OPINION
Inside the nice, ugly tower that’s the Queen of Sydney’s seat of energy, the monarch was going through a disaster and anxious for my presence.
Exterior City Corridor it was a shiny, stunning day however inside the storm clouds had been gathering, and a summons from Clover Moore was delivered by her most loyal foot soldier.
‘Clover wants you in her workplace. Now! It is pressing,’ got here the decision from the Lord Mayor’s chief-of-staff James Zanotto.
All the time gracious even when Clover was at her most demanding, and normally impeccably calm, Zanotto sounded uncharacteristically rattled.
At subject was the resumption of the bike wars – the pitched battle between cyclists and motorists for entry to highway lanes that had in some way unified the warring our bodies in a shared antipathy for the mayor.
Clover’s dream to remodel hilly Sydney right into a northern-European-style cyclists’ nirvana had became a bitter combat; one thing she has at all times relished when she believes she’s proper.
As her CEO Monica Barone had as soon as warned me: ‘Clover is bloody-minded’.
The immediately recogniseable spiky-haired Sydney Lord Mayor is without doubt one of the most polarising politicians on earth, Donald Trump apart. She has been in authorities 20 years
Clover Moore has been in native politics for nearly 45 years and at 78, the identical age as Donald Trump, is prone to be round for a minimum of one other time period
A a lot youthful Clover Moore is pictured strolling her canine in March 1995
The identical age as Donald Trump
At 78, she is similar age as Donald Trump – and whereas they share little by the use of political positions, they every have a commanding air and distinctive hairstyle.
And he or she too has spent this week within the closing levels of one other election marketing campaign.
Clover has been in politics for 5 occasions so long as Trump and can run this week for a sixth time period on the identical inexperienced, planet-saving agenda she espoused once I labored for her.
And nearly 15 years on, she is producing remarkably related rhetoric from her opponents, who mild up the airwaves and feedback sections with long-familiar criticisms.
‘She’s a witch,’ they are saying, ‘She must be sacked! She’s wrecking town. Run her out of city. She’s a vandal. She’s acquired to go!’
Again then, the assaults had been led by the 2 kings of Sydney radio, Kyle Sandilands and Alan Jones.
Jones had totally skewered Clover throughout a earlier battle of the bike lanes, in an obstreperous reside on-air ambush, ill-advisedly arrange by an ad-hoc media staff.
Jones lower in, talked over, abused the lord mayor: ‘You have not acquired a clue what you are speaking about,’ he informed her. ‘You nearly converse for no person… For god’s sake, Clover Moore, cannot you learn?’
Clover had thereafter refused to take heed to talkback radio, leaving the day by day on-air barbs to be filtered by way of to her by her flacks.
She employed me as her communications supervisor; one thing that was ill-advised for each of us.
The e-bikes discarded across the metropolis and dumped in Sydney Harbour haven’t been a raging success, however Clover blames them on Aussie behaviour moderately than a flawed system
One of many reviled and broadly lampooned paintings proposals, the large blue milk crate, which locals speculated would possibly turn into new, albeit leaky, housing for homeless individuals
Tim Tams banned
Within the early weeks of my job I used to be nonetheless climbing the steep studying curve of Cloverland, a Mount Everest of inexperienced agendas and politically appropriate plans to make Sydney a sustainable-climate city paradise.
It was all contained in ‘The Imaginative and prescient’, a 215-page manifesto – on recycled paper after all – that was revered at City Corridor just like the Outdated Testomony, and written in eye-glazing bureaucratese about ‘macrobiotic imbalances’, ‘exercise hub growth’ and ‘strategic financial infrastructure’.
And so once I go the decision to attend her workplace at City Corridor Home, I questioned why I used to be being summoned with such urgency?
Might or not it’s one other ’emergency’ just like the day I might purchased cage eggs from the Woolies over the highway and left them on my desk?
A passing secretary had noticed the eggs and leapt again as if at an escaped lion.
‘Put them away! Do not let Clover see them!’ she mentioned, and warned in opposition to additional transgressions resembling smuggling in chops or steak – and by no means, ever veal.
