The Fog On The Hill: How NSW Labor Lost Its Way

By Frank Sartor

The crisis in New South Wales Labor is so deep and has such significant ramifications that we need a massive dose of unadulterated, no-holds-barred honesty.

The man who can deliver this honesty is Frank Sartor. An independent outsider who became a Labor minister in 2003, Sartor impressed and irritated insiders and the commentarial in equal measure. As minister for a number of important portfolios in successive Labor Governments, Sartor was perfectly positioned to see the way the Labor machine operated; the factionalism, the deals, the incompetence, the shortsightedness; as it went through four premiers in its last six floundering, backstabbing years.

Sartor's thoughtful and acerbic pen skewers the failings and often-risible hubris of politicians. He pulls no punches in ascribing actions to a number of his former colleagues, but not as an exercise in denigrating opponents, but to illustrate the main actors, their mindsets, and the genesis of some of the New South Wales government's major mishaps.

The Fog on the Hill is essential reading for anyone interested in the evolving landscape of Australian politics. It will be a ready handbook for political aspirants, public servants and all students of political science. Much more, though, it will fascinate all those who value our democracy and want our country and its governments to succeed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780522861075

Book preview

To Monique, Oliver, Jack, William and Isabella.

Contents

Introduction

1 The road to state politics

2 The quaint notion of good government

3 How the unions, the party machine and the Caucus lost the plot

4 The temporary premiers

5 Treasury’s waiting room

6 Politics and political interference in the harbour foreshores

7 Deciding developments in the public interest

8 Political donations or political poison

9 Making sense of the planning jungle

10 Transport—our greatest challenge unmet

11 ‘The Transaction’ and its many consequences

12 High electricity prices and the Solar Bonus Scheme

13 The ‘Greening’ of New South Wales—an advantage lost

14 Never let the truth get in the way of a good story

15 Why NSW Labor lost so badly?

16 The need for real reform

Acknowledgements

Notes

Introduction

This book is about how a political movement lost sight of the noble vocation of being an elected representative with Labor values. For many in the movement it is no longer a vocation, but a job, a career, and a means to fulfil personal ambition.

While all political parties go through peaks and troughs, often their re-emergence in government has more to do with the failure of their opponents or voter fatigue, than the strengthening of their mission and the quality of their policies. It would be a pity if all Labor did was to await the next rotation of voter sentiment and not reform itself.

Having entered politics more by impulse than design and battled through all of the frustrations and mundanities of local government I was hugely relieved to be able to make a discernable difference in the City of Sydney during my time as Lord Mayor. I took similar expectations into the state parliament, although mindful of the larger and more collegiate approach required by Labor and cabinet processes. I was grateful to the Labor Party for giving me that opportunity.

Some may feel that I had an easy ride into parliament and into the Cabinet, and by comparison with some others I certainly did. But it was an opportunity that I took seriously and worked very hard to serve the community and carry my weight within government, even when it meant suffering savage public criticism.

Although I have taken the opportunity to correct the record on a number of issues where I was personally involved, the main purpose of this book is to inform the Labor movement, the Labor Party, all elected public officials and those who are involved with the conscientious business of government.

Many good things were done during the 16 years of Labor government and many of these are acknowledged in the book. There were and still are many good people in the parliamentary Labor caucus. But this book is not about our successes. The voters’ emphatic rejection of Labor demands forensic examination of its failures and their causes.

I wrote this book because I was frustrated by the superficiality of many of the key players in the political arena. There is a pressing need to change the current mindset, and not just within the Labor Party. In describing the political and policy failures of the Labor government I have identified the people responsible in some cases. I make no apology for that. There are some things that need to be said. If ever there was a time to lift the corporate veil on misjudgements and follies then surely this is it. It is my genuine hope that those involved in future Labor governments will bear this responsibility in mind when their turn comes around.

The principles that underpin good government are clear and have not changed for many decades. They involve a commitment to implement good policies, those that are of benefit to the community, and of carefully managing the politics and the criticisms that go with such initiatives. It is also about the solid and detailed work of implementation. Finally the modern community demand a degree of transparency greater than in times past, especially where a government initative or policy is likely to have adverse consequences on some.

Those careerists and opportunists that think it is all about the politics, or about using superficial focus groups to massage the community by telling it what it wants to hear do us no service. The business of government is about conscientiously working through the needs and wants of the people and reconciling those with the realities of government to deliver the best possible services in the most cost effective way.

