COUNCIL ELECTIONS

From mountain cable cars to festival shock tactics and highrise buildings, the usually musty affairs of local government have generated unusual excitement in Tasmania’s capital city as elections approach

With Hobart’s future at stake, the approaching elections are starting to get very real.

Long before Dark Mofo, another festival activated Hobart over winter, bringing people out to Princes Wharf 1 on the chilliest of days. It was the late 1990s when the Tasmanian Celt Winterfest celebrated the state’s Irish and Scottish heritage with traditional dancing displays, bagpipes, haggis and guinness. If you had a family tartan you revelled in it. One year guests danced to the Shannon, with festival organiser Ron Christie remembering 8000 people lining up for the popular band. He didn’t manage to get Van Morrison to play his vaguely esoteric Celtic soul numbers and hits, but that was not for lack of trying.

So it rankles Lord Mayor Christie that since his midyear outbursts over Dark Mofo’s themes and what he called a “fly them in, shock them and fly them out” tourism influx, he is perceived as being anti-festivals.

“I am here because of festivals,” he tells TasWeekend, explaining how he came to join Hobart City Council. The former professional event organiser and PR man says he was so disillusioned by lack of local council support for his Celtic and earlier multicultural fiesta in North Hobart, run by his Tasmanian Special Events Company, that he felt compelled to act. “The council members were very old-fashioned in their views of festivals and I thought ‘this is wrong’, so I stood for council and I got on, and I’ve supported virtually every festival.”

We are sitting in Christie’s temporary office at Hobart Town Hall, a stately meeting room the former deputy mayor has been using since stepping into the top job after former Lord Mayor Sue Hickey left to join state politics. Gilded mouldings embellish the walls, on one of which hangs a portrait of the Queen, and plush-pile wool carpet covers the floor in regal red and gold.

Christie leads regular tours of the 1866 building. If returned to office, he wants to introduce public open days and bring back free lunchtime concerts on the heritage organ. He cherishes the building’s rich history and warms quickly to the theme. Before I know it, he is campaigning in a red velvet armchair.

“There’s no capital city like Hobart and that’s why we want to maintain it,” he says. “That’s why I am absolutely opposed to high rise when we have something here to preserve and promote. I’ve been outspoken several times on tourism and festivals but for good reason.”

As a matter of fact, he says in a later text, we have two sets of historic organ pipes in this city that need protection and preservation: the instrument at Town Hall, from the effects of time, and the iconic rock formation on kunanyi/Mt Wellington, from a cable car across its face high above the city whose keys he holds until at least the end of the month.

Beyond two soaring Huon pine-framed windows overlooking Macquarie St looms the striking Art Deco facade of the old Mercury building, where Mona has leased office space since our newspaper headquarters moved to Salamanca Square in 2012. Concocting a stream of ideas in his DarkLab is Dark Mofo creative director Leigh Carmichael. The pair has traded barbs in media and private correspondence but not thus far across the street that divides them.

Christie recently renewed his call to end council’s $258,000 annual sponsorship of the festival, most of which is spent on Winter Feast. A supporter of seed funding for festivals, he thinks they should eventually become self-sustaining.

“I supported Dark Mofo when it first came out in 2013 and the intent then was to promote winter. I don’t see it doing that

now,” he says. “It is a shock festival. I don’t see it as good for our kids the way it’s going… It is sending out the wrong message and I worry. If I am wrong it will show up in the ballot paper.”

Is he sure, I ask cheekily, that this Dark Mofo dissing isn’t partly sour grapes because his winter festival fizzled out after a few years and is all but forgotten while Carmichael is practically hailed as the new Messiah? He dismisses the idea.

Political and polling analyst Dr Kevin Bonham has expressed surprise at the Lord Mayor’s stance. “The Ron Christie I knew a little in the early 2000s was quite the zany freethinker and I suspect would have loved Dark Mofo to bits. I can only wonder what has occurred.”

Christie says he learnt to listen, in this case to the 640 complaints he received about the inverted, illuminated 20m high crucifixes planted across the city. “The things I’ve said have probably put me in a bad [electoral] position, but it’s not personal. [I am representing the views of] people coming to me. I am not going to sit back and not say anything.”

Did the backlash to his Dark Mofo sprays give him pause? Not for an instant. “I probably wear my heart on my sleeve,” says the mayor, who has unapologetically held his position.

On a side note, Bonham believes the way electing is set up may be dudding voters when it comes to the deputy position. Candidates can stand as either mayor or deputy mayor, but not both. That means none of the 10 unsuccessful contenders for mayor this time can become the deputy by straightforward means. He also points out that though Christie cruised in on preferences to become deputy in 2014, he trailed in polling for his straight alderman role, to which lord mayor and deputy must also be elected. “The man who is now Lord Mayor polled only 11th in the councillor primaries,” notes Bonham.

