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“I love the work. I’m a worker”: QNews meets Clover

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“I love the work. I’m a worker”: QNews meets Clover

She turns 79 next month – a fact seized upon by her detractors – but ahead of the NSW local government elections, QNews finds Sydney Lord Mayor Cover Moore bursting with energy and determined to keep Sydney in independent hands.

Interview by Peter Hackney.

Sydney is a city of landmarks: the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge, Anzac Bridge, Sydney Tower, the QVB …

Landmarks don’t come in human form but if they did, Sydney Lord Clover Moore would surely qualify.

Moore has been integral to the fabric of the city since 1980, when she became an alderman at South Sydney Municipal Council (later subsumed into the City of Sydney).

She became Sydney’s first female Lord Mayor in 2004 and is by far the city’s longest serving mayor since the local government area was established in 1842.

Even Moore’s biggest detractors will admit she’s been good for Sydney in many ways.

Sydney today is greener, more pleasant and better connected than it was in 2004. Full of sparkling facilities, it boasts libraries, community centres, swimming pools, cycleways and parks that didn’t exist when she came to power.

George Street, once choked with cars and diesel buses, has been transformed into a pedestrianised, tree-lined boulevard with light rail running down the middle.

Mover over, Clover

But despite her successful stewardship, some say it’s time for Moore to go.

She turns 79 in October, a fact seized upon by her detractors, who claim she’s too old and should step aside for younger candidates with fresh ideas.

Many of the brickbats come, predictably, from major political parties.

The City of Sydney is a glittering prize: the beating heart of modern Australia and the nation’s economic engine-room. It’s galling for the Labor and Liberal parties that, despite their immense power, an independent councillor can keep them from controlling the place.

Moore has beaten her mayoral challengers five times to date. Each time, they’ve employed different tactics. This time, her opponents’ main argument seems to revolve around one thing: her age.

Typical of the sentiments are those of Lyndon Gannon, the Liberal Party councillor vying for the top job.

“After 20 years under Clover Moore, it’s clear – the City of Sydney needs new leadership,” he said in a July media release.

“The City of Sydney is the youngest local government in the state, with a median age of 32. It needs a candidate that understands the challenges they are facing, and their aspirations.”

Even more pointed were comments he made last month, after council staff cut outdoor night-time trading at Woolloomooloo’s Old Fitzroy Hotel by two hours (the decision was quickly reversed after Moore ordered a review).

“Just because Clover is in bed by 8pm doesn’t mean the rest of Sydney has to be,” he sniped in The Sydney Morning Herald.

It’s a similar story over at the ALP.

In a recent ABC News interview, Labor’s Lord Mayoral candidate Zann Maxwell pointedly stated: “There are people who are voting in this election who weren’t even born when Clover Moore first became Lord Mayor.”

But do these criticisms stack up? Is Clover Moore too old? Or are her rivals tapping into ugly tropes in an ageist society? After all, the Australian Human Rights Commission has found that ageism is the most accepted form of prejudice in Australia.

Clover Moore pictured at Wimbo Park, Surry Hills trying out one of the new in-ground trampolines. Photo: Nick Langley/supplied.

‘The work energises me’

Surely, someone is only too old for their job if they’re mentally or physically unfit for it. That seems far from the case when QNews meets Moore at her Town Hall office.

In fact, the first thing that comes to mind is that you’re meeting the political equivalent of the Energizer Bunny. She bristles with energy; ideas for the city’s future surge forth like the tides pulsing through Sydney Heads.

Asked where this drive comes from, she’s quick with an answer.

“I love the work. I’m a worker,” she says. “I love city making.

“Buddha gave advice to his followers. He said, ‘Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart give yourself to it.’

“And Teddy Roosevelt said, ‘One of the greatest prizes in life is to work hard at worthwhile work.’ Poor Paul is sick of me saying this,” she laughs, nodding towards Paul Mackay, her senior media advisor working across the room.

“I find this work incredibly worthwhile. It energises me.”

She also attributes her vitality to exercise and a vegetarian diet.

“I think walking really is key,” she says, adding that she often walks to work from the Redfern flat she shares with her husband Peter and their two dogs, Bessie and Buster.

“I walk to work as often as I can. That’s my favourite way of getting there. I have a coffee at a cafe called Shuk, with Peter and Bessie and Buster. Then they go off in one direction and I go in the other.

“We’re building a fabulous bike lane in Oxford Street and I check that out, and I go through beautiful Hyde Park. And on that morning walk, everyone who speaks to me is very positive and I arrive at Town Hall feeling very good.”

Of her diet, she says: “We run City Talks at the City of Sydney and some years ago we had (philosopher and animal rights activist) Peter Singer. I walked out of that and looked my Peter in the eye and said, ‘We won’t eat meat anymore.’ And we haven’t except that Peter has diabetes, so he’s introduced a little bit of chicken into our diet. But I prefer a vegetarian diet.

