Has the idea of running for the Gawler Council ever interested you? If so, this Frequently Asked Questions document should hopefully provide some context on whether, when, and why to run for Council.
Aside from this document, the other thing I would recommend when making a decision on whether to run is to watch a Council meeting for yourself! You can either attend in person or watch online, and the schedule of meetings is available on the Council website.
The Gawler Civic Centre on Murray Street, where the Council meets.
When are the next Council elections?
The current Council (both the Elected Members and the Mayor) were officially elected for a four-year term in November 2022; this term will end in November 2026. This applies to every Council in South Australia; all SA Council elections are run simultaneously.
Before this, there will be a lead-up process where nominations open and close, the campaign starts, and the ballots are sent out. At the last election, this process began in August – it will probably be similar in 2026, but I haven’t seen that information come through yet.
Am I eligible to run for Gawler Council?
There are only a few things you need to run for the Gawler Council. You must be an Australian citizen, be old enough to vote, and live in the council area (that is, be listed as a resident on the voter roll). If you live outside the Town of Gawler but own property or pay commercial rates as a business in Gawler, you can join the voter roll through an application process.
There are also some things you can’t be. The most likely caveat to apply is that you can’t be an employee of Gawler Council (though working for a different Council is fine). This would be a conflict, as you would be on the organisation’s “board of directors” as an Elected Member while also taking orders from the CEO as a worker.
There are some other clauses, like not being a Member of Parliament or likely to spend the entire Council term in jail, but they are much less common concerns; if you’re not sure, you can just read Part 6 of the SA Local Government Act.
What kind of time investment would this be? Could I work or study alongside being on Council?
Being an Elected Member is not a full-time responsibility and can be balanced with other work or study. As a rule, Gawler usually schedules meetings for a 7 PM start to avoid clashing with regular office hours. Tuesday nights are preferred for holding meetings/information sessions, but we will meet on Wednesdays if all the Tuesdays get booked.
Your level of time investment in Council is mostly up to you. Let’s say that all you do is attend the monthly Council meeting and join a couple of sub-committees you are interested in (like the Youth Advisory Committee). In that case, you might have 2-3 meetings per month, plus any training/information sessions required to get you up to speed.
There are official minimum attendance requirements to be a Councillor, namely that you attend the regular monthly meeting of the Council (on the fourth Tuesday of every month). You can send an apology or ask for a Leave of Absence in advance, but if you simply disappear for three consecutive months without notice, you can be booted from Council. The government has also brought in mandatory training to get new Councillors up to speed, which will mean an extra ~12 training sessions over the first year on Council.
The rest is optional! Sub-committees are great for getting into Council business at a more in-depth level, and if you want to be in the loop as a community representative, you can join other community organisations and attend local events. However, how much extra stuff you sign up for depends on what you think you can juggle with your other life responsibilities.
What do Councillors have the power to do?
The power of an Elected Member is not at an individual level but as a collective. While I do not have the personal power to enforce any policies, as a group of 11 (ten Councillors plus the Mayor), we make up the board of directors for the Town of Gawler.
We make strategic decisions for the town, such as determining the priorities of the Council. Here is a real example for you: our Gawler Aquatic Centre is extremely popular but also wildly inefficient as a business. One of the main issues is in trying to heat an outdoor pool that wasn’t initially built for it – for example, it has a deep end that is too deep (which makes trying to heat it considerably more difficult). We could fix this with a total structural redo (i.e., demolition and then building something new).
A proper upgrade like this means we might have to spend a decade saving money and retiring our debt so that we can go deep into debt again to fund this project. It would be a savings in the long-term, but in the short-to-medium term, it would be a massive expense and would likely mean raising the rates.
So, do we need to save for an upgrade, or should we do some temporary patch fixes and put off the problem for a future Council to solve? Or, as a third option, should we shut down the popular but inefficient pool, lowering the rates in exchange?
