Counting down: Is there block voting on Shellharbour City Council?

However, a Labor councillor has suggested the tendency to block vote has grown in recent meetings.

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On council, the independents hold a majority of places over Labor - five seats to four.

The new make-up of this council first met on February 1 this year and, since then, there have been allegations from Labor councillor Rob Petreski that the five independents are voting as a block, shutting out Labor.

Cr Petreski has raised this concern several times, including in August when no Labor councillor was elected as a voting delegate to a local government conference.

He also objected at an October meeting where councillors were voted onto various committees.

Cr Petreski complained that he had lost his committee positions, due to the five independents combining to vote in one of their own instead.

Both Shellharbour Mayor Chris Homer and deputy Kellie Marsh have previously gone on the record to state the independents do not meet and decide to vote collectively on any issues.

A look through the minutes of every meeting of this council shows only a small number of instances where the five independents voted together.

Ignoring the 'housekeeping' votes at every meeting, such as for passing minutes of the last meeting, there was a total of 164 votes across 16 meetings.

Of those, there were just 22 instances where all five independents voted the same way - and five of those came during the contentious selection of committees.

Those 22 instances account for just 13 per cent of all votes.

Also, there have been 14 votes where the independents split, some of them voting with Labor.

When asked about these numbers, Cr Petreski suggested the 22 instances the five independents voted together were on the "most important" topics.

He also suggested the claimed block voting had gotten worse in recent meetings.

"If you were to survey the last few meetings, I'm sure those percentages would be very different, probably inverted to be honest," Cr Petreski said.

"In the first few meetings I think people did go in fairly open-minded. I think in the last couple of meetings, it shows the reverse of that."

Across the last three meetings, (aside from the 64 per cent of unanimous votes) the independents voted together eight times - 32 per cent of all votes.

Mayor Homer refuted the suggestion that this showed a conscious rise in block voting as "absolutely inaccurate".

"Once again we don't block vote," Cr Homer said. "An independent mindset will have a certain alignment as we move forward but it's not about block voting at all.

"Every one of those councillors moves forward and does things objectively, on the independents' side."