This election marks a very special point for my blog, as rather than simply providing commentary on results already available on the Electoral Commission website (they currently provide records back to 2006), I am now providing Gawler Council election results not collated anywhere else online.
This is now a historical resource in its own right and will continue to be one (hopefully) all the way back to the very first Gawler Council in 1857.
On another note, we finally depart from having anyone involved in these elections who is still on the Council at the time of writing this. Brian Sambell, who started in 2006, is also on the current-day Council, but we have no incumbent Councillors from 2003 or earlier.
The Mayoral race
The Bunyip, April 16th 2003.
At the 2003 Council elections, incumbent Mayor Tony Piccolo was challenged by Sandy Davies (no relation to myself), an incumbent Councillor who had been on Gawler Council for eight years, serving since 1995. According to this headline, the Bunyip believed her to be the first woman to ever nominate for the position of Gawler’s Mayor.
The Bunyip, January 2nd, 2003.
This announcement was in January, well ahead of the May elections. Both candidates would receive a full page in the Bunyip for their campaign platforms.
Tony Piccolo covered campaign issues such as improved public transport and a fairer deal for rural residents, whereas Sandy Davies brought up improved services in hard waste collection, and potentially the return of a Council ward system (which had only just been abolished).
The Bunyip, April 16th 2003.
Enough of that, though; I’m sure you’re all wondering the same thing. That is, which Italian word would Tony Piccolo’s family (visiting from overseas) use to describe our fair Town of Gawler? Well, you’re in luck, because thanks to our local Bunyip newspaper, we know the answer.
The Bunyip, January 22nd, 2003.
The Mayoral Results
The Bunyip, May 14th, 2003.
Tony Piccolo had been returned as Mayor, but in a very close election; he received only 52% of the vote, winning 2971 votes to 2697. Notably, this was quite a high turnout of 41.5%, though not as high as the turnout of the 2000 election, which had reached almost 46%.
The Councillor non-race
Let’s talk a little about the process for finding the official state government record of Council election results. It actually took me a while to locate these particular Councillor results, because the Electoral Commission only covered the Mayoral race; the Councillor results were just absent without any explanation.
In the end, I had to track it down in the South Australian Government Gazette, which is something of a nuisance if you don’t know the exact day you’re looking for. If you’re unfamiliar with the Gazette, it’s a regular (currently weekly) publication of the government that lists every single legal action that has occurred in the state.
That does include local government results, but also encompasses, for example, every time someone acquires or sells land, or a business gets a liquor license; at one point while searching there was even a list of every licensed veterinarian in the state (though I’m not sure why). This leads to a lot of false positives trying to search for “Gawler”, which contains all of these things.
Anyway, the good news is, I’ll be relying on the Gazette for official confirmation for the rest of this series when we reach pre-Electoral Commission times (a.k.a. 1997), so I might as well get in some practice with the search engine now.
Ten candidates applied for ten positions and were automatically elected. There’s obviously no point in listing these in order of election; they all got zero votes. That said, I do still want to note which candidates were incumbent and which were new.
Incumbent Councillors (5): Brian Thom, Ian Skewes, Lillian Bartlett, Helena Dawkins, Robin Richter
Returning (but not incumbent) Councillors (1): Warren Dibben (had lost the past two elections but was back after a six-year gap)
New Councillors (4): David Arandle, David Strauss, David Ferguson (a good year for Davids), Valerie Paltridge
Retiring Councillors (5): Sandy Davies (ran for Mayor instead), Dianne Field, Judy Gillett-Ferguson, Peter Graham, John Ragless
Thankfully, the Bunyip did run a page introducing the new Council, otherwise we wouldn’t have any of their profiles for this election:
The Bunyip, May 28th, 2003.
The by-election
This was not the end of the story for the 2003 Gawler Council; in 2005, a by-election was triggered after the resignation of Valerie Paltridge. Councillor Robin Richter had already resigned in June of 2004, but a by-election had not yet been necessary until a second Councillor quit.
The Bunyip, February 2nd, 2005.
That said, I’m not sure about the Bunyip’s spelling of ‘by-election’ in the above article, unless they mean that the election could swing either way. The seven candidates also received their own profiles in the Bunyip.
The Bunyip, May 4th 2005.
Notably, this election involves the third Carmody that we’ve seen so far (they’re all related), after Karen Carmody who won in 2010 and Helene Carmody who ran in 2022. Incidentally, I can confirm that Kylee Carmody is still playing tennis for Willaston eighteen years later, because I played against her back in January.
The results were:
The Bunyip, May 19th, 2005.
Kevin Fischer and Gregory Morris won, filling out the remaining 18 months of the term. The Bunyip does not provide any official results for this one, aside from the article stating that “Mr Piccolo described the results as quite close”, but I did manage to track down the first preference results in the Government Gazette.
We are stuck in a time loop
For the last three posts now, part of my coverage has been dedicated to highlighting recurring topics that Gawler Council has had to deal with over and over with eerie repetition, so I’ve decided to just make this an official section of the blog from now on.
While I was searching through 2004 and 2005 in particular (while looking for by-election news), I encountered what was honestly a cavalcade of familiar sights. These include:
The Bunyip, May 25th, 2005
The return of the Barossa Wine Train is a current pet project of our local MP Tony Piccolo. As you can see, this project has been stalled for quite some time, but hopefully someone can eventually get it back on the rails.
The Bunyip, June 1st 2005.
The restoration of this piano is still hovering around the “below the line” part of the Gawler Council budget to this very day, waiting for the year when we have a large amount of money to spare on historic piano repair.
The Bunyip, January 6th, 2005
Recent complaints about the state of our Christmas decorations and celebrations have resulted in multiple Councillor budget bids for the 2023 budget cycle.
The Bunyip, April 30, 2003.
Here it is again; the Gawler Council’s most ever-topical issue, boundary reform. Here, Tony Piccolo is spruiking it as necessary as part of his 2003 Mayoral election campaign.
“It is important that boundaries reflect community boundaries if local government is to be truly representative and effective”, he stated. He has first-hand experience with such boundary reform; Gawler’s last change of boundaries in 1985 was what moved his home into the Gawler Council in the first place.
The Bunyip, July 21st and August 4th, 2004.
Another extremely topical issue: residents wanting the closure of Edith Street because of its nature as a traffic rat-run. We’ve had several public forum representations on this topic from local residents just this year.
Well, this has been a fun election cycle to look through. I’ll see you all again next time when we cover the turn of the millennium – the year 2000.
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