I worked closely with Clover Moore and it was the most difficult three months of my life. But it explains why she is going to win a sixth term today as Sydney’s lord mayor

OPINION

Inside the great, ugly tower that is the Queen of Sydney’s seat of power, the monarch was facing a crisis and anxious for my presence.

Outside Town Hall it was a bright, beautiful day but within the storm clouds were gathering, and a summons from Clover Moore was delivered by her most loyal foot soldier.

‘Clover needs you in her office. Now! It’s urgent,’ came the call from the Lord Mayor’s chief-of-staff James Zanotto.

Always gracious even when Clover was at her most demanding, and usually impeccably calm, Zanotto sounded uncharacteristically rattled. 

At issue was the resumption of the bike wars – the pitched battle between cyclists and motorists for access to road lanes that had somehow unified the warring bodies in a shared antipathy for the mayor. 

Clover’s dream to transform hilly Sydney into a northern-European-style cyclists’ nirvana had turned into a bitter fight; something she has always relished when she believes she’s right.

As her CEO Monica Barone had once warned me: ‘Clover is bloody-minded’. 

The same age as Donald Trump 

At 78, she is the same age as Donald Trump –  and while they share little by way of political positions, they each have a commanding air and distinctive coiffure.

And she too has spent this week in the closing stages of another election campaign.

Clover has been in politics for five times as long as Trump and will run this week for a sixth term on the same green, planet-saving agenda she espoused when I worked for her.

And almost 15 years on, she is generating remarkably similar rhetoric from her opponents, who light up the airwaves and comments sections with long-familiar criticisms.

‘She’s a witch,’ they say, ‘She should be sacked! She’s wrecking the city. Run her out of town. She’s a vandal. She’s got to go!’

Back then, the attacks were led by the two kings of Sydney radio, Kyle Sandilands and Alan Jones.

Jones had thoroughly skewered Clover during a previous battle of the bike lanes, in an obstreperous live on-air ambush, ill-advisedly set up by an ad-hoc media team.

Jones cut in, talked over, abused the lord mayor: ‘You haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about,’ he told her. ‘You virtually speak for nobody… For god’s sake, Clover Moore, can’t you read?’

Clover had thereafter refused to listen to talkback radio, leaving the daily on-air barbs to be filtered through to her by her flacks. 

She hired me as her communications manager; something that was ill-advised for both of us.

Tim Tams banned 

In the early weeks of my job I was still climbing the steep learning curve of Cloverland, a Mount Everest of green agendas and politically correct plans to make Sydney a sustainable-climate urban paradise.

It was all contained in ‘The Vision’, a 215-page manifesto – on recycled paper of course – that was revered at Town Hall like the Old Testament, and written in eye-glazing bureaucratese about ‘macrobiotic imbalances’, ‘activity hub development’ and ‘strategic economic infrastructure’. 

And so when I go the call to attend her office at Town Hall House, I wondered why I was being summoned with such urgency? 

Could it be another ’emergency’ like the day I’d bought cage eggs from the Woolies over the road and left them on my desk?

A passing secretary had spotted the eggs and leapt back as if at an escaped lion.

‘Put them away! Don’t let Clover see them!’ she said, and warned against further transgressions such as smuggling in chops or steak – and never, ever veal.

Since Clover had read A Vegetarian Philosophy by Peter Singer, she’d given up meat and drafted guidelines which included a ban on battery hen eggs as ‘cruel food’.

Tim Tams were not even allowed into the building, so I was told, since Clover learnt that 80 per cent of the world’s cocoa was farmed on the Ivory Coast by child labour.

It was the same ‘progressive’ principles that saw the roads of central Sydney and inner suburbs seemingly permanently occupied by bitumen-ripping bulldozers, witches hats, road dividers, and orange netting.

Through the dust and confusion you could still read Clover’s signed proclamation, ‘The city’s new cycleways are good for your health!’

Chauffer-driven mayor 

Since the Alan Jones carve-up, Clover had been ambushed again and again in the media; photographed climbing into her car with her chauffeur for the brief 2.7km commute to work, while other drivers fumed at the torn-up roads they used to drive down.