Christie thinks his Lord Mayor prospects would be better if he had not stepped up to fill Hickey’s shoes. “The downside is I lost my elected role as deputy and I can’t go back to it from this role. So I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t and that’s the only reason I’m standing now.”

He says his manager advises him to be “more presidential” when conflict with colleagues flares, but Christie finds it hard to turn the other cheek. “I’m supposed to sit there like a shag on a rock?” He says the only time he fights with his deputy, Peter Sexton, “is when he comes out and makes ridiculous statements about me”.

Tit for tat is not the point, though, is it? Does undisciplined bickering indicate a level of dysfunction in the current council? He says it does not, pointing out that council meetings operate smoothly when he runs them and that colleagues often commend him on his chairing.

“I am fair to every member in the chamber,” he says. “I carry out the role. I am not personally biased. There was at times turmoil and heat in the chamber when Sue [Hickey] was there.”

Nevertheless, he says he would like to see the last of certain aldermen. Or, as he puts it, “there’s a couple of cats in the alley I don’t like and they should move on to another alley”.

He knows there is a strong chance he will be moved on himself. “Commentators are saying I’m committing political suicide,” he notes. “But I am not going to cry if I am not elected mayor.” We’ll see, I say.

He roars with laughter, as he does frequently during our 80 minute meeting.

“I’ve got tissues everywhere,” he jokes.

Electors have until almost the end of the month to vote for the next lord and deputy mayors of Hobart City Council, the city’s 11 other aldermen, and mayors, deputies and councillors of 27 other councils statewide (Glenorchy is not due to vote).

The race for Lord Mayor has 11 starters, compared with five in 2014. In EMRS polling conducted last weekend, Christie, on 5 per cent, trailed aldermen including frontrunner Anna Reynolds, with 15 per cent, Damon Thomas and Bill Harvey, both on 8 per cent, and Marti Zucco and Jeff Briscoe on 6 per cent.

Of the 2680 people asked by pollsters if they planned to vote, a mere 548 said they intended to fill in the paperwork and send it off. The participation rate for electors in Hobart City Council was 51.7 per cent last time.

The spectre of voter apathy has renewed a call for making local government elections compulsory, bringing them into line with other levels of government and some other states.

In NSW, Victoria and Queensland it is compulsory to vote and plenty of aldermen would like to see Tasmania lift participation by adopting that system. We can take heart, though, that the voting rate at the last council elections was much higher in Tasmania, at 54.6 per cent, than in other voluntary states, with a dismal 27.5 per cent voting in Western Australia, where the state average was dragged down by very low urban voting rates, and 32 per cent in South Australia. Younger people (18-35) in Tasmania are typical in that they are not half as likely as over 65s to vote, with 74 per cent of the latter doing so.

ABC election analyst Antony Green has attributed lower voter turnout compared with federal and state elections largely to lack of interest and lack of knowledge of candidates.

It appears the uptake of local media plays a role in our higher than average voluntary voting rate. “Hobart and Launceston have fewer councils than other cities and coverage of local government doesn’t get relegated to throwaway free local newspapers,” notes Green.

University of Tasmania political scientist Professor Richard Eccleston says the lower level of voter engagement in local government elections is partly a result of political parties not being prominent.

“In many ways political parties are a necessarily evil because at the very least one thing they do is provide a strong brand,” Eccleston says, “giving voters insight into what candidates stand for on issues. “An interesting trend in this year’s poll is prominent independents forming tickets in an attempt to clearly communicate what they stand for and their priorities for the city. In a sense these are quasi-parties,” says Eccleston, referencing Damon Thomas’s Liveable Hobart Group ticket.

Eccleston is fascinated by three intersecting variables. “It’s a really highly contested set of elections,” he says. “I can’t remember this level of interest in local government elections in Greater Hobart. Secondly, with the debate about compulsory voting coming to the fore, there’s uncertainty about who’s going to turn out and who’s going to benefit from that, which is the bread and butter of elections right around the world, except for Australia.”

And thirdly, there is the “curious anomaly” where, along with everybody on the state roll, special voting provisions are offered to nonresident landowners and occupiers and nominated representatives of corporate bodies owning or occupying land in the municipal area.

“Obviously there have been concerns about candidates trying to mobilise their supporters and to get those who aren’t citizens onto the General Managers’ Roll [to enrol],” says Eccleston.

“It does create questions about who is voting. The great thing about the compulsory Australian system is our electoral administration and governance is first rate.”

Simple reforms can help to safeguard that integrity, says Eccleston, citing the simple Queensland system of one vote per one resident citizen. Remarkably, that state reformed its law on various forms of plural voting way back in the 1920s.

The Local Government Association of Tasmania has voted on compulsory participation several times in the past 10 years, including for it in 2014, and most recently in 2016 when it was narrowly defeated. Concerns by those who blocked change included the cost to councils of paying for their own elections and the potential of mandatory voting to stimulate a rise in party politics.

