Deputy Mayor, then, in taking up the position? In fact, a month earlier, Deputy Mayor Brian Thom had also announced his retirement from Council.

The Bunyip, July 3rd, 2014.

Brian Thom had been on Gawler Council for over 14 years since his debut at the May 2000 elections, and spent seven of them as Deputy Mayor. After retiring, he focused on his Gawler History Team project, working on a website that would eventually become https://gawlerhistory.com/, a valuable local history resource.

With the leadership retiring, it was an open field for people to nominate for the position.

Meet the Mayoral Candidates

Three candidates stepped in to fill the vacancy. In ballot order, they were:

The Mayoral Election

The election campaign was not without its controversies.

Karen Redman issued complaints to the Electoral Commission on a number of fronts, including a cartoon of her being controlled by fellow Councillor Adrian Shackley as a “puppet” (John Bolton had shared this on his Facebook page), alongside claims by Bolton that she was lying about being politically unaligned and that she was part of a “gang of four” councillors who controlled the Gawler Council.

Bolton responded by lodging a counter-complaint, suggesting that Redman’s complaints were trying to prevent him from campaigning “vigorously”. Meanwhile, Peter Graham was off throwing a few bombs of his own during interviews with the Bunyip, referring to retiring Mayor Sambell as “Mayor Shambles” and John Bolton as “Bobo the Clown” (for context, Bolton does regularly dress up as a clown for events; he’s easy to spot because he walks around on stilts).

In the end, the Electoral Commission took a more conservative approach to dealing with these complaints, only really stamping down on clear factual inaccuracies rather than issues of tone. John Bolton did end up having to issue one retraction – that it is mathematically impossible for a “gang of four” to control a Council with eleven people on it.

For what it’s worth, after the 2022 election in which Bolton ran again, he wrote a letter to the editor suggesting that his 2022 run was in order to help Karen Redman get re-elected because they were aligned on the topic of boundary reform, so make of that what you will.

The Mayoral Election Results

Karen Redman had won and become Gawler’s first publicly elected female mayor. The reason for the very specific wording here is that Gawler did previously have a female Mayor (for approximately six months) due to the resignation of Mayor Tony Piccolo in 2006, who had quit to become a Member of Parliament. However, this was an internal election by the Councillors to fill a vacancy and not the result of a public vote.

I mentioned previously that the most straightforward type of mayoral election is when only one candidate runs. This is the second-most straightforward type of mayoral election; Karen Redman got more than 50% of the vote outright (57%, in this case) and so the election was instantly concluded. We will never know whether Peter Graham’s voters preferred Karen Redman or John Bolton, because that was not necessary in order to find who won.

Meet the Councillor Candidates

There were a record 25 candidates to fill the 10 Councillor positions, and many of them were new. Aside from Brian Thom who had retired and Karen Redman who was running for Mayor instead, all of the incumbent Councillors ran again, alongside 17 other locals.

The Bunyip newspaper ran a full four-page profile featuring every candidate, which I’ll share here as a clickable gallery for you to look through at your leisure.

Now, the eagle-eyed among you may say – “Cody, there are only twenty-four profiles here, but I was promised twenty-five candidates”. You are correct, someone was forgotten in that week’s Bunyip. None other than myself, in fact. Luckily, they still ran my profile the next week instead.

The Councillor Election Results

For the sickos out there who continue to read the several-hundred-page Councillor preference flow documents that I link to for reference, you’re in luck once again, because this one is 204 pages.

Gawler’s 2014-2018 Council, by order of their election, were:

1. Adrian Shackley (incumbent)
2. Ian Tooley (new) (and recipient of this year’s “first place on the ballot” bonus)
3. Scott Fraser (incumbent) (only on Council from 2014-2015; unfortunately, he died a year into the term)
4. Jim Vallelonga (new)
5. Merilyn Nicolson (new)
6. Kevin Fischer (incumbent)
7. David Hughes (incumbent)
8. Robin “Nobby” Symes (new)
9. Paul Koch (incumbent)
10. Beverly Gidman (new)

Five of the eight incumbent Councillors who ran were successful in their re-election. Missing out from the incumbent elected group were Diane Fraser, Barry Neylon (who had only been there for two years due to winning a 2012 by-election) and Dianne Hockley (same situation). Of the seventeen other candidates who ran, five were elected and the remaining twelve missed out.

One notable difference between this election and all the previous ones we’ve looked at is that, presumably as a result of the vote being split between a record-high number of candidates, nobody managed to hit quota on first preferences. As a reminder, “quota” is the number of votes you need in order to get elected, which for the purpose of electing 10 Councillors is 1/11th (or about 9% of the vote).

