All About Voters and Voting in Sunshine Coast Council Division 4
Sep
2
Written by:
Friday, September 02, 2011 9:03 AM
It's no secret that Councillor Chris Thompson wants to change the local laws surrounding dog off-leash exercise areas in both La Balsa Park and Point Cartwright Reserve.
As we all live in a free democracy, let's take a look at the numbers for Sunshine Coast Council Division 4, which neatly surrounds Point Cartwright and covers a large percentage of the people who use the area on a daily basis.
Division 4 stretches from Alexandra Headland, south of Aerodrome Road, down to Production Avenue in Warana, bordered by the Pacific Ocean on one side, and the Sunshine Motorway and Kawana Way on the west.
As part of the new Sunshine Coast council, it was a new division created for the 2008 local elections.
You might be forgiven for thinking that Cr Thompson has a large and comfortable majority based on the last election results. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Division 4 race at the last election was a close-run contest.
Here's the results, from the ECQ (Electoral Commission of QLD) website:
| THOMPSON, Chris |
6,957 votes (53.27%) |
| CHAMPION, Andrew |
6,118 votes (46.79%) |
The above results are from 2008 Election Results Summary - Sunshine Coast Regional Council and are results after distribution of preferences.
You can see the individual booth results on the Division 4 Individual Booth results.
The bottom line is that Cr Thomson won the division by 839 votes. We can only speculate as to how the results of the next election might go, but any one contentious issue might easily change the results of the next election, which is due by March 2012, just 6 months away.
The question is, are there more than 800 families with a dog in Division 4? Are those families willing to fight for the right to keep the same exercise areas that have served the community well for more than a decade ?