Clover Moore, above in her mayoral chains with the then Princess Mary of Denmark, standing alongside the sunshine rail outdoors City Corridor in 2023
Since Clover had learn A Vegetarian Philosophy by Peter Singer, she’d given up meat and drafted pointers which included a ban on battery hen eggs as ‘merciless meals’.
Tim Tams weren’t even allowed into the constructing, so I used to be informed, since Clover learnt that 80 per cent of the world’s cocoa was farmed on the Ivory Coast by baby labour.
It was the identical ‘progressive’ ideas that noticed the roads of central Sydney and internal suburbs seemingly completely occupied by bitumen-ripping bulldozers, witches hats, highway dividers, and orange netting.
By means of the mud and confusion you might nonetheless learn Clover’s signed proclamation, ‘Town’s new cycleways are good in your well being!’
Chauffer-driven mayor
For the reason that Alan Jones carve-up, Clover had been ambushed time and again within the media; photographed climbing into her automotive along with her chauffeur for the temporary 2.7km commute to work, whereas different drivers fumed on the torn-up roads they used to drive down.
It was this horrible PR that introduced me to Clover’s workplace – not the elegant room she retains within the grand neo-Classical City Corridor, however the working workplace within the Brutalist-style City Corridor Home.
She was standing by her desk, bristling with impatience and nervousness. The desk was stacked with books concerning the defining habits of leaders, together with considered one of Clover’s mantras, ‘parallel priorities’.
James Zanotto started an evidence, ‘Clover simply walked again to City Corridor from …’ however Clover interjected within the well-mannered voice which turns into clipped when she’s agitated.
Lord Mayor Clover Moore with a performer forward of the forty sixth annual Sydney Homosexual and Lesbian Mardi Gras in 2024
The ‘hate vibes’
‘Sure! I simply walked again right here and all alongside the best way I may really feel it. I may really feel the hate vibes popping out of individuals. What are you going to do about it?’
In that tense second, varied options got here to my thoughts. Remedy? Meditation? Or three deep breaths? Perhaps I may simply give up on the spot.
What sort of hate vibes had been they? Bike lane vibes? Radical inexperienced agenda vibes?
Or simply larrikin previous convict city Sydney wrestling within the grasp of a former convent schoolgirl?
Center-of-the-road Australia arcing up at huge dollops of woke earth preservation, served up with just a bit an excessive amount of self-righteous insistence?
I mumbled one thing about media releases selling Clover’s favorite subjects: making Sydney ‘inexperienced world, linked’, ‘excellence’ basically, and the newest, ludicrous big multi-million greenback paintings – the Cloud Arch, higher identified within the tabloid media because the ‘area noodle’.
Did I embody her ‘award-winning parks’, which Clover nonetheless likes to say with cringing regularity? In all probability.
The ‘cloud arch’ – additionally dubbed the ‘area noodle’ – was shelved after the price range blew out to $22m and its basis security could not be assured
At any price, the phrases appeared to assuage her. Disaster averted, I left James with Clover and went again to work on Clover’s murderous schedule.
Again-to-back conferences, briefings, enterprise boards, spherical tables, strategic steering committee conferences, pre-meetings to the conferences, and media releases, a minimum of three dozen on the go in any working week.
Every one, by decree of Clover, carried the message: ‘Let’s Make Sydney Inexperienced, World and Related!’
Banners, flyers, speeches, e-news, pamphlets, blogs, tweets, all ‘Cloverised’ by workers and personally authorised by the Lord Mayor, who like the true Queen Elizabeth II, took containers of labor dwelling each weekend.
Saturday afternoons had been routinely interrupted with the Lord Mayor’s calls about her architect husband Peter’s newest ‘good’ thought, or his much less complimentary appraisal of her work that wanted my speedy consideration.
You’d must chunk your tongue when Clover heartily mentioned – and he or she mentioned it typically – ‘Peter is my best critic!’
No, Clover, he isn’t.
Clover Moore was ousted from her state MP’s job by the ‘get Clover’ regulation, however received anyway when the mayor’s favoured candidate Alex Greenwich (proper) secured the seat
Not a sport fan
Over 80-hour working weeks, I had learnt about Clover’s likes (80-hour working weeks, ‘excellence and integrity’ and speaking about her ‘legacy’), and her hates (rugby league, most different sports activities, ingesting, swearing, meat).