It was this terrible PR that brought me to Clover’s office – not the elegant room she keeps in the grand neo-Classical Town Hall, but the working office in the Brutalist-style Town Hall House.

She was standing by her desk, bristling with impatience and anxiety. The desk was  stacked with books about the defining habits of leaders, including one of Clover’s mantras, ‘parallel priorities’.

James Zanotto began an explanation, ‘Clover just walked back to Town Hall from …’ but Clover interjected in the well-mannered voice which becomes clipped when she’s agitated.

 The ‘hate vibes’ 

‘Yes! I just walked back here and all along the way I could feel it. I could feel the hate vibes coming out of people. What are you going to do about it?’

In that tense moment, various solutions came to my mind. Medication?  Meditation? Or three deep breaths? Maybe I could just quit on the spot. 

What kind of hate vibes were they? Bike lane vibes? Radical green agenda vibes? 

Or just larrikin old convict town Sydney wrestling in the grasp of a former convent schoolgirl?

Middle-of-the-road Australia arcing up at massive dollops of woke earth preservation, served up with just a little too much self-righteous insistence?

I mumbled something about media releases promoting Clover’s favourite topics: making Sydney ‘green global, connected’, ‘excellence’ in general, and the latest, ludicrous giant multi-million dollar artwork – the Cloud Arch, better known in the tabloid media as the ‘space noodle’.

Did I include her ‘award-winning parks’, which Clover still likes to mention with cringing regularity? Probably. 

At any rate, the words seemed to soothe her. Crisis averted, I left James with Clover and went back to work on Clover’s murderous schedule.

Back-to-back meetings, briefings, business forums, round tables, strategic steering committee meetings, pre-meetings to the meetings, and media releases, at least three dozen on the go in any working week.

Each one, by decree of Clover, carried the message: ‘Let’s Make Sydney Green, Global and Connected!’ 

Banners, flyers, speeches, e-news, pamphlets, blogs, tweets, all ‘Cloverised’ by staff and personally approved by the Lord Mayor, who like the real Queen Elizabeth II, took boxes of work home every weekend. 

Saturday afternoons were routinely interrupted with the Lord Mayor’s calls about her architect husband Peter’s latest ‘brilliant’ idea, or his less complimentary appraisal of her work that needed my immediate attention.

You’d have to bite your tongue when Clover heartily said – and she said it often – ‘Peter is my greatest critic!’ 

No, Clover, he’s not. 

Not a sport fan 

Over 80-hour working weeks, I had learnt about Clover’s likes (80-hour working weeks, ‘excellence and integrity’ and talking about her ‘legacy’), and her hates (rugby league, most other sports, drinking, swearing, meat).

Part tough politician, part highly-sensitive idealist, no amount of criticism will change Clover’s mind. She won’t back down just because it annoys somebody. 

People should recognise her excellent work. Her award-winning public buildings. Her green electricity system. She’s building a global city!

I was adjusting to the realities of Cloverland, where green evangelism flows unabated from her pulpit, and where quite apart from avoiding controversy, the sometimes snappy-tempered Lord Mayor seemed to thrive on it.

And insiders say there has been no mellowing as she campaigns for re-election, again, on her Team Clover ticket, still promising Sydney it will be an ‘environmentally performing, economically thriving, internationally recognised city with integrated transport’. 

Among her eight rivals in Saturday’s electio=n, are candidates campaigning on the old maxim that mayors should stick to ‘roads, rates and rubbish’, something that continually rises up to bite Clover.

Rates have skyrocketed in her two decades of rule, rubbish mountains mushroom on many streets – but not the street where Clover owns a house, which is tidily swept – and then 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, rather than the flawed system.

That’s not to say she hasn’t kicked a few goals in her time, to use a footy analogy she would loathe.

The light rail – love it or hate it – was her idea, and I remember the day she had finally convinced someone to sign off on it – the NSW premier Kristina Keneally.

As we strode towards a hostile media pack gathered in the old Town Hall for the joint conference with Keneally and the inevitable questions about road disruption, Clover asked, not quite under her breath, ‘Why is very day of my life like an exam?’

Those bike lines 

Town Hall has a corridor lined with the portraits of gentleman in ermine coats and chains. They are Clover’s 79 predecessors, each mayor since 1842 when Sydney was incorporated as a city – the odd drunk, lay-about and liar among them.