All of these are valid options. Securing the upgrade is an obvious “plus” for our long-term planning, but the pool isn’t our only asset, so prioritising it means our other expensive problems elsewhere are getting those temporary patch fixes instead. Residents would be upset at the loss of the pool but, on the flip side, are also clamouring for lower rates due to cost-of-living pressures.
We have plenty of subject-matter experts on staff who can give us technical advice on the operational matters at play here, but what is needed is a strategic decision by the residents/ratepayers who fund the Council, of whom Elected Members are the representatives.
What don’t Councillors have the power to do?
The role of Elected Members within the Town of Gawler is limited. They do not directly control the staff or its hirings and firings – the elected body has only a single employee (the CEO) who is responsible for running the staff team. If twelve “CEOs” ran around the Council office giving conflicting directions, the organisation would be in chaos.
Decisions above a certain threshold do need to come to Council, but we also have a Delegations Policy to allow staff to handle more minor issues (otherwise, we would meet every night to approve e.g. $5 stapler expenses).
This is one that I encounter occasionally: Elected Members (including the Mayor) have no power to reverse your parking ticket or to approve your shed extension. This kind of work is at the operational staff level.
As an Elected Member, you won’t be able to solve everything that comes to you. Understandably, most residents do not have a clear distinction regarding which tier of government is responsible for what, so you will receive plenty of feedback you won’t be able to help with directly.
Most commonly, this happens around major roads (which are the State Government’s responsibility), trains/train stations/buses (ditto), and a range of development-related issues. Many restrictions (like heritage laws) may be enforced by Council staff but are actually due to state government law.
What sort of compensation do Elected Members get for their time?
The amount goes up with CPI every year, but the 2022 allowance for Gawler Councillors was $19,110 per year, in the form of $1592 deposited into your bank account monthly.
Let’s say you put in the equivalent of one full day of work every week (8 hours) as a combination of attending meetings, reading agendas for those meetings, and other aspects of the role like going to community events, running your Councillor social media pages, or meeting with residents. In that case, you would be getting reimbursed at around $50 per hour.
However, as I mentioned above, time commitment to your Councillor role is what you decide to make of it. You will get the same allowance however much work you do – if you’re putting in 20 hours every week, your Council allowance will quickly amount to less than the minimum award rate for a fast-food employee. The allowance is a reimbursement for your commitment that could allow you to justify some lower work hours or a reduced study load, but it won’t scale with time spent – many Councillors do extra work, but this is due to their passion for the local area rather than for a financial incentive.
Some people do get a higher reimbursement – the Deputy Mayor receives an extra 25% to their monthly allowance, whereas the Mayor is paid 4x the Elected Member allowance, though this (obviously) also comes with additional workload and responsibilities.
As a final note, it is worth noting that this is not “pay” but an allowance; it doesn’t receive any superannuation or other employment benefits, only the directly stated amount.
How does Gawler Council’s structure work? Do I have to run in a ward?
Gawler Council doesn’t use a ward system, meaning that rather than running against a small pool of candidates to represent a suburb or two, it’s an open field of all the candidates for the entire town, where the first ten candidates to reach the quota win.
This has both benefits and disadvantages. The upside is that because you do not have to compete against a specific person for limited spots, you don’t have to try to knock out some long-established Councillor on their home turf. In recent Gawler elections, about half of the elected members have been replaced each election cycle, so there is plenty of room for new people to squeeze in.
The downside is that it can be hard to know where to start – the entire Town of Gawler (over 19,000 enrolled voters at the last election) is available to you, so you’ll need to make your own decisions on who to represent, whether that is geographic or demographic.
Other resources
Running a Council campaign in SA involves a few associated legislative rules and guidelines. You can find various documents and candidate handbooks on the subject on the Electoral Commission of South Australia hub page,
For more context around how elections typically work in Gawler, I would recommend my blog posts covering the 2022 and 2018 Gawler Council elections.
If you don’t know where you would get started on organising an election campaign, there are plenty of books on the subject, but this one, by former Victorian Mayor Ruth McGowan, is especially notable because it is free to download on her website as a PDF.
If you have any other questions, feel free to contact me (contact info is at the bottom of the page).