Half robust politician, half highly-sensitive idealist, no quantity of criticism will change Clover’s thoughts. She will not again down simply because it annoys anyone.
Folks ought to recognise her wonderful work. Her award-winning public buildings. Her inexperienced electrical energy system. She’s constructing a world metropolis!
I used to be adjusting to the realities of Cloverland, the place inexperienced evangelism flows unabated from her pulpit, and the place fairly other than avoiding controversy, the typically snappy-tempered Lord Mayor appeared to thrive on it.
And insiders say there was no mellowing as she campaigns for re-election, once more, on her Staff Clover ticket, nonetheless promising Sydney it is going to be an ‘environmentally performing, economically thriving, internationally recognised metropolis with built-in transport’.
One of many rival candidates gunning for Clover’s job , Yvonne Weldon, who says she hopes to turn into Sydney’s first Aboriginal Mayor this Saturday
Amongst her eight rivals in Saturday’s electio=n, are candidates campaigning on the previous maxim that mayors ought to keep on with ‘roads, charges and garbage’, one thing that frequently rises as much as chunk Clover.
Charges have skyrocketed in her 20 years of rule, garbage mountains mushroom on many streets – however not the road the place Clover owns a home, which is tidily swept – after which there’s the e-bikes piling up or chucked into the harbour.
Clover airily blames the latter on the lasting vestiges of instinctive anti-authoritarianism that arrived at Sydney Cove in 1788, moderately than the flawed system.
That is to not say she hasn’t kicked a couple of objectives in her time, to make use of a footy analogy she would detest.
The sunshine rail – find it irresistible or hate it – was her thought, and I keep in mind the day she had lastly satisfied somebody to log off on it – the NSW premier Kristina Keneally.
As we strode in the direction of a hostile media pack gathered within the previous City Corridor for the joint convention with Keneally and the inevitable questions on highway disruption, Clover requested, not fairly beneath her breath, ‘Why may be very day of my life like an examination?’
Clover’s bike lanes have divided the neighborhood, with some saying that for a hilly metropolis like Sydney with its winding slim streets, they solely take away parking areas and trigger congestion
These bike traces
City Corridor has a hall lined with the portraits of gentleman in ermine coats and chains. They’re Clover’s 79 predecessors, every mayor since 1842 when Sydney was integrated as a metropolis – the odd drunk, lay-about and liar amongst them.
Whether or not Clover’s will get rolled this weekend, or if she is elected as soon as extra for yet one more time period, she deserves a constructive legacy for her achievements. However it’s value lots and there was some terrible waste, particularly the artwork works.
Everybody likes to recollect the $2.5million big blue milk crate sculpture for Belmore Park, a hardscrabble area reverse Central Station identified for homeless sleepers, who might need welcomed it as a house.
After the concept was roundly lampooned, the crate was ‘indefinitely deferred’, however I consider the artist was paid nonetheless.
Then there was the 58m excessive ‘cloud arch’, of which Clover declared ‘individuals will wish to make love beneath it!’
When the associated fee blew out to $22million and the sunshine rail plans interfered with the safety of its footings, the area noodle was shelved.
There was the $9million line of ratty murraya vegetation snaking by way of Surry Hills, dubbed the world’s costliest hedge, which had her workplace indignantly protesting that it’ll embody ‘lighting and seating’
Design for the paintings, bara – that means shell hook – didn’t create any controversy and is by an Indigenous artist, Judy Watson
Few keep in mind Clover’s big ‘trip over piano’ which traversed a path in Prince Alfred Park close to Central which performed musical notes.
It did for a short time, anyway.
Two years earlier, an excited Clover had described how she and Peter had conceived one other good thought, whereas watching the 1961 movie West Aspect Story.
This was translated into a 30m multi-coloured keyboard which lit up and emitted music when triggered by pedestrians or cyclists, supposed as an ‘interactive collection of artworks throughout town instructing cyclists and pedestrians consciousness and etiquette’.
It was put in in late February 2012. Vandals ripped it up in a single day.
Then there was the blue factor within the basement at City Corridor, which seemed like a cartoon machine however was a ‘trigeneration’ vitality producer which promised to take your complete metropolis off the electrical energy grid.