“I think it’s those things and the work that keep me going.”

Why run again?

Still, she’s been Lord Mayor for two decades. She was also MP for the electoral district of Sydney (formerly Bligh) in the NSW Parliament from 1988 until 2012, when former premier Barry O’Farrell’s ‘Get Clover Bill’ banned dual membership of parliament and local councils.

Surely at some point, enough is enough?

“I’m running again because there’s still more work to do,” Moore says emphatically.

She specifically names “two key projects that are left to do”: the revitalisation of Chinatown and the revitalisation of Oxford Street.

“We’ve done a lot of work on both and we’re really ready to go in terms of those precincts being transformed. You’ve seen the transformation we’ve done in George Street? From Town Hall down to Haymarket, it’s just buzzing now, day and night. People tell me, ‘You could be in Hong Kong.’

“Now we’re going to transform Chinatown and Oxford Street.”

Clover Moore at the opening of Butterscotch Park in Rosebery in May. Despite being Lord Mayor for 20 years, she says there’s “more work to do”. Photo: Katherine Griffiths/supplied.

Chinatown

The first known Chinese immigrant to Australia was Mak Sai Ying, who arrived in Sydney in 1818. Chinese migration to Australia kicked off in earnest when the Australian gold rushes began in 1851. A vibrant Chinatown sprung up around The Rocks, moving to its current location in Haymarket in the 1920s.

By the 1980s, when David Bowie filmed scenes for his China Girl music video there, it was easily the biggest Chinatown in Australia and one of the biggest in the Western world.

But recent years have seen some of the shine come off the area – a fact Moore readily acknowledges.

“Haymarket and Dixon Street seemed to really suffer during Covid,” she laments.

“People just didn’t come near those precincts and so we’ve done a lot of work, a lot of consultation, a lot of discussion and we’ve come up with a new plan that’s been endorsed by all the various groups and figures in Chinatown, Haymarket and Dixon Street.”

Restoring the Chinatown gates, grants to businesses to do up their shopfronts, new lighting, public art and funding for a new music, art and light festival, Neon Playground, are all part of the plan.

Oxford Street

Revitalising Chinatown is one thing. Fixing Oxford Street is quite another.

Once considered the main street of LGBTQI Australia, it’s perhaps best described these days as an unappealing traffic sewer. It’s typified by flailing businesses, empty shops and people slumped in doorways.

At a Lord Mayoral candidates’ forum held at the National Art School in Darlinghurst on 27 August, it seemed that all the candidates – from the ALP, Greens, Liberal, Libertarian, Socialist and Yvonne Weldon parties – were united in blaming Moore for the state of the strip.

A case to support that notion can be made. It’s true that Oxford Street has declined under Moore’s watch.

What’s also true is that the nature of the LGBTQI community has changed in that time, not just in Sydney but in many places. Similar stories about the decline of the ‘gaybourhood’ are heard in London’s Soho, the Marais in Paris and the Castro in San Francisco.

With the rise of LGBTQI apps, the community simply doesn’t need to congregate in gay bars and clubs to meet anymore. And with an increased acceptance of varied sexualities and genders, many people don’t feel the need to live their lives in a rainbow bubble.

In addition to changing demographics, Moore cites “online shopping, the lockouts that Barry O’Farrell imposed and the lockdown that came with Covid” as challenges affecting the strip.

Despite the negativity, she’s upbeat about the prospects for Oxford Street, where hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent transforming three heritage-listed city blocks owned by the City of Sydney.

“The city struggled to get the right group in to take over those buildings,” she admits. “But we ended up signing a 99-year lease with (investment firm) AsheMorgan.

“They’ve got to restore those really interesting early 20th century buildings – and because of the new planning controls we’ve introduced, which gives developers increased floor space if they include creative and cultural uses in their buildings, we’re going to get that cultural creative space and then on the ground floor and in the laneways at the back, we’ll get retail.”

Moore compares the deal to the successful 1980s arrangement the City made with Malaysian firm Ipoh Garden at the QVB.

“Ipoh Garden had to restore and renovate the QVB as part of a 99-year lease agreement and oversee the various commercial activities happening there. It was really in a bad state when they took it on – and look at it now.”

She says the Oxford Street cycleway, new landscaping and a reduction in traffic speeds to 40 kilometres an hour will also enhance the strip.

“Both Oxford Street and Chinatown are special projects I want to see come to fruition during this next term,” she says.

A strong relationship with the LGBTQI+ community has been a feature of Clover Moore’s career. Photo: Nick Langley/supplied.

The rainbow connection

No matter what one thinks of Moore’s stewardship of Oxford Street, there’s no doubting her commitment to the LGBTQI community.

