The cost to City of Sydney ratepayers of allowing businesses two votes in elections is set to hit almost $13 million since the state government backed controversial changes to its electoral process.
The bill has led to claims that the business voting process has eroded the democratic power of residents over Town Hall and placed an unworkable and costly burden on the council.
Ahead of council elections on September 4, the City of Sydney has calculated the operational cost of maintaining a register of non-residential business voters has averaged $1.57 million a year since the changes seven years ago.
The City of Sydney has to cover the cost of keeping a register of non-residential voters.Credit:James Alcock
The council also booked an extra $1.74 million to develop the system to hold the data. “While most costs are ongoing, additional costs are incurred close to each election to help ensure local business understand their requirements for that election,” a spokeswoman said.
The Baird government backed the changes to the voting rules in 2014 that mandated the voting of businesses in the City of Sydney, and gave each business two votes. The requirement for a continual register of business voters has made the voting and enrolment system complex.
City of Sydney Labor councillor Linda Scott accused the government of imposing a large annual cost on ratepayers in order to gerrymander the City for conservative interests.
“No other local government has this electoral system where businesses are deemed onto an electoral roll. The voting system is complex, costly and has no clear public benefit,” she said.
Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore also said the changes to the rules had eroded the democratic power of residents and “placed an unworkable and costly burden on the council”.
“One of the great flaws of the legislation was that it gives businesses two votes and residents just one, completely reversing one of the founding principles of Australia’s democracy: one vote, one value. [It] was not about business voting at all – it was about manipulating democracy,” she said.
“Given the fact this legislation has not been rolled out across the state, it was clearly a targeted attack on me and my team, a costly and unworkable experiment that has been deemed a failure.”
Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore says the changes to voting rules in 2014 have eroded the democratic power of residents.Credit: Wolter Peeters
But Local Government Minister Shelley Hancock said it was only fair that many of the hundreds of thousands of workers across many businesses in the City of Sydney who did not live within its boundaries had a say in who represents them.
“It is disappointing that the lord mayor of one of the wealthiest councils in NSW is objecting to greater participation in the September local government elections,” she said.
Mrs Hancock declined to comment on whether the government would consider taking on the cost of maintaining the register of business voters from the council.
Crs Moore and Scott are vying again for the mayoralty, while new candidates this year include Indigenous leader Yvonne Weldon. Lawyer Shauna Jarrett is the Liberals’ frontrunner.
The council said the non-residential roll for the elections on September 4 was expected to include about 48,000 voters. An exact number will not be known until after rolls close on July 26.
At the last poll in 2016, a total of 22,972 non-residential voters were verified by the Electoral Commission to vote in the City of Sydney election. That was more than 13 times the 1709 non-residential voters who registered at the prior elections in 2012.
Despite uncertainty about what impact the business vote would have on the 2016 elections, Cr Moore ended up gaining a swing of almost 7 per cent to win about 58 per cent of the mayoral vote.
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