City council election court case reopened for new evidence
Former Adelaide City councillor Alex Hyde will be allowed to reopen a court case over the last council election, nearly two years after the ballot he wants declared void.
District Court Judge Michael Burnett has agreed to reopen the case between Hyde, the electoral commissioner and Adelaide City councillor Jing Li to allow Hyde’s legal team to include new documents they’ve discovered.
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Jing Li was elected as a Central Ward councillor at the last council election in November 2022, while Hyde, a former Deputy Lord Mayor, lost his seat. In December 2022, Hyde lodged a petition with the court to declare the election void.
Hyde’s team requested the case be re-opened in April, before a judgement was published but after closing arguments in the case were heard in February.
When the petition to reopen the court case was first heard in April, all parties agreed the timeframe should be swift given the election result that Hyde is disputing is almost two years old.
Judge Burnett wrote in his judgement on September 13 that he is satisfied the evidence presented could not reasonably have been discovered at the trial, and that it remains unexplained why Li did not properly discover this information sooner, as there was no affidavit filed by Li explaining why.
“The time and cost associated with the reopening has been caused by the second respondent’s [Li’s] failure to make proper discovery,” the judgement said.
Hyde’s team presented more than 1900 pages of documents to be included, with Judge Burnett allowing about half to be tendered in the case.
The documents include emails between Li and the City of Adelaide enclosing enrolment forms and WeChat messages telling supporters to use a specific postal address when enrolling to vote.
The emails relate to 73 people who were enrolled to vote in the council election and were first obtained through a Freedom of Information request by Liberal MLC Ben Hood.
According to the judgement, it could be inferred from the emails that Li “encouraged and assisted many persons to be enrolled and was actively engaged in that process; (2) many of those persons were students of Chinese nationality; (3) some other persons assisted him in enrolling electors”.
The judgement also states it could be inferred that Li engaged with the electoral commissioner about enrolments and took steps to maximise the number of persons who might support him to be included in the supplementary voting roll.
“There is no prohibition against assisting persons to be enrolled on the voter’s roll and the second respondent [Li] committed no illegal conduct by doing so. It is not alleged that he did,” the judgement said.
Some of the WeChat messages the judge is allowing to be submitted are about a dinner held at the Ancient Oriental restaurant in May 2022.
The judgement says specific pages of messages about the dinner are allowed to be tendered in the case as they provide context and background and therefore could affect the outcome of the proceedings.
The WeChat messages were translated from Mandarin, and the judgement says Li and the Electoral Commissioner are permitted to cross-examine the interpreter who translated the documents to English.
Li and the Electoral Commissioner are also allowed to tender documents or give evidence in response to the documents submitted by Hyde’s team.
Hyde, who was appointed acting state director of the Liberal Party in September, told the court in January he “may not” stand for Adelaide City Council despite the long-running legal battle.
The court case will continue to be heard later this week.
