I published the first draft of my guide to Brisbane City Council’s election back in June 2023, but at the time most of the guide was reserved for Tally Room financial supporters.
As we are now getting close to the election, I’ve now taken down the paywall for my whole Brisbane City guide.
The guide includes a profile of the Lord Mayoral contest and all 26 ward contests.
You can see the whole guide here, or you can click onto any ward on the below map.
I’d like to thank everyone who has chipped into to support the website. I wouldn’t be able to produce these guides without these donations.
If you want to sign up to support the Tally Room now, you’ll gain access to paywalled guides to the next elections in the ACT, Queensland and Tasmania, and a partial guide to the next federal election covering House races in the states unaffected by the redistribution, as well as the Senate. There’s also a couple of new guides that I’ll announce in the next few days, which you can find if you go looking.
You can gain access to those paywalled guides by signing up to support The Tally Room on Patreon for $5 or more per month.
Throwing in a couple of things I’ll be watching outside of the scope of Brisbane City council.
Firstly Logan Mayor Darren Power has retired. Will be an interesting contest to see if both LNP and Labor “unofficially” field a candidate for Mayor. Labor are naturally represented in a few divisions of Logan council. The LGA incorporates some of Labor’s best support in Queensland at the State and Federal level. Chalmers division of Rankin sits neatly within Logan LGA for example. Conversely, the previous mayor of Logan City, Luke Smith, was affiliated with the LNP (before being charged with corruption). So there is precedence for the LNP being interested in representing Logan at the mayoral level. Many of the rural and outer-suburban parts of Logan receive strong support for the LNP at a state and federal level.
The Logan City LGA is the 4th largest local government in QLD (by population).
Secondly is Division 7 – Gold Coast. Councillor Ryan Bayldon-Lumsden has indicated that he will likely stand for re-election despite facing murder charges. LNP might back a seperate candidate to stand against him given the circumstances. This is going to escalate into a contest with a lot of media interest. Ryan has seemingly so far elicited a sympathetic reception from his local community based on a vocal cohort of Facebook commenters. This might surprisingly serve to improve his re-election bid against any contenders.
@seqobserver – quite right that the Logan mayoral race will be an interesting one. Current mayor Darren Power was an LNP member (although not endorsed by the party) and previously ran for the Nationals in the seat of Springwood.
The current front runner is Cr Jon Raven, who is a Labor member (also not party endorsed). He was deputy mayor at the start of the current term, but may face a challenging from current deputy Cr Laurie Koranski (to my knowledge not a party member, but more conservative than Cr Raven).
Logan is surprisingly politically diverse with sections of the city leaning in all political directions, despite the aggregation effects of larger federal election results.