Mayors have been decided in 15 Tasmanian councils as of 8:40pm tonight, including Launceston, as counting continues in the state’s local government elections.
The Launceston mayoral count is final, with Matthew Garwood elected.
In Hobart, Charles Wooley leads the mayoral count with 19.1% of first preferences as preferences are distributed, while Sue Hickey leads in Glenorchy with 45.5%.
Election analyst Kevin Bonham said the Hobart mayoral race appeared to be a close contest between Wooley and sitting councillor John Kelly.
Based on unofficial scrutineering, which Bonham said was not necessarily representative, he had Wooley 861 votes ahead on primary votes before preferences were distributed. He said Wooley then unofficially gained a further 13 votes on Kelly from the preferences of Rifatul Bari.
Official figures show Wooley on 5,761 first preferences, Kelly on 4,900 and Bill Harvey on 4,747.
After three candidates, including Bari, were excluded, Wooley had 19.77% of the vote, Harvey had moved into second place with 17.21% and Kelly was third with 16.69%. Ryan Posselt was fourth with 12.62%.
Mayoral counts are also under way in seven other councils.
Giovanna Simpson leads in Burnie with 28.7% of first preferences, Casey Farrell in Derwent Valley with 24.9%, Mark Jessop in the Huon Valley with 31.6% and Jo Westwood in Kingborough with 38.7%.
Paul Terrett leads in the Northern Midlands with 27.2%, Chloe Foster in Waratah-Wynyard with 43.4% and Lindsay Newman on the West Coast with 39.9%.
In Burnie, Bonham said Simpson, the deputy mayor and a former state Liberal candidate, had a 9.4% lead over incumbent mayor Teeny Brumby with three exclusions to come.
Bonham described the Derwent Valley primary vote as “very close”, with Farrell, a former Labor MP for Lyons, on 24.94%, incumbent mayor Michelle Dracoulis on 22.86% and Neil Biggar on 19.85%.
Both the mayor and deputy mayor in the Huon Valley retired at this election. Bonham said Jessop led his nearest rival by 2.53% with 26.87% still to come from the preferences of the Greens’ Paul Gibson.
No figures are yet available for the mayoral races in Clarence, where eight candidates are standing, Central Highlands, Glamorgan-Spring Bay, King Island and Sorell.
Results show final mayoral counts in Break O’Day (Mick Tucker), Brighton (Leigh Gray), Central Coast (Cheryl Fuller), Circular Head (Gerard Blizzard), Devonport (Alison Jarman) and Dorset (Rhys Beattie).
Mayoral counts are also final in Flinders (Rachel Summers), George Town (Greg Dawson), Latrobe (Vonette Mead), Meander Valley (Stephanie Cameron), Southern Midlands (Edwin Batt), Tasman (Rod Macdonald) and West Tamar (Rick Shegog).
Bonham said Tucker won more than 61% of the vote against Liz Johnstone, Gray won nearly 70% against John McMaster and Fuller had a 2-1 win over former JLN official Glynn Williams. He said Beattie and Summers had been “easily re-elected”, with more than 70% and 74% of the vote respectively.
Kate Haberle was elected Kentish mayor unopposed. John Hall in Central Highlands and Vanessa Grace on Flinders Island were elected deputy mayors unopposed. Five councillors on King Island and six in Tasman were also elected unopposed.
Both Tasman and King Island were short of councillor nominations when they first closed, so nominations were reopened for an extra week.
Most councils will have fewer members this term. Hobart, Launceston and Clarence will each elect nine councillors, down from 12 and most other councils will elect seven, down from nine.
Across the state, 441 candidates are standing for 213 councillor seats, compared with 510 candidates for 263 seats in 2022. Results so far have 126 seats filled, 115 of them provisionally.
Statewide, 362,282 ballots had been returned by close of business on Tuesday or 85.6% of the 423,251 enrolled voters, compared with a final turnout of 84.8% in 2022.
Turnout ranged from 81% in Brighton and on the West Coast to 88.9% in West Tamar. In Launceston, 84.9% of enrolled voters returned ballots, up from 82.3% at the 2022 election.