When elected representatives lose sight of the vocational attributes of being a parliamentarian, or a minister, then decline will occur, and in New South Wales it certainly did.

In Chapter 15 I have outlined some of the specific reasons why New South Wales voters deserted the Labor party in droves at the March 2011 election. They include losing the trust of the electorate, misbehaviours, service failures such as in transport, longevity of the government, policy blunders, incompetence, and leadership misjudgements.

Behind these failures though lies a more endemic problem with the failure in the very foundation relationships of the Labor Party starting with the unions and its contagion on the other three pillars of Labor governments. Firstly the role and attitude of the affiliation unions has changed with a much greater recklessness towards the governance requirements of Labor governments. Secondly we saw the empowerment of party officials into a poll driven corporatist machine with scant regard for the intrinsic value of policies and programs. Thirdly, the outsourcing of preselections to power brokers diminished the caucus and its independence. The final outcome of these concurrent failures inexorably produced a weaker cabinet and a weaker leadership group, unable to instil confidence in the community and prone to poor judgement.

I do not blame the media for the Labor Party’s current predicament. We deserved to lose. But I do believe there needs to be a community wide recognition of the frequent inaccuracies and biases of media organs and the harm that such recklessness does to the fabric of representative democracy. It is now difficult to encourage anyone of worth to enter political life. The cost is exceptionally high and the quality of our governments and parliaments is diminishing as a result. Yes there always will be plenty of time servers, opportunists and ideologues who will put their hands up for election. But is that what we want?

There will be some readers who will say, ‘Well if you thought the government was so bad why didn’t you speak out or leave’. To those I say firstly the government wasn’t so bad, nor was it corrupt, it just wasn’t good enough. Secondly, as part of a government one cannot (other than in extreme circumstances) speak out against one’s own team. That would be irresponsible in any political party in government and does not happen for good reason. Yes it was difficult to remain in the government and in parliament when people and decisions they make disappoint you greatly. But ultimately one must also be judged by the things one achieves and by one’s role as a local representative which I did conscientiously for eight years.

Even though I occasionally thought seriously about resigning I persevered and achieved a significant number of things of which I look back on with satisfaction. The reforms in cancer care, stem cell research, water conservation, energy policy, environmental programs and planning policies and processes in my view make the difficult journey worthwhile, albeit hard labour.

I had my frustrations but the greater concern which led me to consider leaving on occasions was the unconscionable attacks on my reputation and its impact on my family. Often such attacks need to be outlived for some of the smear to be erased. Leaving can be seen as tantamount to an admission of blame.

This book is written in the hope that politicians of all persuasions learn to fully appreciate their job as an important vocation and purse it with commitment, or else leave the scene. It is also a plea to party members, unionists and officials to realise that governments may be elected by scarcely 50 per cent of voters but they have a duty of care to 100 per cent of the entire population.

Government is not a game, or just a source of income for politicians and public servants. It is a duty to the many who seek to improve their lives, or simply survive with some measure of quality.

I have always been a reformer. I see much that can be done better. I have provided my views of the reforms that are needed within the Labor Party, the state’s constitution and on the key policy areas of transport, land use planning, housing, and the agencies of government. But the reform I would treasure the most is the evolution to an attitude that sees the principles of good government become paramount in the minds of all elected representatives and much better appreciated by those who report on the actions of government.

This State has great potential but it needs a serious sweep of reforms if it is to achieve it. Many of the observations I make in this book could equally be applied to all of the other political parties that comprise the NSW parliament and government. I hope they take note.

Frank Sartor

August 2011

1

The road to state politics

It was never a childhood ambition to go into politics. As a child I felt self-conscious and lacked confidence. Public speaking was not my forte.

I was the son of Italian immigrants who moved from Padua in northern Italy to the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area in south-western New South Wales. My dad, Cesare, arrived in 1949 and mum, Ida, followed in 1950 with four of my siblings. I was the fifth of eight children, and the first to be born in Australia. When I was born on 9 November 1951, we lived in a tiny tin shack in Beelbangera, near Griffith. Our family was of very modest means and my father worked as a labourer on local building projects. He started market gardening and was later able to acquire a horticultural farm in a little hamlet called Yenda, where I spent most of my childhood years. My mother was a strong Labor supporter but my father was more of a cynic who thought that most Labor voters didn’t have a good work ethic. He voted Liberal although I expect his votes would have been informal, as his English was very poor.

