100 UNSW Law Journal Volume 40(3)
5
VOTING RIGHTS AND AUSTRALIAN LOCAL DEMOCRACY
RYAN GOSS
I INTRODUCTION
Section 256 of the Local Government Act 1993 (Tas) is a curious provision. It indicates that, at any given election for a municipal area in Tasmania, any given voter has no more than 2 votes’. 1 This provision is designed to facilitate a franchise based partly on property qualifications, and in which plural voting is explicitly allowed. It may seem extraordinary, in the 21st century, that such a franchise may be found in Australian law. But Tasmania is not an outlier. Indeed, in five of Australia’s six states, local government franchises include property qualifications, votes for corporations, and various forms of plural voting. This aspect of Australian local government has been touched on before in the political science and public administration literature and in local government scholarship.2 Occasionally, there is high profile public discussion of individual instances of this phenomenon, especially with respect to the City of Sydney.3 But