Most Councillors tend to reach that number after gaining preference votes from other eliminated candidates, but in both 2018 and 2022, three Councillors had high enough first-preference vote counts to be elected instantly. That this wasn’t the case in 2014 indicates that the vote was much more evenly spread this time around.

Lessons from my failed campaign

I did say at the start that there would be fewer essays about how elections work than usual, but I didn’t promise that there wouldn’t be any. This was my first attempt at running for election, which landed me in 22nd place out of 25 candidates. To be fair to my campaign, a busy Mayoral election and a massive list of Councillor candidates is not a great time to try to introduce yourself to the Town for the first time, but looking back now I did have a lot of improvements I needed to make.

That said, I did think that my campaign pitch was pretty good. As a 24-year-old involved with Gawler’s Youth Advisory Committee and with experience in modern technology such as websites and social media, I had both a niche and a clear point of difference to other candidates, most of whom I had over a 20-year age gap with. People were always talking about wanting change and fresh faces and youth involvement, and there I was, ready to get more involved.

It’s not that I didn’t campaign; I printed out fliers and did some letterboxing and attended all the Meet the Candidate forums, where I think I spoke well. But it’s also true that I had the attitude that with all those good aspects going for me, I would just let everyone know that I existed, and then at some point, all I had to do was magnanimously “allow people to make their own decisions” and “step back”, etc etc.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that this kind of “magnanimity” where you don’t bother people because you’d like to build up goodwill is a privilege reserved for people who are already comfortably on top, because they are operating on foundations they had previously built. The reason that they can even consider “stepping back” is because their starting position is already 200 metres into a 400-metre race. Even then, in any given election cycle without fail, people who were previously at the top will lose their so-called “safe seats” (a forbidden phrase to our local MP Tony Piccolo) because they have allowed others to catch up by misjudging how “magnanimous” they can afford to be.

If you sit back and “let the people decide” they will naturally decide in favour of the people who’ve made the effort to consistently communicate their campaign message. That’s not necessarily because their campaign message was better than your own, but because yours never made it through the ambient noise of the election in the first place. I’m not talking about aggression here, which is a different topic entirely; it’s certainly possible to turn people off your campaign by running a bad one. I’m just talking about assertion. Don’t be satisfied with the idea that someone has heard from you once. For TV advertisers, their rule is to not think of the ad as having really reached the audience until they’ve heard it three times. Think of your campaign in a similar way.

I was competing against 24 other people who also had unique pitches of their own, had fliers of their own, and had voter bases of their own, and I had done nothing particularly unique aside from feeling like I had the best pitch. If I were to re-do my 2014 campaign (while keeping the limited financial and volunteering resources I had then) I would have picked one area small enough for me to focus on and targeted it over the course of the election month with an initial flier, followed by doorknocking, followed by a second flier, which may have included a time-sensitive reminder to vote. Even if I had failed to win the election, I would have begun to build a real support base, instead of spreading my net so wide that I only gained temporary vague recollection in the minds of many.

I noticed what felt like a similar issue while reading one of the campaign interviews with third-place Mayoral candidate Peter Graham.

Not to pick on Peter Graham here or suggest that he fundamentally had the wrong idea; there are many forms of campaigning. You don’t need to, say, doorknock to be successful if you can find your votes in a different way. Maybe utilising his business (he ran the local Blockbuster Video store) was the most efficient strategy that made use of his strengths.

In fact, in 2022, I also did very little doorknocking (though I did a round of fliers) – a lot of my time and money was expended on social media advertising, which I thought was an area where I would get more value-for-effort thanks to my background in the field.

But my point is, that if you don’t have a clear idea of where your numbers are coming from, what you can’t do is hope that people will treat “not hearing from you” as a virtue. I know there can often be a sentiment out in the community that this whole process is a bother, but keep in mind that when you’re hearing from people who hate having to hear about local government, chances are high that you’re also just speaking to the 70% of residents who completely fail to vote each election.

Especially with youth (the demographic I was targeting) but also as a general rule in local government, your main opponent in a non-compulsory election like this isn’t the other candidates, it’s apathy. Turnout at this election was 30.4%, which is a fairly typical turnout for any SA metropolitan council.

So, in 2018 I reworked my election strategy. I don’t think I was wrong about my pitch being good, so I continued to emphasise that I was a young resident who was active in the community and interested in getting more involved and joining Council. But I also gave people a direct call to action. Rather than a flier suggesting wouldn’t it be nice to have young people on the Council, I directly stated: “As a 28-year-old, I’ve often heard people say “we need more young people like you on Council”, but without real action, nothing will change. Help me make a difference with your vote.”

Asking people directly to vote for you can feel confrontational, especially for someone naturally introverted like me. But when it comes down to it, the fact of the matter is that it’s effective.