I spent my teens helping on our farm after school, on weekends and during holidays. Thanks to a Commonwealth scholarship, I left home when I finished school to attend the University of Sydney where I completed a degree in chemical engineering. I followed this with an honours degree in commerce from the University of New South Wales.

It wasn’t an easy childhood, not only because we were poor but also because of the racism that persisted at the time. I will never forget accompanying my father to the local cooperative to deliver his produce and interpret for him, and too often hearing racist slurs like ‘dago’, ‘wog’ and other remarks that I never translated for him.

Life was even harder for my seven siblings—I considered myself the luckiest of them. The elder four found it harder to live the lives of normal Aussies because of my parents’ out-of-date expectations. And the three younger ones were only aged seven, ten and twelve when our mother died of cancer at the age of forty-eight in 1968. They were packed off to boarding schools in Goulburn—the Christian Brothers for the two boys and nuns for my little sister. I’m certainly not suggesting that they suffered any abuse but I have little doubt that the experience was detrimental to them. I swore I would never send a child of my own to a boarding school. The struggles, disappointments and sadness of my childhood made me fear failure as an adult. I’m not sure whether this was a good or bad thing.

When you’re young, it’s hard not to be a little politicised and I was an avid defender of Whitlam in the chemical engineering common room at the University of Sydney in the early seventies, when most of my fellow students were ardent Liberal supporters.

Despite this, I had no thought of becoming involved in politics, and early working experiences didn’t encourage it. In my first post-university job, as a plant supervisor at Colgate-Palmolive, I worked in an impossible industrial climate. It was toxic to the core. I felt that the local unions had become drunk on power, with petty power plays being almost the order of the day. Eventually I got out of the place. It was a wise decision. I then went to work for the local arm of Total, a French-owned local oil company, a move that for me represented a shift from the factory floor to head office.

In July 1978 I married Judith Fleming. We had two children—Oliver born in 1982 and Jack born in 1984. Judy was very supportive of my initial political involvement and activism in the eighties and in my subsequent mayoral years. In 1998 we separated and were divorced several years later, but remained good friends. In 2006 I married Monique Flannery who I had first met eight years earlier at a Sydney festival launch. Monique and I have since had two children—William (3½) and Isabella (1½)—both born while I was a minister. Monique was also very supportive of my political involvement but, like Judy, lived through some periods of hell as political battles raged and media reports were often unforgiving, unconscionable and defamatory, especially during those difficult years I had as Planning Minister.

Small political beginnings

Then one day in 1980, when I was living in Newtown, I came home from work to find a development being proposed around the corner and another in our narrow street. Meriton was planning to erect an eight-storey building in a row of two-storey terraces in Watkins Street. Horrified, we started a campaign with other locals. We called a public meeting at Erskineville Town Hall and attracted hundreds. And so began my involvement in politics. We started the South Sydney Residents Action group, began a monthly newsletter, collected signatures for a petition to oppose the development—and it went from there. Meriton was forced to scale down their development, not through the efforts of the very ordinary South Sydney Council but because some of the residents had access to a good barrister, Murray Wilcox QC, who identified shortcomings in the application and forced Meriton to redesign their development to a three-storey height.

I passed up the chance to stand for the September 1980 council elections and instead supported Clover Moore for Redfern ward in South Sydney. I played a key role in her campaign and managed to persuade another independent, local Redfern shop owner Joe Capogrecco, to allocate his preferences to Moore on his how-to-vote card. But Mr Capogrecco came under pressure from local Labor identities and, unsolicited, was delivered several boxes of how-to-votes favouring Labor’s Bill Hartup (the then mayor of South Sydney) to hand out instead. When I discovered this on the morning of polling day, I had to track him down and persuade him to use the leaflets that favoured Ms Moore instead. He made the switch at about 11am, in just enough time for Ms Moore to be elected on his preferences by fifty-four votes. A nail-biting entry to political campaigning.

At those same local council elections the Labor Party won control of the City of Sydney Council, but the left faction controlled the Labor caucus. On 1 January 1982 South Sydney Council (and its twelve mostly right-wing councillors) was summarily merged with the City of Sydney, creating a council of twenty-seven alderpersons plus the Lord Mayor, then Doug Sutherland. The purpose was to give control of the city council to the right wing. The performance of the merged council was marginally better than that of the old South Sydney Council but still abysmal.

