AT the time of going to press, just four ballots were needed to ensure the validity of a referendum that seeks to kill off the East Fremantle-Fremantle merger.
The WA electoral commission says it’ll be “amazing” if the poll falls short, with a ballot box at the council chamber yet to be cleared and, at the time of writing, two days’ of mail still to come in.
For the result of the referendum to be valid, more than half of all eligible voters in the town must return their ballots.
In recent weeks anti-amalgamation campaigners have been pounding pavements, strong-arming neighbours and running full-page ads in the Herald.
They’d thought they’d just about done it when mid-week they were blind-sided by an obscure rule about invalid votes.
Even though the commission’s website had been keeping a progressive tally of all ballots received, only valid ballots would count towards reaching the magic halfway number.
“No” campaign leader, retired resources executive Bruce Seligmann, was livid.
“It’s absolutely disgusting that the figures on the website have been misleading,” he told the Herald.
With returns slowing to a trickle and all votes needing to be back by Saturday February 7, his group was advised to try to rustle up another 100 just to be sure. But when the Herald spoke with Chris Evans from the commission Thursday afternoon, he said it would be “amazing” if the poll fell short.
He says just 87 votes have been deemed invalid from 2674 returned so far. With 5178 ballots issued by the commission, just four more need to come back to hit the target.
Mr Seligmann predicts somewhere between 80 and 90 per cent of returns will be “no” votes.
Although town mayor Jim O’Neill told an electors’ meeting earlier this week that premier Colin Barnett had warned he would simply try a different tack to force an amalgamation, Mr Seligmann says he’ll use the result to widen already-apparent divisions within the Liberal party over the issue: “We will go to the government and pressure some of the ministers who have already expressed some reservations, and say the 80 per cent to 90 per cent of the people who voted—the people who voted you in—are opposed to mergers.
“Have a look at Queensland and what happens when you stop listening to the people.”
Meanwhile, Kwinana’s “no Cockburn merger” also looks like it will achieve an official result.
Mosman Park mayor Ron Norris says with the Kwinana-Cockburn and East Fremantle-Fremantle mergers looking likely to go belly-up, there’ll be a knock-on effect and he thinks the entire process might now grind to a complete halt.
His tiny town is set to be swallowed into the mega-city of Riversea. “It’s the domino effect,” he says. “Where one of the amalgamations is destabilised or stopped, it has a knock-on effect to others.”
If the mergers go down it’s not known what impact that will have on planned boundary changes, which are handled separately.
Palmyra and Bicton have already been removed from Melville by governor’s orders, so if the Freo/East Freo merger falls apart they’ll be homeless.
New submissions would have to go to the local government advisory board, and at Cockburn’s annual electors meeting last Tuesday, CEO Stephen Cain warned Freo might still go for North Coogee and Hamilton Hill if his council’s merger with Kwinana is also killed by the latter’s poll, as expected.
by EDDIE ALBRECHT and STEVE GRANT