The challenge value the council tens of thousands and thousands in analysis and wages, after which it too was shelved, deemed ‘too costly and dangerous’. It now solely powers City Corridor.
Clover oversees a council space of 26 sq. kilometres that’s dwelling to round 231,086 residents and 23,510 companies that generate greater than $370million a yr in charges.
Between 2020 and 2030, the council is anticipated to spend $2.1billion on infrastructure and the acquisition of land and property.
Clover is usually criticised for her private wage invoice, having 22 full-time workers within the Workplace of the Lord Mayor (OLM) together with media, coverage makers and secretaries, and anticipated to value $47million over a decade.
That is simply six fewer that NSW Premier Chris Minns’s workers of 28, however in actuality Lord Mayor’s quantity is sort of twice that.
Petrol is ‘dinosaur juice’
A passionate bike owner, town’s biking supervisor Fiona Campbell, sees a future with out automobiles and has described petrol as ‘dinosaur juice’
Clover’s devoted workers is mirrored by one other staff working for the council, 10 extra media and communications individuals, plus coverage advisers, all employed by town, however in actuality everyone seems to be working for Clover.
Clover’s government workers are loyal, whether or not it is the excessive wages or the shared inexperienced imaginative and prescient, individuals resembling CEO Monica Barone have been there for 18 years, on $500,000 or extra.
Graham Jahn, director of Planning and Growth, and thus Sydney’s strongest property planner who can ‘make or break a challenge’, has been there since 2009.
Fiona Campbell, town’s Biking Technique supervisor for 16 years, shouldn’t be unexpectedly much more enthusiastic about bike lanes than Clover. Greater than as soon as I might needed to politely inform her to cease the evangelising.
Journey To Work day, Sydney’s Spring biking occasion, would have been memorable only for the actual fact the Lord Mayor broke her leg – biking – however Campbell additionally managed to offer an out-of-body expertise.
Clover’s loyal executives embody Monica Barone (left) who has labored for Clover for 18 years because the Metropolis of Sydney’s CEO, and Graham Jahn (proper), town’s director of planning and growth, who has been working for Clover since 2009
The media had been gathered in Hyde Park. Clover was nonetheless on her toes, despite the fact that she’d fallen off her bike en path to the staging level.
Campbell was speaking to a reporter, rapturously describing a future two-wheeled Eden, the place automobiles had been lifeless and so was petrol, which she dismissed as: ‘dinosaur juice’.
Imagining a entrance web page with the phrases printed in a Jurassic Park font and maybe even a Stegosaurus superimposed with Clover’s head on the entrance web page of the Every day Telegraph, I hustled the younger journalist away.
Clover delivered her speech concerning the joys of biking within the Sydney Springtime, then turned instantly to go away: she needed chauffeur Doug to select her up from the park.
She did not say she was in ache or suspected she’d damaged her leg and I counselled strongly in opposition to the transfer – not a very good look on Sydney biking’s day of days.
A damaged leg
Clover Moore in a wheelchair along with her leg in a black forged, 15 days after she fractured her proper fibula falling off a motorcycle whereas dismounting on town’s Journey To Work Day, 2010
That day I made Clover, to my everlasting disgrace, stroll the block to the place Doug sat ready within the Toyota Prius.
Doug took Clover to hospital and an X-ray proved she had sustained a hairline fracture of her proper fibula. Morale at City Corridor fell to half-mast.
Clover re-emerged along with her leg forged, in what she jokingly referred to as ‘Darlinghurst black’ fibreglass, and the media duly added insult to damage, ridiculing her for falling off her bike.
She was photographed on crutches and in a wheelchair, and adopted in her personal avenue. Nonetheless she continued, in some ache, to work her punishing program.
Maybe impressed by her temporary wheelchair expertise, Clover’s Inclusion Advisory Panel’ would later ban the time period ‘disabled’ as offensive, as an alternative calling individuals ‘Entry Inclusion Seekers’.
Blame Clover’s bike lanes on Danish architect Jan Gehl (above), lord of the cycleways, from pancake-flat Copenhagen to hilly Sydney and with a lot extra bitumen-ripping years to go
The years have rolled by since, and rival contenders for mayor have risen and fallen however Clover, term-after-term, has been victorious, toiling away for Sydney but in addition presumably frightened of stepping off the treadmill, as a result of what else would she do?
