The power of five: Women poised to dominate council
By Tim Howard
As many as five of the next Clarence Valley Council could be women as vote counting heads toward the distribution of preferences in the 2024 council election.
The deadline for postal votes ends on Friday and on Monday the distribution of preferences begins and is likely to conclude on October 3.
How preferences fall could spell a radical change for the next council, with two of the former council, Karen Toms and Steve Pickering sitting outside the nine.
The best placed to slip into ninth spot is Ms Toms, who with 1451 first preference votes was 96 votes behind Amanda Brien, who holds ninth spot on current counting.
Former councillor Andrew Baker, with 1174 and another incumbent Steve Pickering on 1146 also have an outside chance of forcing their way into contention if preferences flow their way.
But predicting how this flow might go has been fraught in recent elections and could be more so this time.
Many candidates did not produce how to vote cards during campaigning and voting patterns, like women exclusively supporting female candidates down or up the ballot paper, introduced further complexity.
Current mayor and candidate Peter Johnstone said it looked like there would be five women on the next council with Cristie Yager, Alison Whaites, Lynne Cairns and Debrah Novak all in strong positions.
“The rule of thumb is after you’re past 1500 on first preference you could pull another 1000 from preference, so you’re pretty safe,” Mr Johnstone said.
He said, like top candidate, Cristie Yager, he had detected a womens supporting women candidates bias in this poll.
“I would certainly say that I think Amanda and Karen are in the box seat,” he said.
Mr Johnstone said he welcome the change in voting pattern and the increase in female representation.
“The difference this time is there’s a very good chance we’re going to have five women to four men, which I think is a very good thing, because the bias has always been the other way,” he said.
“And dare I say, there are a few men around who would only vote for men. So just goes both ways, for sure.”
He said if Ms Toms and Mr Pickering miss out it would be sad as Ms Toms had a wealth of experience on council and Mr Pickering had been active in his first term.
“He’s somebody with a great attention to detail,” he said. It’s something I like. He does his reading. We’ve talked about reading earlier, but he does his reading. He looks at it in detail. And that’s exactly what we need on council.”
The 2024 result could be similar to the position in 2021, when five councillors decided not to re-contest.
This time three of the former council, Ian Tiley, Jeff Smith and Bill Day called it quits and the voters will make a decision on the other two.
The Greens candidate Greg Clancy was delighted with his vote and said the new council offered possibilities, but its makeup and leadership were still to be decided.
“It’s interesting that someone like Lynne Cairns, who’s been a bit of a thorn in the side of council, looks like she’ll be on while it could be Karen (Toms) or Steve (Pickering) might miss out,” he said.
“If that plays out it’s going to be whole different dynamic in the new council.”
He it was just guesswork trying to work out where preferences might go.
“I don’t think anyone follows how to votes much, and it wasn’t something many of us went with,” he said.
“You look at something like National Party allegiance, where Peter and Allison are involved with the party locally and there might be something there.
“And someone like Shane Causley obviously is a name with strong Nationals links, so there could be some movement that way.”
He said that while it was interesting to speculate, it really came down to waiting until the final count on October 2 and the poll declaration the next day.
