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Liverpool ratepayers will be charged more than $500,000 to run a byelection for about 82,000 residents on Saturday to fill a council vacancy triggered by the resignation of the council’s deputy mayor.
The huge cost to ratepayers is unique to Liverpool: it is the only council in Greater Sydney that did not vote, at its first meeting following the September 2024 elections, to implement a “countback” system. In the instance of a councillor leaving their position, the countback system allows for a recount of the ballot papers from the previous election to confirm the candidate who came in second place, avoiding the need to send voters back to the polls.
Election experts and council staff generally support countback voting because of the cost to councils of carrying out local elections for specific wards, as well as the difficulty of alerting residents to the legally mandated requirement to vote on a specific Saturday.
“Countbacks are very cheap,” said Ben Raue, an election analyst and founder of the Tally Room. “It’s like one dude in an office pressing go on a computer program, rather than conducting a whole byelection.
“So any place that decides not to do it, unless there’s some kind of case of gross incompetence that I’m not aware of, usually the politicians [say], ‘We think there’s a political reason to do this, even though it costs a lot more money’.”
Liberal mayor Ned Mannoun disagreed: “This is what democracy does cost,” he said. Voters in parts of Uralla, in regional NSW, will also vote in a vacant councillor byelection this Saturday, as will residents in Newcastle to vote on a new popularly elected mayor, after the current mayor resigned citing health problems.
The byelection in Liverpool’s south ward comes after deputy mayor Betty Green, a Labor councillor before quitting the party, resigned in January citing health issues. The resignation came during a time of immense turmoil for the council, which spent much of 2025 embroiled in a lengthy public inquiry into “serious breakdowns in council operations”.
Liverpool Council chief executive Jason Breton told a February meeting the cost of having the NSW Electoral Commission run the election would be “upwards of half a million dollars”.
Labor candidate Zeli Munjiza, who, if residents vote as they did in 2024, would be likely to win the election, said the byelection “should not have really happened”.
“It was a surprise,” said Munjiza, who is working as an electorate officer for former Liverpool councillor-turned-state MP Nathan Hagarty. “It’s been a very, very short campaign, not a lot of time to gather your thoughts.
“It is a lot of money. When you look around the area, and you can see that there’s a big lack of parks, open space, the grass isn’t cut, footpaths are either lacking or they’re in dire need of repair, [there’s] rubbish everywhere. That money could have been spent better on looking after of the LGA, as opposed to a council byelection.”
The Sydney Morning Herald has a bureau in the heart of Parramatta. Email [email protected] with news tips.
