Labor would have lost byelection in two horse race: Lake

Former Campbelltown Mayor Paul Lake believes Labor would have lost last Saturday’s byelection if it was a two horse race.

“I think Josh Cotter would have been elected, when you look at how the numbers ended up after preferences were distributed,’’ Councillor Lake said.

The Labor candidate, Ben Gilholme was declared the winner after preferences were distributed yesterday.

However his vote did not improve Labor’s support at the September general election, which has it at around 44-45 percent.

At the end of the count, Gilholme picked up 3,025 second preference votes from independent candidate Gary Potts to finish with a total of 35,854 out of the 77,477 votes cast.

Josh Cotter, who ran under Paul Lake’s Community First Team banner, did a lot better in the preference count, picking up 4,787 votes from Mr Potts, to finish with 27,633.

Cr Lake thinks that would have been the trend in a two horse race and Cotter would have beaten Labor.

“Josh ran a very good campaign, but it was a three way race and so Labor ended up winning,’’ he said.

The result will give Labor a one seat majority in the 15 member council, but Cr Lake doesn’t think things will change much.

[social_quote duplicate=”no” align=”default”]“The mayor, George Brticevic, has so far worked very closely with all the councilors, he’s listened and acted and I think he would continue the same way,’’ Cr Lake said.[/social_quote]

“From what we’ve seen so far he’s not likely to let the result change the way he does things.’’

Cr Lake also believes the State Government and not the Campbelltown ratepayers should pay for the cost of the election, expected to be more than $500,000.

“Council shouldn’t be paying for the election, the government should be footing the bill because it was their ineptness that meant we had to have an election in the first place,’’ he said.

The government had legislated for a countback system to eliminate the need for byelections but for reasons best known to itself it has not gazetted the necessary regulations.

Cr Lake says the whole issue is a mess, with more costly byelections coming up in Sydney and elsewhere.

“They also plan to make countbacks optional for each council to decide if they will use it or not,’’ Cr Lake said.

The final issue related to Saturday’s byelection was fining the 28,465 people who did not vote last Saturday.

The penalty for failing to vote at a State election or Local Government election is $55.

The money is pocketed by NSW Treasury.

If every single person who did not vote last Saturday was fined the government would get a whopping $1.56 million, but Cr Lake doubts that would happen.

“They allow for so many excuses that let a lot of people off the hook there’s no way they are going to collect all that money,’’ he said.