I remained interested and active in local politics, and continued to be amazed by the ineptness of the council. I felt that the City of Sydney Council (just like the previous South Sydney Council) was a gold mine of potential for better government if only it had good-quality leadership. Throughout my political career, my single biggest motivation to be involved in public life was because I believed local and state government can be much better run (and so can the Commonwealth too). I could see dozens of programs and services that could be greatly improved. I could also see massive waste created by a recklessly indifferent bureaucracy overseen by a bunch of elected seat-warming pissants, who passed a lot of motions but made bugger-all progress.

In early 1983 I left Total after they were taken over by Ampol Petroleum. After spending three months at home minding Oliver, Judy encouraged me to go and get another job and gave me an ad for a job in State Parliament. And so in September 1983 I started work as executive director of the NSW Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC). I served the committee for three years, during a very active period of scrutiny of government agencies. We became a little too active and so in August 1986 I was replaced. This was my first taste of disappointment in state politics. But I learned much that would be useful later on.

Although I was working for the PAC I remained interested in city council politics. The council elections had been scheduled for April 1984 and I sought and obtained from the PAC’s chair, Michael Egan, permission to stand. On the advice of a senior parliamentary officer, I consulted Rodney Cavalier, then chair of the Legislative Assembly privileges committee. His response was, ‘If you nominate, they [the Labor right] will come after you with everything they’ve got, and they will get you.’ He paused, then added: ‘But do what you think you need to do.’ So I threw caution to the wind and decided to stand for the city council as an independent.

In April 1984 I was resoundingly elected to the City of Sydney Council as an alderman for Newtown ward. What then followed was three years of frustration sitting on a council that was simply dysfunctional. The Labor councillors were in a minority, and so initially they formed an alliance with some independents, including the union and environmental activist Jack Mundey, and me. Then in September 1985 they formed an alliance with the Liberals led by Jeremy Bingham, a prominent planning and environment lawyer.

In 1987 the council was sacked by the Unsworth Labor government and was not reinstated until 1 January 1989 by the Greiner Liberal government. Its boundaries were much reduced, essentially limiting it to the CBD of Sydney and creating quite a biased, pro-Liberal constituency. I stood again and, having done better than expected, was re-elected to the new City of Sydney Council among seven other councillors. The Jeremy Bingham-led Liberals failed to get a majority and only held three of the seven seats.

In September 1991, I was re-elected again, this time topping the poll and electing three members of our team—Julie Walton, Elizabeth Farrelly and me. The Liberals had only two seats. Labor had one, and independent Labor candidate Doug Sutherland was also elected. A few days later I became the first independent lord mayor in eighty years when, in the second round of the ballot, Liberal councillor Randolph Griffiths broke ranks with his colleague, John McDermott, to vote for me ahead of Labor’s Henry Tsang.

I remained lord mayor through the next three annual mayoral elections until Premier Carr’s newly elected Labor government changed the City of Sydney Act in 1995 to make the vote for lord mayor a popular one. In September that year I narrowly beat Kathryn Greiner to retain the role, and I beat Greiner again in 1999, when my team won four seats out of the seven.

I was lord mayor in 2000 during the successful Sydney Olympics.

Interactions with the Coalition state government

As lord mayor I was in regular contact with the NSW Coalition government although the association was at times strained and difficult. I got on well with Premier Greiner and Transport minister Bruce Baird but this good relationship was not continued when Greiner’s successor, John Fahey, took over in June 1992. I found him difficult, self-important and a poor listener. Meetings with him would usually involve a monologue lasting up to an hour, during which nothing of material value was discussed. Then he would say how busy he was and get up and leave. I gained a strong impression that he and Gerry Peacock (the Minister for Local Government) were keen to sack the council.

My colleagues and I had inherited a council with serious financial problems but only discovered them in late 1992. They were not of our making but rather the inheritance of the ramshackle, inefficient, overstaffed and culturally backward organisation that had evolved over the previous two to three decades. We immediately took strong measures to clean up the City’s finances, among them hiring a new general manager, Katie Lahey, who started work in January 1993. Yet despite regular briefings with Minister Peacocke, he ran a media campaign with constant hints that Sydney City Council was to be sacked.

