It's time for the biennial show of hands in the Town of Victoria Park
It is local election season here in Western Australia, and for anybody interested, here is my take on the race in which I will vote, the Town of Victoria Park. I do not expect an awful lot of people will care, but if you follow this account there's a good chance you're a nerd for elections, so you might appreciate finding out about a random one going on somewhere in Australia right now. Polls close for all WA local elections at 6pm AWST today, Saturday 18 October.
In this very long and self-indulgent post, I will first introduce you to my local government area, then explain the electoral system, tell you what I'm looking for in a councillor, and see if anybody on the ballot gets even remotely close to meeting my satisfaction.
When I discuss the candidates, I refer regularly to three things. One is a report of a meet-the-candidates debate by Sky Croeser (a current councillor who is not up for re-election until 2027), and the official candidate blurbs and additional information documents, which can both be found here. The blurbs are sent to all voters in the voting packs; the additional info, if the candidate provided any, is only online. Learning more is challenging if you, like me, are one of the many ordinary voters who do not personally know a candidate or participate in the handful of community/party settings where one might get the juicy gossip. Media coverage of my council is practically non-existent.
Meet the Town of Victoria Park
The name "Town" of Victoria Park might lead you to think I live in a country town, perhaps somewhere nice and lush near the coast. Instead, the Town is one of Perth's inner suburban councils on the banks of the Swan River, and its population is insufficiently large to be called a City because WA loves tiny postage-stamp council areas that should have been merged years ago for economies of scale and to reduce how many of them are invisible gated communities run by NIMBYs. Victoria Park was in fact separated from the City of Perth in 1994 in a move to this day widely liked by a strange combination of NIMBYs and WA lefties (because Colin Barnett's Liberal government sought amalgamations in the early 2010s and negatively polarised the left into hating the notion) and roundly hated by anybody who wants decent local government.
So, although I live in a "Town", I am within 5km of the Perth GPO. The Town contains a landmark a lot of interstate people will know: Optus Stadium. It is on the Burswood Peninsula near Crown Casino. At the other end of the council's patch is the main campus of Curtin University in Bentley. The council covers a bunch of suburbs that went through a pattern similar to many other inner burbs of Australian cities: working class in the first half of the 20th century, suburban sprawl after WWII led to local population decline, then it gentrified from the 1970s as middle-class city office workers sought to live near their work. There is also a significant population of Curtin Uni students.
The Town remains mostly low density, though there are some areas of medium density and a few decent sized apartment blocks. There are way too many single-family homes on large plots for somewhere this close to the CBD. Densification along most residential streets is piecemeal and incremental, with properties subdivided to add a second house in an old backyard or to replace one 1920s house and large backyard with a few townhouses. The main commercial strip is Albany Highway; despite what its name may imply, it is a high street lined with shops and cafes, many of which reflect the large local South, East, and SE Asian diasporas. It is one of Perth's best cafe strips, but some sections are blighted by large car sales yards, all of which in my view should be compulsorily acquired for construction of apartment blocks. Shepperton Road is the main arterial heading southeast from Perth CBD to the southeastern suburbs, and it is paralleled by the Southwestern Railway to Bunbury, which in this section is used by the electrified suburban Armadale and Thornlie lines. Frequencies in Victoria Park are turn-up-and-go, with trains serving our stations every 7–8 minutes.
The electoral system
The Town of Victoria Park is divided into two wards (Banksia and Jarrah) that elect four councillors each, plus a mayor elected by the Town at large. The division between the wards is Shepperton Road. One detail that will probably surprise most interstate readers is suggested in this post's title: elections are held every two years for half the membership of each ward (i.e. two councillors apiece). The mayor is elected for four years; current mayor Karen Vernon retained her office in 2023 and is not up for election this year.
Local elections in Western Australia were one of the last holdouts of first-past-the-post voting in Australia. It was used up to and including the elections in 2021 for single-member and multi-member contests alike; in the latter, this meant it was plurality block voting (i.e. if you had two vacancies, you got two votes of equal value, with the two highest vote-getters winning, no preferences). I moved to WA in 2022, and thankfully early the next year the McGowan government legislated to end this abomination and replaced it with optional preferential voting. First-past-the-post/plurality block voting survives in some Queensland councils; I'm not sure anywhere else in Australia still uses this most unlikeable of electoral systems?
Voting is not compulsory for local elections in WA, which means that turnout rates are usually appalling. In the last decade, Victoria Park's turnout has been around 24–29%; only in 2017 did turnout exceed 30%. Like almost all councils, Victoria Park uses postal voting rather than in-person attendance, although a box is set up at the council offices to drop off your vote (primarily for people who leave it too late to post). So, because I am a nerd for voting, I am going there today and pretending it is a normal attendance vote.