So closely aligned is she with LGBTQI causes that critics have used homophobic language to describe her. Working in toxic newsrooms in the ’00s and ’10s, this journalist has personally heard her described as “the patron saint of cocksuckers” and “the high priestess of poofs”.

Even more shocking was the ugly incident on 16 December 2003, when Moore was Member for Bligh. While handing out prizes to schoolchildren in the playground at Crown Street Public School, she was attacked by a woman who rained punches down on her, while calling her a “lesbian bitch”.

Moore recalls that her relationship with the LGBTQI community began “very early” when she was a young mother living in Redfern, trying to improve the neighbourhood.

“I started out down Bourke Street with a baby in a pram and a three-year-old holding on to the pram, with my handwritten petition to try and do something about the fast-moving traffic in Bourke Street,” she says.

“And a lot of the friends I met at that time were gay. They were moving into an inner-city area before it had been discovered or loved and they really gave me lots of support.

“We formed a little community group and started trying to do things in the local area, and they became very good friends. And then, of course, when the AIDS crisis came, I got very involved in that, particularly with people like (the late actor and HIV activist) Tony Carden.”

As Member for Bligh, Moore campaigned hard for beds for AIDS patients in Ward 17 South at St Vincent’s Hospital. It was a lifeline for the community during a deeply homophobic era, when hundreds of young gay men in Sydney were sick and dying.

“Sad, sad, sad times,” she recalls.

Happier times were also part of the picture, including Moore’s early involvement with the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

“I was the first person in the NSW Legislative Assembly to go to Mardi Gras, and everyone at Parliament said that I’d never be re-elected – and of course that didn’t happen at all, and they all lined up to go to Mardi Gras when they found out it was worth money to the economy,” she says.

“I’m so grateful for my very good friends in the community. They’re great fun, with a great sense of humour. Good to be with, you know? An important part of my life.”

Moore and more

Her plans for Chinatown and Oxford Street, as well as the day-to-day remit of rates, roads and rubbish, are more than enough for anyone to be across but Moore is keen to talk up even more proposals.

The City has planted more than 17,000 trees under her watch and she says more are on the way.

“We’ve planted probably as much as we can on footpaths now, so now we’re doing median strip planting on streets that are wide enough,” she says.

“I’m very proud – well, I don’t like to say proud, because that sounds arrogant – but I enjoy our trees very much and they’re really going to help us during accelerated global warming.”

Social and affordable housing is also important to Moore, despite it being the province of state government. She says collecting levies from property developers, selling City land to community housing providers at subsidised rates and agreements with developers for a proportion of social and affordable housing in new developments has “enabled over 3,000 homes to be built and we’ve got another couple of thousand in the pipeline”.

Even the City of Sydney’s official flag is under her microscope, with the Lord Mayor stating: “The 1908-designed City of Sydney flag does not represent all that we are. It is based on the City’s former Coat of Arms and contains no acknowledgment of First Nations People.

“It centres on colonial maritime history, the impact of which is particularly poignant here in Sydney – the first site of invasion.”

She says the flag is now under review, along with “all of the City’s emblems, symbols and public domain (including colonial statues) to inform an update”.

Clover Moore pictured in Kepos Street, Redfern in the 1980s and 2020s. She has been a strong proponent of greening Sydney throughout her career. Photo: Lord Mayor Clover Moore/Facebook.

Succession

Despite her seemingly boundless energy, even Moore acknowledges that she can’t be Lord Mayor forever. While she tends to avoid talk of succession, she confirms to QNews that she does indeed have a strategy for a post-Clover Sydney.

She compares it to her plan for the seat of Sydney, when the ‘Get Clover Bill’ forced her to choose between being Lord Mayor or being in state parliament, and she resigned from the latter.

“I want to make sure that someone who is independent and community-based and progressive will keep all the fantastic work going as my successor and I would endorse that person,” she reveals.

“When the ‘Get Clover’ legislation was passed by the Coalition, Alex Greenwich got in touch and it became clear that he could be someone I could hand the baton to. And I did hand the baton to him and at that first election, people supported Alex because I endorsed him. Because they knew who I was and I had established trust,” she says.

“I believe the same will happen with the mayoralty; that the person I endorse is going to continue the progressive, independent, community-based work that we do.”

Pressed on who that person might be, she replies: “There are a number of people who I think could do that.”

Pressed further, she smiles. “My focus for now is on winning this election.”

And barring a political earthquake the likes of which Sydney has never seen, that’s exactly what she’ll do.

While some pundits predict her Clover Moore Independent Team could lose its council majority at this election, even her fiercest critics believe Clover Moore is about to win an incredible sixth term as Lord Mayor of Sydney.

The NSW local government elections will be held this Saturday, 14 September 2024.

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