The war of attrition came to a head on Wednesday 19 May 1993. I was at lunch at Dunhill Madden Butler (a city law firm) when I received a call from my chief of staff, Simon Eldridge. He explained that he had received a phone call from Peacocke’s office advising that the minister planned to raise the matter of the council’s future in Parliament during question time that afternoon. I promptly left what I hoped would not be my last supper as lord mayor.

In reply to a prearranged question from his own side in State Parliament, Peacock announced a public inquiry into the city council under Section 649 of the Local Government Act. The inquiry was structured so that an adverse finding would have allowed the government to dismiss the council.

I returned to my office to meet with Katie Lahey, who looked stunned by the news, and we proceeded to map out a survival plan. Even though Katie thought that I could be volatile, as we worked through our strategy she turned to me and said: ‘Lord Mayor, I can’t believe how calm you are. You are much scarier when you’re calm!’

One of the first people I called was the then Opposition leader, Bob Carr, who suggested I come to Parliament House to discuss the matter. I also called the Member for Bligh, Clover Moore, and agreed to meet with her and other independents that afternoon. There were non-aligned independents in the Legislative Assembly at that time and they held the balance of power. A fourth independent, Tony Windsor, supported the Coalition.

At Parliament House I met with Paul Whelan, the leader of Opposition business in the Assembly. He advised me that the new Local Government Act, in the form of the Local Government bill 1993, was still before the Assembly. He suggested that the Assembly could vote to amend the Bill to provide that the City of Sydney could not be dismissed without a resolution of the Legislative Assembly recommending that the minister do so.

We next met with the independents, including those from the Legislative Council, and they agreed to support a similar amendment—to dismiss the City of Sydney would require the resolution of both houses of Parliament to support it.

The government was duly informed of the intention of the Opposition and independents. Premier Fahey called an emergency cabinet meeting and even considered withdrawing the Local Government bill, which would have jettisoned the new Local Government Act, a major reform four years in the making. However, cabinet relented; it allowed the Bill to be debated and it was amended as planned. We had won a reprieve.

The next morning, Thursday, I received a number of phone calls. One was from former long-serving Labor Premier Neville Wran wishing me luck. Another was from former Premier Nick Greiner, also wishing me luck. Greiner also told me that Fahey was planning to sack Peacock over the coming weekend and that I should keep fighting because Peacock would no longer be minister the following week. So on the Friday morning I went on ABC radio to give a strong defence of the council—and to call on the Premier to sack the Minister for Local Government, accusing him of being incompetent and disingenuous.

Greiner was right. On the Sunday, Fahey announced that he was going to sack Gerry Peacock after stories in a similar vein had appeared in that day’s papers. On Monday morning Peacocke also appeared on ABC morning radio, defending himself and lashing out at Premier Fahey for having ‘a head like a soup bowl—broad and shallow’.

National Party MP Garry West was appointed the new Minister for Local Government. He immediately declared that he would not pursue the public inquiry into the Sydney City Council that Peacocke had announced, but would instead appoint an independent review panel to monitor our progress in restoring the city’s finances. The panel was about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike but obviously had the benefit of giving the minister some political cover. Over the course of the year the finances of the city were restored and the rest, as they say, is history.

Fahey’s negative attitude towards the city council continued. Whenever joint city and state ceremonial events were being planned—such as welcome home parades for sporting teams—the Premier was uncommunicative and his people uncooperative. At meetings of the Olympic Bid Committee he either acted as though I didn’t exist or made jokes at my expense. In fact, John Valder, former president of the Liberal Party and member of the Bid Committee, later confided that he had decided to support me for the city council election in 1995 against Kathryn Greiner in part because of what he considered to be the appalling way Fahey had treated me at those committee meetings.

Frank Sartor, as Lord Mayor of Sydney, was never part of the Liberal Party’s plan for the city council. They had so heavily rigged the voting system (for example, interstate partners of law and accounting firms could vote in City of Sydney elections) and so designed the electoral boundaries to exclude as many residents as possible, that the thought of a conservative Lord Mayor failing to get up simply hadn’t occurred to them. Fahey clearly resented me sitting at the same table at Olympic Bid meetings.