The atrocious turnout rate means that Hayden Donnell's excellent piece for NZ's local elections earlier this month about how "city is made of council" is just as relevant for WA. As Hayden puts it, "So many of your daily problems are caused by council. They get away with it because everyone thinks they’re boring and irrelevant." So, "Please vote. I do not know how else to say this."
One thing that does not help turnout is that most candidates for local government stand as independents, even if they are members of parties. Low-info voters receive a pack with a ballot containing bunch of names of people they've never heard of, and a small booklet where each candidate gets a black-and-white headshot and a short blurb to spruik their case. These blurbs usually boil down to "I have lived here for x-years, I love it, somehow I will provide better services without rate rises, vote for me!" It's spectacularly useless. People who demand no parties in local government mystify me—especially those who demand no politics in local government, an inherently political activity. Party labels are a helpful proxy for someone's general inclinations and views, especially for low-info voters.
What I am looking for in a candidate
As I said above, I live so close to the Perth CBD that an elite AFL player could just about kick a torp from out front my place and hit one of the office towers in the CBD. Hence, my biggest wish is for an out-and-out YIMBY urbanist candidate whose main platform is for rapid and substantial densification of Victoria Park. I like living here and I think many thousands more people should also be able to like living here.
Perth is often said to be the most sprawling city in the world, and at the moment most new homes are being built as sprawl in the far north and south. It is an absolutely insane, environmentally unsustainable way to design a city. Victoria Park must do its bit to make Perth more sustainable: council must enable developers to build up so that people can live much, much nearer their places of work, study, and leisure and enjoy car-light or car-free lifestyles. If you live in a housing estate out Yanchep way, your life will be car-dependent; if, however, more people can live in Victoria Park, they can give up their cars, save oodles of money in the process, and spend it at local businesses. Also, I will win personally because more cool cafes, pubs, and gig venues will open if there are more people to patronise them.
If Victoria Park is to have any hope of supporting population growth and more sustainable lifestyles, it must improve its infrastructure for active transport. Part of that involves more protected cycle lanes; Perth drivers seem blind to anything that is not another car. Moreover (and most important to me as someone unable to ride a bike for eyesight-related reasons), we need much better pedestrian infrastructure. Far too many streets have footpaths only on one side, unprotected or poorly protected crossings of busy roads, and circuitous routes that could be a lot more direct. This actively discourages a walking culture. It is very obvious to me that people who walk a lot have had little to no influence on infrastructure here. As someone who walks everywhere, I can tell walking is the option of last resort for most locals because I rarely pass anyone on foot except for a) people near shops walking from their car, or b) dog walkers.
More traffic calming measures in general would be great. There has been some movement on this front lately. I want councillors who support more works like what is going on right now on Albany Highway out front the Victoria Park Hotel to make that intersection safer for pedestrians. To get better active transport infrastructure and car calming, the council needs revenue to pay for it, hence I cannot support rate freezes or reductions; they would lead to expenditure cuts at a time when we need to spend money to make a better community.
Something astounding to me is that Victoria Park is apparently one of Perth's leafier council areas. If this is leafy, I would hate to think how bare and baking many suburbs must be. Victoria Park badly needs more urban tree canopy. Perth is a hot city (too hot, though thankfully dry rather than humid). More trees would reduce the urban heat island effect, and also make walking more attractive in the hotter months.
Last, something aspirational: I want councillors who will work with neighbouring councils and the state government to get light rail back on the agenda (despite Rita Saffioti downplaying it a week ago). Perth should be moving towards upgrading its high-frequency bus routes (principally the 9xx routes) into light rail. For Victoria Park, it would immensely improve public transport to Curtin University, which has one of those campuses you find in every capital city that had its location chosen by the most car-brain'd mid-century planners imaginable. It is out of reach of either the Armadale/Thornlie lines or the Mandurah line, and consequently the bus routes that serve it become hopelessly crowded during semester. I fantasise about one route running along St Georges/Adelaide Terraces and down Albany Highway and Kent St to Curtin, with another linking Canning Bridge station on the Mandurah line via Curtin to either Carlisle or Oats St station, thence to Belmont Forum and Perth Airport. Pie in the sky? Yes. Would I vote without hesitation for a councillor at least prepared to consider this? Duh.
Last, the big issue locally is opposition to the state government's proposed redevelopment of Burswood Park to include a racetrack (for an annual three-day V8 Supercars event) and an amphitheatre for concerts. I think a racetrack is a poor use of the land but I don't feel as strongly about this as it seems most locals do; it's not my main issue. There are lots of placards up around Victoria Park against it, and council candidates seem to uniformly oppose it. I imagine it would be a nuisance for current residents on the Burswood Peninsula, and I'd rather the money be spent on more housing there than a racetrack (the amphitheatre sounds cool, more live music please). Burswood has two railway stations—one of that name, another for Perth Stadium—and more high-density development should happen there, as it is so close to countless workplaces and in a gorgeous spot in a bend of the Swan River with parks, Optus Stadium, and already some decent cafes and a brewery. But if the racetrack goes ahead, oh well that's a Perth thing to happen.