Whether Clover’s gets rolled this weekend, or if she is elected once more for yet another term, she deserves a positive legacy for her achievements. But it’s cost a lot and there has been some awful waste, especially the art works.

Everyone likes to remember the $2.5million giant blue milk crate sculpture for Belmore Park, a hardscrabble space opposite Central Station known for homeless sleepers, who might have welcomed it as a home.

After the idea was roundly lampooned, the crate was ‘indefinitely deferred’, but I believe the artist was paid nevertheless.

Then there was the 58m high ‘cloud arch’, of which Clover declared ‘people will want to make love under it!’

When the cost blew out to $22million and the light rail plans interfered with the security of its footings, the space noodle was shelved.

There was the $9million line of ratty murraya plants snaking through Surry Hills, dubbed the world’s most expensive hedge, which had her office indignantly protesting that it will include ‘lighting and seating’  

Few remember Clover’s giant ‘ride over piano’ which traversed a path in Prince Alfred Park near Central which played musical notes.

It did for a short while, anyway. 

Two years earlier, an excited Clover had described how she and Peter had conceived another brilliant idea, while watching the 1961 film West Side Story. 

This was translated into a 30m multi-coloured keyboard which lit up and emitted music when triggered by pedestrians or cyclists, intended as an ‘interactive series of artworks across the city teaching cyclists and pedestrians awareness and etiquette’. 

It was installed in late February 2012. Vandals ripped it up overnight.

Then there was the blue thing in the basement at Town Hall, which looked like a cartoon machine but was a ‘trigeneration’ energy producer which promised to take the entire city off the electricity grid.

The project cost the council tens of millions in research and wages, and then it too was shelved, deemed ‘too expensive and risky’. It now only powers Town Hall.

Clover oversees a council area of 26 square kilometres that is home to around 231,086 residents and 23,510 businesses that generate more than $370million a year in rates. 

Between 2020 and 2030, the council is expected to spend $2.1billion on infrastructure and the acquisition of land and property. 

Clover is often criticised for her personal wage bill, having 22 full-time staff in the Office of the Lord Mayor (OLM) including media, policy makers and secretaries, and anticipated to cost $47million over a decade.

That’s just six fewer that NSW Premier Chris Minns’s staff of 28, but in reality Lord Mayor’s number is almost twice that.

Petrol is ‘dinosaur juice’ 

Clover’s dedicated staff is mirrored by another team working for the council, 10 more media and communications people, plus policy advisers, all employed by the city, but in reality everyone is working for Clover.

Clover’s executive staff are loyal, whether it’s the high wages or the shared green vision, people such as CEO Monica Barone have been there for 18 years, on $500,000 or more.

Graham Jahn, director of Planning and Development, and thus Sydney’s most powerful property planner who can ‘make or break a project’, has been there since 2009.

Fiona Campbell, the city’s Cycling Strategy manager for 16 years, is not unexpectedly even more passionate about bike lanes than Clover. More than once I’d had to politely tell her to stop the evangelising.

Ride To Work day, Sydney’s Spring cycling event, would have been memorable just for the fact the Lord Mayor broke her leg – cycling – but Campbell also managed to provide an out-of-body experience. 

The media were gathered in Hyde Park. Clover was still on her feet, even though she’d fallen off her bike en route to the staging point.

Campbell was talking to a reporter, rapturously describing a future two-wheeled Eden, where cars were dead and so was petrol, which she dismissed as: ‘dinosaur juice’. 

Imagining a front page with the words printed in a Jurassic Park font and perhaps even a Stegosaurus superimposed with Clover’s head on the front page of the Daily Telegraph, I hustled the young journalist away.

Clover delivered her speech about the joys of cycling in the Sydney Springtime, then turned immediately to leave: she wanted chauffeur Doug to pick her up from the park. 

She didn’t say she was in pain or suspected she’d broken her leg and I counselled strongly against the move – not a good look on Sydney cycling’s day of days.

A broken leg

That day I made Clover, to my eternal shame, walk the block to where Doug sat waiting in the Toyota Prius.