Most people will remember ‘jolly John’ Fahey for his giant leap of excitement into the air when it was announced in Monte Carlo in September 1993 that Sydney had won the bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. I was sitting beside him during the announcement, and I still recall him pushing down on my knee as he sought to get leverage for his leap should the announcement go our way. In other words, I got the distinct impression that his ‘spontaneous’ leap was rehearsed and aimed at getting him maximum television exposure in the news reports. And it worked. I also recall Fahey and Bob Carr (then Opposition leader) literally jostling for position in front of a TV crew immediately afterwards.

Fahey remained uncooperative throughout the remainder of his premiership, which ended when the Coalition lost government in April 1995. Apart from the attempt to sack the council, there was also an attempt to further reduce the city’s powers in planning matters by removing the lord mayor as the chair of the Central Sydney Planning Committee. This was aborted after an inquiry by Commissioner Simpson didn’t go the way the government had wanted. While Fahey was always difficult, other state ministers such as Bruce Baird (Transport) and Peter Collins (Treasurer) remained cooperative throughout the period of Coalition government.

As fate would have it, after losing the March 1995 state election to Bob Carr, Fahey went into federal politics and became Finance minister in the Howard government. Several years later he was diagnosed with lung cancer and, after having a lung removed, was one of the lucky ones to survive it. He turned up at a cancer function I was having at the Sydney Town Hall in 2002 and we had a good chat about the need to do more about the disease. He was quite friendly. I later appointed him to the board of the new Cancer Institute of NSW.

Interactions with the Carr Labor government

From the election of the Carr Labor government in March 1995 until I left the City of Sydney to become a Member of Parliament in 2003, the City and the State Government worked together in a period of almost unprecedented cooperation. It was a very productive relationship that allowed us to achieve a great deal. Apart from the Premier, my main interactions with the government involved ministers Ernie Page (Local Government), Craig Knowles (Planning), Morris Iemma (Public Works) and Michael Knight (Olympics). These relationships were constructive ones. We were able to attract a state contribution of $30 million towards the upgrade of George Street—almost half the cost of the $70 million project—and the collaboration of the Department of Transport and the Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA), was needed for the upgrade of the city’s streets, footpaths and public parks. There were dozens of projects where the state’s cooperation was helpful, including the creation of Cook and Phillip Park by closing Boomerang Street, thanks to the Minister for Lands, Richard Amery; plans to improve William Street (after the creation of the Cross City Tunnel), Oxford Street and Broadway, thanks to Transport minister Carl Scully; the restoration of the Capitol Theatre and the building of the City Recital Hall.

In 1995, we started the tradition of the New Year’s Eve midnight fireworks, a complex interaction of the two levels of government and various authorities. The City funded it, supported by private-sector sponsorship, while the state contributed significant logistical support involving police, public transport, access to the Harbour Bridge and access to the harbour itself. This event was designed to prepare us for major crowd movements during the Olympics and to showcase Sydney at the turn of the century.

I have always had a philosophical view that one should not stay in the job too long, and by mid 2002 I had achieved about 90 per cent of what I had set out to achieve as lord mayor. Also, to be honest, I was getting bored with most civic receptions—except citizenship ceremonies. I enjoyed these receptions because the people involved were so happy to become Australians, and the atmosphere was always inspiring, optimistic and rewarding. But there was a lot of other dross that one did, especially as a conscientious mayor.

All bureaucracies need to be held accountable; they need to have people in charge who carefully observe their performance. Too often I would have to raise with senior bureaucrats—and raise again and again—issues about the cleanliness of the city, the state of footpaths, the work of our city rangers, and so on. By this time I lived in Pitt Street, within two blocks of Sydney Town Hall, and so whenever the bureaucrats told me porkies about how things were running in the city I was able to correct them very quickly. They came to know that I expected a very high standard.

Such constant vigilance is the tedious but essential part of public office. Any person who avoids the boring stuff will never be a good elected official. It might just be responding to letters of individual constituents, or making sure responses to their letters go out in a reasonable time, something bureaucracies seldom do. But it’s important. It is about instilling a belief in the community that their elected officials—and the bureaucrats their rates and taxes pay for—mean to do the right thing and are not simply fat cats taking everyone for a ride.