The candidates: Banksia Ward
You might well be thinking "finally, he's got the people on the fucking ballot". I'll start with Banksia ward, which I am grateful is being contested at all: there are 3 candidates for 2 positions. Incumbents Lindsay Miles and Peter Devereux are being challenged by Scott Ingram. None of them to my knowledge are members of a political party, though Ingram has sufficiently little info online that he might be.
Before writing this entry, all I knew about this race was from the uninspiring corflutes I've seen around the place: Ingram wants to "bring back weekly red bin collection", while Devereux is an "independent voice for a safe, sustainable and inclusive community" and Miles very similarly promotes a "sustainable, inclusive and liveable Vic Park". So, the incumbents are using platitudes that say virtually nothing about their positions or achievements, while Ingram is focusing on a petty issue indeed. (Bins with red lids are for general waste and are collected fortnightly; yellow-lid bins for recyclables are the same; lime green "FOGO" bins for food organics and garden organics are collected weekly.)
Are they more interesting than first impressions suggest? Well, Ingram has a website with no content. Great job, mate. Real professional. His blurb in the candidates booklet spruiks a two-year rate freeze. Why that long specifically? What will he cut or not fund? This sort of lazy rates policy means that for me he's out straight away; sorry folks, but services cost money. We don't want to end up like New Zealand, where decades of low-rates councillors who didn't want to spend money on anything have left cities with decayed infrastructure (see the Hayden Donnell article linked above). Anyone who wants to freeze or reduce rates is immediately on my shitlist.
Devereux is Senior Lecturer in Sustainability at Murdoch Uni, and his academic work seems predominantly about volunteering and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Initially this made me a bit wary; I also work in academia and I've noticed that here in WA, a fair few academics love to cite the Sustainable Development Goals while doing nothing—professionally or personally—that achieves sustainability, least of all sustainable cities (i.e. compact ones) or transport (i.e. reducing car dependency). But then I read Sky Croeser's report on the candidate debate and my opinion markedly improved. Devereux's answer to "What’s your craziest idea for Vic Park if anything was possible?" is basically my tram vision as outlined above! His other answers are about as good as I'd expect from an incumbent on this council.
As for Miles, she voted to reduce rate increases from 5% to 4%, but she at least supports active transport and urban canopy initiatives. She emphasises the need for better active transport links from railway stations to local hubs, although she pooh-poohs bike lanes on main streets; her desire for better cycling and pedestrian infrastructure on quieter parallel streets is fine, but this is a "both and" situation, not "one and not the other". Broadly, then, I think Jarrah Ward is pretty easy to rank: Devereux 1, Miles 2, and Ingram 3.
The candidates: Jarrah Ward
Neither incumbent is contesting this election, Bronwen Ife and Jesse Hamer. So, from six contestants this year, two newbies will land on council. In this contest, most of the candidates do have party membership or endorsement. It is important to distinguish the two; those who simply have party membership are standing on their own account and not as official, endorsed representatives of the party.
I can immediately tell you who stands out as the least desirable candidate: Carl Celedin. Although he is a Labor member and there are a couple of Liberal-aligned people to come, he is your classic local government boomer bore. He vows to keep rates "at or below inflation", never mind the services council needs to provide. He is a big fan of emphasising that he has served on another council before and thus does not need training; the irony is that when he quit the City of South Perth in December 2022, he could have spared them the expense of a by-election if he had simply set his date of resignation for about a month later. Moreover, his emphasis on not needing training is such a strange thing to highlight; it is a price-of-everything-value-of-nothing attitude that it is hardly worth taking seriously. Who cares if a great candidate needs a quick briefing to know the ins and outs of council procedure?
Celedin's answers at the candidates debate were atrocious. He is outright NIMBY and anti-urbanist; he believes that Victoria Park is "under attack" from proposals for "massive blocks of boring and distasteful development". This is utterly deranged language to describe houses for people, especially as he said it in the context of upzoning the 1km around Oats St railway station, which is a major interchange with high-frequency bus routes.
Andra Biondi is the failed Liberal candidate for the state seat of Victoria Park. Hannah Beazley absolutely spanked Biondi at the WA election in March, 66.7% to 33.3% two-candidate-preferred. Biondi also was one of two candidates (alongside Ingram) to not attend the candidate debate. Nonetheless, she is the only candidate to leave a leaflet in my letterbox this whole election season. It does not mention her Liberal background, and she is not running as an endorsed candidate; she tries to appear teal-esque. Her election material is the usual "I'm a local standing up for common sense, small businesses, and the community" guff you get from right-leaning candidates. In any case, as a crypto-Lib, she does not warrant a good preference.