She’s been a politician practically 45 years since she stood as an alderman for South Sydney Council in 1980 so as to save a neighborhood park.
She was a NSW state member for 14 years till then premier Barry O’Farrell’s ‘Get Clover’ regulation in 2012 dominated a lord mayor ineligible to be a MP.
The LGBTI-supportive Clover had her personal victory when her favoured candidate, Alex Greenwich, received her previous seat.
Clover has been Sydney Lord Mayor since 2004. Her inclination to remain in workplace for so long as is humanly, or electorally potential, implies that if she wins, this election will not be her final.
By no means thoughts the bollards
One among Clover’s absolute heroes, and the person responsible for Sydney’s bike lanes, is Danish architect Jan Gehl, lord of the cycleways from pancake-flat Copenhagen to the remainder of the world.
Gehl fired up Clover’s dream for Sydney and on a number of council-funded journeys right here continues to encourage her. Gehl is the rationale Clover hates bollards, the metallic posts used to maintain out automobiles.
Clover fought a spirited battle in opposition to bollards within the Pitt Road mall, that had alarmed Westfield executives imploring councillors to permit bollards to guard the glass-plated bling of their luxurious retail purchasers.
The sunshine rail was Clover’s thought and he or she lastly discovered a state premier she may promote it to in Kristina Keneally. Promoting it to a hostile media pack was one other factor
Senior NSW police warned the council they’d assist Westfield, given the chance of terrorists and ram-raiders. The bollards received.
Jan Gehl remains to be at it, aged 87, consulting on city areas in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, so do not put it previous Clover to face once more aged 82.
In my closing week with Clover, the Tuesday was Melbourne Cup Day and I slipped out of City Corridor Home.
Drinks had been on on the company run by Sue Cato, the PR maven who’d rented out considered one of her flacks to Clover, together with the $500-an-hour man who’d disastrously put the Lord Mayor in a studio with Allan Jones.
Consuming sins
I returned a couple of hours later, sober sufficient to recollect an aghast staffer’s haste in bundling me again out the door.
Quelle horreur! Lord mayoral workers don’t rejoice ingesting, not to mention horseracing, Clover would not approve.
The 13 weeks I spent in Clover’s realm could not appear to be lengthy sufficient to provide the job an opportunity, however quitting appeared the one path again to a traditional life.
Clover has a murderous work schedule of conferences, bulletins, boards, spherical tables, talks, displays, however do not ask her to cease, she’s constructing a world metropolis!
As a journalist I might had a gun held to my head in civil war-stricken Bougainville, and had waded by way of the our bodies and dying kids strewn within the refugee camps post-Rwandan genocide.
Regardless of that, being accountable for Clover’s public picture generated extra PTSD. Or was it Submit Traumatic Clover Dysfunction, from being beneath fixed fireplace till there got here a time once I too may really feel the hate vibes zapping at me.
She by no means stops
On my closing afternoon, whereas on the pub for farewell drinks, Clover, nonetheless in her black fibreglass leg forged, rang from dwelling, on speaker telephone along with her husband, with a breathless request.
There have been about two hours left to go, however Clover in her traditional method, needed to get each final worth out of the day.
Kings Cross residents had been planning a protest in opposition to the Lord Mayor over plans for Fitzroy Gardens, website of the well-known El Alamein fountain.
Clover, nonetheless with a strolling stick in December 2010, two months after a motorcycle accident which put her in ache however hardly interrupted her ever propensity to work onerous
Locals needed a minor tart-up which Clover mentioned ‘lacked design magnificence’ and had been threatening to picket the streets if she did not relent on her ‘overdeveloped’ plan.
There was time for one closing media launch! ‘I would like an thrilling, evocative phrase image,’ Clover mentioned, ‘to encourage residents!’
‘Folks have to be informed about Clover’s award-winning parks,’ Peter chimed in.
‘Create a tweet,’ Clover mentioned. ‘The Lord Mayor works to create stunning and alluring parks.’
Into battle as soon as once more for Clover and for me, one final time.
