2024 Ipswich City Council election

The 2024 Ipswich City Council election was held on 16 March 2024 to elect a mayor and eight councillors to the City of Ipswich. The election was held as part of the statewide local elections in Queensland, Australia.

Teresa Harding was re-elected mayor with 57.73% of the vote after preferences, a swing of 5.25% against her.

Background
At the 2020 election, Teresa Harding was elected mayor, defeating six other candidates. She was the first non-Labor Party aligned Ipswich mayor in 50 years.

Four independents, two Independent Labor candidates and two candidates on the "Your Voice Of Experience" ticket were also elected as councillors.

Division 3 councillor Marnie Doyle joined the Labor Party in March 2023.

Electoral system
Prior to 2020, Ipswich City Council was composed of a directly elected mayor and 10 single-member wards (or divisions), both using optional preferential voting.

In July 2019, it was announced that the 10 single-member wards would be replaced by four two-member wards, reducing the total amount of councillors to eight. Preferential voting was removed and replaced by plurality block voting (also referred to as first-past-the-post by the Electoral Commission), where voters are only required to mark the same amount of candidates as there are positions to be elected − in the case of Ipswich, two candidates.

Optional preferential voting is used for the mayoral election.

Candidates
In April 2023, former councillor David Martin stated he would again run for mayor after his unsuccessful campaign in 2020.

Division 1 councillor Sheila Ireland announced in December 2023 that she would contest the mayoralty and form Team Sheila Ireland.

Marnie Doyle and Andrew Fechner, the two Division 3 councillors, formed the "Better Brighter Ipswich" ticket in early 2024. Former mayor Andrew Antoniolli, who won the 2017 by-election before the council was dismissed in 2018, also contested Division 3 as an independent, having previously been a Labor member.

On 26 January 2024, Ipswich West MP Jim Madden resigned from the Queensland state parliament to contest Division 4. This triggered a by-election in his seat, held on the same day as the local elections.