Doug took Clover to hospital and an X-ray proved she had sustained a hairline fracture of her right fibula. Morale at Town Hall fell to half-mast.

Clover re-emerged with her leg cast, in what she jokingly called ‘Darlinghurst black’ fibreglass, and the media duly added insult to injury, ridiculing her for falling off her bike. 

She was photographed on crutches and in a wheelchair, and followed in her own street. Nevertheless she continued, in some pain, to work her punishing program.

Perhaps inspired by her brief wheelchair experience, Clover’s Inclusion Advisory Panel’ would later ban the term ‘disabled’ as offensive, instead calling people ‘Access Inclusion Seekers’.

The years have rolled by since, and rival contenders for mayor have risen and fallen but Clover, term-after-term, has been victorious, toiling away for Sydney but also possibly fearful of stepping off the treadmill, because what else would she do? 

She’s been a politician nearly 45 years since she stood as an alderman for South Sydney Council in 1980 in order to save a local park.

She was a NSW state member for 14 years until then premier Barry O’Farrell’s ‘Get Clover’ law in 2012 ruled a lord mayor ineligible to be a MP.

The LGBTI-supportive Clover had her own victory when her favoured candidate, Alex Greenwich, won her old seat. 

Clover has been Sydney Lord Mayor since 2004. Her inclination to stay in office for as long as is humanly, or electorally possible, means that if she wins, this election may not be her last.

Never mind the bollards 

One of Clover’s absolute heroes, and the man to blame for Sydney’s bike lanes, is Danish architect Jan Gehl, lord of the cycleways from pancake-flat Copenhagen to the rest of the world.

Gehl fired up Clover’s dream for Sydney and on multiple council-funded trips here  continues to inspire her. Gehl is the reason Clover hates bollards, the metal posts used to keep out cars.

Clover fought a spirited battle against bollards in the Pitt Street mall, that had alarmed Westfield executives imploring councillors to allow bollards to protect the glass-plated bling of their luxury retail clients. 

Senior NSW police warned the council they would support Westfield, given the risk of terrorists and ram-raiders. The bollards won. 

Jan Gehl is still at it, aged 87, consulting on urban spaces in Europe, North America,  Australia and New Zealand, so don’t put it past Clover to stand again aged 82.

In my final week with Clover, the Tuesday was Melbourne Cup Day and I slipped out of Town Hall House.

Drinks were on at the agency run by Sue Cato, the PR maven who’d rented out one of her flacks to Clover, including the $500-an-hour man who’d disastrously put the Lord Mayor in a studio with Allan Jones.

Drinking sins

I returned a few hours later, sober enough to remember an aghast staffer’s haste in bundling me back out the door. 

Quelle horreur! Lord mayoral staff do not celebrate drinking, let alone horseracing, Clover would not approve.

The thirteen weeks I spent in Clover’s realm may not seem like long enough to give the job a chance, but quitting seemed the only path back to a normal life.

As a journalist I’d had a gun held to my head in civil war-stricken Bougainville, and had waded through the bodies and dying children strewn in the refugee camps post-Rwandan genocide.

Despite that, being responsible for Clover’s public image generated more PTSD. Or was it Post Traumatic Clover Disorder, from being under constant fire until there came a time when I too could feel the hate vibes zapping at me.

She never stops  

On my final afternoon, while at the pub for farewell drinks, Clover, still in her black fibreglass leg cast, rang from home, on speaker phone with her husband, with a breathless request.

There were about two hours left to go, but Clover in her usual manner, wanted to get every last value out of the day.

Kings Cross residents were planning a protest against the Lord Mayor over plans for Fitzroy Gardens, site of the famous El Alamein fountain.

Locals wanted a minor tart-up which Clover said ‘lacked design elegance’ and were threatening to picket the streets if she didn’t relent on her ‘overdeveloped’ plan.

There was time for one final media release! ‘I want an exciting, evocative word picture,’ Clover said, ‘to inspire residents!’

‘People need to be told about Clover’s award-winning parks,’ Peter chimed in. 

‘Create a tweet,’ Clover said. ‘The Lord Mayor works to create beautiful and inviting parks.’

Into battle once again for Clover and for me, one last time.