Following the declaration of Brisbane's Lord Mayor that he is running for state parliament at the next election, and will be the leader of the opposition for that campaign, there is a trope making the rounds that he is somehow "unelected".

Out of curiosity, I decided to see how his numbers in the Brisbane City Council elections in 2008 stacked up against Anna Bligh's numbers in the 2009 state election.

The internet being what it is, official sources for these numbers weren't too hard to dig up:
I found the Lord Mayoral results on the Brisbane City Council site
I found the Electorate of South Brisbane results on the Electoral Commission Qld site (with the preferences taken into account here).

Results:
Campbell Newman received 335,076 first preference votes for Lord Mayor (60% of the total).
After distribution of preferences, he received a total of 339,320 votes (66% of the total).
It's probably worth noting that the second placed candidate received 29% of the first round votes, increasing to 34% after distribution of preferences, so Newman actually did receive the majority of the remaining preferences, there just weren't many to go around.

Anna Bligh received 12,243 first preference votes in her electorate of South Brisbane (48% of the total).
After distribution of preferences, she received a total of 14,697 votes (65% of the total).

So, our State Premier holds her position on the back of the support of her party and around 15k people living in or near South Brisbane.

The new leader of the opposition will hold that position on the back of the support of his party and around 340k people living in the City of Brisbane.

Since the current population of Qld is estimated at 4.5 million people, effectively 7.5% of the state voted for Newman to be Brisbane's Lord Mayor, while only 0.3% voted for Bligh to represent the seat of South Brisbane.

And people are calling Newman an unelected leader?

(Yes, I'm aware that the nature of parliamentary governments based on geographic representation means that most constituents don't get to vote directly for their parliamentary leaders. The only purpose of this post is to point out how dumb that makes the "unelected" gibe sound when it is aimed at the directly elected Lord Mayor of a city the size of Brisbane)