Michael McGrady, like Biondi, is a member of the Liberals and is also not running with party endorsement. His promo blurb begins by mentioning two completely irrelevant qualities: the fact he is a husband and father have nothing to do with whether he is a good politician. He seems to support traffic calming initiatives. His pitch is that he is "an experienced communications leader" (whatever that means) who "know[s] how to listen" (uh-huh). He says his campaign "is centred on a simple principle: Families First". I wish he would just put all residents first, whether they are single, sharehouses, nuclear families, blended families, or any other grouping. The "family" focus fucks me off as someone who lives by himself and wants a Vic Park for everyone, not just parents of small children.
Tim Young once stood for the Greens. At the candidates debate, he mentioned that he has since left the party because he disagreed with some policies. This could be perfectly valid disagreement, but there have also been prominent departures from the Greens for reasons that reflect negatively on those people rather than the party. I have no idea which camp Young falls in. From some online sleuthing, he appears to have been endorsed in 2020 to be the Greens candidate for Victoria Park at the 2021 state election, launched his campaign with state and federal Greens MPs, was holding events for the party as late as mid-January 2021... and then never made it to the poll in March, with Gerard Siero standing for the Greens instead.
Young's election website gives a decent enough sense of him as a career scientist and volunteer with broadly progressive values, but says very little about his policies or objectives. At least his additional info says he wants to preserve tree canopy and improve pedestrian paths, but it's not much to go on. At the candidate debate he added his support for cycling infrastructure, particularly better end-of-trip facilities for bike parking, and enthusiastically spruiked more mixed-use medium density. I wish his website was better; like Devereux, I get a more favourable perspective of him from the debate. Croeser has done us all a real service with that detailed account of proceedings.
Melinda Joseph is a GP and an endorsed candidate for the WA Socialists (yes, part of the national expansion of the Victorian Socialists). Her campaign materials suffer from the usual shortcomings I see from many socialist candidates running for local government in Australia: they emphasise issues about which councils can do little except pass symbolic motions, and if these issues are your primary concern, you should stand for state (Joseph emphasises healthcare) or federal (Joseph has a whole paragraph about Gaza in her candidate blurb). It's interesting, because in the 1940s the erstwhile Communist Party of Australia achieved its best electoral success at local level rather than state or federal. It pursued municipal socialism and focused on very specific local issues that a socialist agenda could address rather than this broad-brush approach taken by today's socialist candidates. Joseph does give a nod or two to things council can do, like bike lanes and traffic calming, but I would have liked her to demonstrate more clarity about how practical socialist objectives can be achieved through the levers council can pull. Basically, instead of making noise about issues where responsibility lies with state or federal parliaments, what can council do for everyday lives of residents?
Last, we get to Jack Gordon-Manley, an endorsed Greens candidate. He did very well at the 2025 state election, winning a primary vote of 20.6% (less than 6% behind Biondi), an 8.1% swing to the Greens, and easily their best local result (the prior record was 14.4% in 2017). He's been running a professional campaign although I have been unable to tell if his idea of "sustainability" aligns with my visions for reducing car dependency and sprawl, or if there is a NIMBY undercurrent; he is, at least, openly in favour of more medium density in the Oats St precinct. As a Green, he aligns with party policies such as doubling Perth's urban tree canopy by 2040, and he emphasises measures to support local artists and cultural activities.
All three of Gordon-Manley, Joseph, and Young talk about renters. I really appreciate this. Too often, local council elections obsess about "ratepayers" and treat renters as ephemeral blow-ins or lesser members of the community, if acknowledged at all. These three candidates discuss experiences renting and/or underscore a commitment to renter rights and social inclusion. They are my top three, with Gordon-Manley first because he is a known quantity aligned with a long-established party policy platform. Young and Joseph are a toss-up. Biondi seems boringly generic centre-right and ranks fourth ahead of McGrady's family-first blather. Celedin, as noted, is an easy last place.
To end, a prediction: the incumbents will be returned in Banksia Ward, while in Jarrah Ward, Biondi and Gordon-Manley will win on name recognition. Interestingly, although I walk and jog around both wards a lot, I have seen corflutes around Banksia a lot more than in Jarrah. My walk home from work is 45 minutes across Jarrah and literally the only corflute I've noticed the entire way is the one pictured above for Young. My morning jog, however, is mostly through Banksia and I pass corflutes for all three candidates at regular intervals. Anyway, this entry was a fun way to work through my vote, and it pushed me to dig further into some candidates; if anyone bothered to read it, I hope you found it interesting too.