The reason we were able to change the culture of the City of Sydney—the look and feel of the city, the quality of its infrastructure, the quality of its services and the number of community facilities—was because of excruciatingly hard work by a lot of people, my colleagues among them, over a sustained period of time. I’m proud to say that we turned ramshackle public spaces into much-loved places that are now a pleasure to be in. The graffiti removal, the new street furniture, the large fluttering banners, the smart poles, the new cultural facilities, the new community facilities and the new footpaths are all things that enhance the pride and self-worth of a community.

The events we held in the centre of Sydney during the 2000 Olympic Games were a smashing success. To this day I am sure that one of the reasons Sydneysiders were so happy with these events was that, whether they were held in central Sydney or at Olympic Park, people took enormous pride in the quality of the public domain and the public facilities.

Many local government councillors, state bureaucrats and state politicians underestimate the importance of such basic things to community pride and to the acceptance by communities of new development projects. It is, of course, harder for state politicians and ministers to be as close to the coalface as I was able to be as Lord Mayor of Sydney. That’s why politicians at state level need to find ways of being connected to the community and to understand the things that the community considers to be important.

The transition into state politics

It may have been this level of cooperation that led Premier Carr— and other Labor MPs and officials—to entertain the idea of inviting me to join the Labor Party and stand for Parliament. The first electorate the Premier suggested in early 2002 was Drummoyne, which was being vacated by John Murray. But I was still undecided and commissioned a private poll that showed the Labor Party’s margin was somewhere between 5 and 7 per cent. Considering the amount of new waterfront development that was underway, I decided the seat was likely to become quite marginal and so for this reason, and because I still had serious reservations about running for state politics, I decided not to proceed. Soon after, Angela D’Amore was preselected for the seat.

My main concern about entering state politics, however, was that I would be perceived as an outsider and therefore would not be well accepted in the government. There was never any specific offer of a ministry. I also wondered how much longer Labor would remain in office, given that the government had been in power for seven years. At a crossroads, I also considered going into the private sector. I hadn’t totally dismissed the possibility of staying on as lord mayor, given my stocks were higher than they had ever been, and I expected to be easily re-elected were I to contest the 2004 City of Sydney elections.

I finally agreed to stand for the State Parliament in September 2002.

I saw the opportunity to do some good things within the government and when by September it became pretty clear to me that Labor would win at least another term. At last I responded positively to the suggestion of entering state politics. The seat that was now proposed was Rockdale in southern Sydney, which was one of the remaining few that had not preselected its Labor candidate by September 2002. It made sense for two more reasons. First, the sitting member, George Thompson, was interested in retiring and second, there had been a corruption inquiry, which had found against two Rockdale councillors. There appeared to be some benefits in having an outsider preselected for the seat. I discussed the issue with Treasurer Michael Egan and Labor Party officials, and the decision was taken to support me for preselection using the N40 rule, which meant that the preselection committee would comprise equal numbers of state office nominees and local branch members.

I became a member of the Labor Party, was nominated for the seat of Rockdale on 1 November 2002 and preselected on 9 November.

Over the coming months I began to wind up my work as lord mayor and prepared for the transition to a new lord mayor, as well as throwing myself into the Rockdale election campaign. In February 2003, I moved into a rented apartment in Monterey in the Rockdale electorate. On 22 March 2003, I was elected the member for Rockdale, having won every polling booth in the electorate and 65 per cent of the two-party preferred vote.

I was well received by the people of the electorate. A number of sidelined Labor aspirants were not so welcoming and some have been sulking ever since. This was reflected in lower votes (although still a majority) in some of the polling booth results around Arncliffe and Rockdale, but these recovered at the subsequent election in 2007.

A few weeks before the election, in February 2003, I held a major fundraiser at the Regent Hotel (now the Four Seasons) in the Rocks. It was attended by over 600 people, mainly from the business community, and served both as a farewell party and fundraiser for the ALP. It was a great success.

I resigned as Lord Mayor of Sydney on Tuesday 8 April 2003, the day after I voted in council for the election of Lucy Turnbull as my replacement for the balance of the term that was to run until April 2004. Lucy became the first female Lord Mayor of Sydney.

The day I was elected Lord Mayor, on 23 September 1990, I’d felt enormous responsibility, a grave fear of failure—and lonely. On 8 April, when I walked out of the Town Hall, I felt a great deal of satisfaction but wondered what lay ahead for me in the murky waters of Macquarie Street.

I acknowledge that my preselection and passage into State parliament and the ministry was facilitated