2011 Shellharbour and Wollongong local elections

The 2011 Shellharbour and Wollongong local elections were held on 3 September 2011 to elect the councils of the City of Shellharbour and the City of Wollongong in New South Wales.

Wollongong City Council was sacked in March 2008 amid a corruption inquiry, and the same happened to Shellharbour City Council in July 2008 because of continual failures with the council's code of conduct committee.^[1][2] This meant electors in both councils did not vote at the 2008 local elections.

Both councils also faced a proposed merger, which was later abandoned.

Shellharbour has single ward with seven councillors, while Wollongong has a popularly-elected mayor, along with three wards that have four councillors each.

Under the Local Government (Shellharbour and Wollongong Elections) Bill 2011, which passed the New South Wales Parliament on 9 May 2011, councillors were elected to hold office until the 2016 local elections, meaning they skipped the 2012 local elections.^[3][4] However, as a result of delays caused by amalgamation proposals, both councils went to the polls in 2017 instead.

In 2014, Shellharbour councillors began to investigate the costs of a referendum that would allow voters to directly elect their mayor (as was the case before 2008) and increase the number of councillors from seven to nine.^[5] Both proposals later passed at a 2017 referendum, with four wards created with two councillors each, plus the mayor.