Voting in Tasmanian council elections has been compulsory since 2022. Tasmanian Electoral Commissioner Andrew Hawkey said the number of votes meant around 1 million ballot papers had to be entered across all positions.
Hawkey said people who did not vote would receive a letter and go through the full fine process this time, starting at $42.60. After the last election, around 50,000 to 60,000 non-voters were contacted but not fined.
Telephone-assisted voting was available for the first time for people who were overseas, interstate or had a print disability and 2,000 people used it.
Councillor counts are still in progress. In many councils, including Hobart, Launceston, Glenorchy and Clarence, results so far are based on trial counts of around 20% of the vote.
In Hobart, where nine sitting councillors are recontesting nine seats, Bonham said the trial count had four incumbents provisionally losing their seats. He said several margins were “extremely close” and the outcome could change as counting continued.
There are 32 candidates standing for Hobart’s nine councillor seats. The Tasmanian Electoral Commission’s trial count projects Wooley, Kelly, Harvey, Posselt, Harvey Lennon, Marti Zucco, Mike Dutta, Simon Behrakis and first-time candidate Tiffany Ashdown to be elected.
Candidates shown as projected have not been elected and the full count can change the order.
Sitting councillors Ben Lohberger, Louise Elliot, Louise Bloomfield and Zelinda Sherlock, who is the current deputy mayor, are outside the projected nine. Each won between 3.7% and 4.3% of first preferences in the trial count.
Bonham has called seats for Wooley, Kelly, Harvey and Posselt and expects Lennon to win. He said Zucco, Behrakis, Dutta, Ashdown, Lohberger, Elliot, Sherlock and Bloomfield were “in the mix” for the remaining four seats.
Hobart councillor Louise Elliott was among those to concede she could miss out, posting on Facebook that she was “looking likely to not be elected”.
“Based on 20% of the vote counted, I’ve just missed out,” she wrote.
“If you’re superstitious or religious, I’ll take all the help I can get!”
On Bonham’s analysis of the trial distribution, Ashdown stays ahead of Sherlock by six votes and finishes three votes ahead of Lohberger. He said it was very likely at least one of those results would change unless the count shifted in Ashdown’s favour.
Bonham said the trial count result would mean a council split “5-4 for the right but not a majority for the cable car”.
He said the provisional count left Hobart three votes away from an all-male council. Sherlock was getting only about a third of preferences when fellow Green Trenton Hoare was excluded, which Bonham described as “remarkably low”.
In the race for Hobart deputy mayor, Bonham said early sampling suggested a contest between Behrakis, Sherlock and Lohberger.
In Launceston, Bonham said Garwood won 48.3% of the mayoral vote in a field of eight and had three quotas in the councillor trial count. He said all recontesting councillors were winning except Alan Harris, who was a few dozen votes behind.
Mayoral challengers Kyle Barrett and Rose Diamond, Labor state candidate Melissa Anderson and former Examiner editor Martin Gilmour would also join Launceston council on the trial count.
In Clarence, Bonham said Mayor Brendan Blomeley was easily topping the poll in the councillor trial count, which he said boded well for his chances of keeping the mayoralty.
Sitting councillors Heather Chong, James Walker and Daniel Hulme are currently losing their seats, while the Greens’ Carly Allan, Drew Jenner, Zac Morrisby and former state Liberal MP Dean Young would be new to council. Bonham said Chong was only 20 votes behind sitting councillor Wendy Kennedy and 14 behind Young, so she could still win a seat.
In Glenorchy, Bonham said the councillor trial count had sitting councillors Shane Alderton, Justin Stringer, Peter Ridler and Steve King losing their seats, with Hickey, Russel Yaxley and Stuart Slade the only incumbents winning. He said Slade was 43 votes ahead of King, so that result might change.
Lachlan McCarthy, the Greens’ Nathan Volf, Mala Crew and former Liberal candidate Marilena Di Florio look likely to join Glenorchy council on Bonham’s analysis, along with Kelly Sims, who forfeited her seat during the previous term.
Every ballot paper is entered twice to ensure accuracy. Deputy mayor counts are due to start on Thursday and Hawkey said some councils may not have final results until next Tuesday.