Alderman Damon Thomas steps out of his orange campaign Kombi van to our Salamanca Place interview wearing a charcoal suit and colourful striped necktie. “I would say I have retained my energy and passion,” says the former Lord Mayor from 2011-2014, who is campaigning on the Liveable Hobart Group ticket with four others.

The lawyer is a strong supporter of compulsory voting. He applauds the State Government for getting a Bill for an Act to Amend the Local Government Act on the matter through the Lower House after the LGAT vote in 2014, though it

subsequently came to grief in the Legislative Assembly.

“It is a slight on the democracy that is local government and closest to the people,” says Thomas. “It leaves far too much up to a few who decide to vote. A huge amount of trust has gone out of local government as an institution since 2014 and that makes it even more important to get everyone to vote, so there’s no answer for them when they say ‘look what we ended up with’. Especially when you have something close to a plebiscite going on with the cable car. We have far too many significant issues confronting the city, like housing and transport and rates affordability, and yet this [election] might well end up being skewed by the cable car. It’s a side issue, a project that will, if approved, have a value for the city and tourism in general but is not going to put food on tables or roofs overhead or help people get through the city.”

Christie describes voting as a privilege that should be “a compulsory right”. It is a position shared by Hickey, now Speaker in the Liberal State Government, and Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce chief executive Michael Bailey, who last month told the Mercury representation can be distorted by low voluntary turnout, with candidates winning places when “only a handful of people have voted for them”.

Hickey said compulsory voting could help councils become more representative. The current system favoured motivated minority groups, which were able to get up single-issue candidates, and incumbents, who were re-elected, often by older voters, “on name recognition and not ability”.

Alderman Anna Reynolds, who won her seat at the table as a Green four years ago, went independent this year after finding it difficult to achieve good traction and consistent alignment with other sitting Greens on Hobart City Council. She is with Hickey on the staying power of incumbents. “In Hobart, nine out of the 11 aldermen have been there for 10 or more years, with two close to 20 years and two for 25 years,” she says, calling for more fresh faces in the next line-up. “Incumbent councils do create a certain culture which can be tricky to break into.”

Eccleston sees the rise in the sheer number of candidates this time around as healthy, if rather overwhelming for voters. “Having real choice and contestation and different tickets is great,” he says. “One of the concerns with local government is that it traditionally hasn’t been part of the political process and it’s just driven by personalities and there hasn’t been that turnover.”

Alderman Marti Zucco, who is also running for the top job, remembers standing against former Lord Mayor Rob Valentine (who held the job for 12 years from 1999) once “because no one wanted to challenge him, and I believe in competition”.

“I drove around town with Rob Valentine magnetised stickers on my car and he got quite cut and said ‘what are you doing advertising me?’ and I said, ‘well, I’m not going to win’.”

Zucco ended up with a respectable 19 per cent of the vote that time, but is hoping to trump the competition this time. Like Thomas, he feels he has been shut down, left off committees and sidelined to some extent over the past four years and is keen to get back in the thick of it. “It makes you feel disappointed and that your abilities are not wanted on council,” says Zucco. “To push away a person who developed the Taste of Tasmania, who pushed to develop PW1 and did a lot for tourism, to be cut away, it’s not something you feel comfortable about.”

He thinks the current voting system is flawed, with the postal ballot vulnerable to corruption by means as simple as letterbox theft. He supports compulsory, private booth-based voting. “At the moment there could be somebody receiving somebody else’s ballot, somebody else could be signing it, someone could be pressuring someone else on how to vote.”

Even if only 75-80 per cent of electors voted in a compulsory election, it would take the sting out of complacency and deliver a better, broader result for the citizens of Hobart. Zucco is also worried people will vote on single issues. “It’s not just about tourism, the cable car and building heights,” says the hospitality veteran. “It’s about everything that Hobart is and wants. We are a diverse community. Unless we find the balance, we will just make one group or another happy.”

Reynolds believes we are on the cusp of a new era that will see greater engagement with local government and less with other levels of government. “My understanding is young people internationally who have been feeling disillusioned are re-engaging through local government, both as candidates and voters and active citizens between elections,” says the former international adviser to Bob Brown and climate change policy expert, who is on leave from her role as chief executive of the Multicultural Council of Tasmania.

“Local government and cities are going to be a really exciting level of government into the future and a fundamental part of restoring people’s faith in democracy. We know the community is disillusioned with politics. That’s why many people don’t vote unless forced.”

Reynolds says a move in Tasmania to compulsory voting “just makes sense” and is “respectful to the level of government”.

Shifting the balance of power wouldn’t hurt, either, with careful consideration. “Local government is a beast of state government. We are regulated by it and there are all sorts of things in the Local Government Act that need to be changed because they set certain requirements on local governments that other levels of government don’t have.

“For example, we run Hobart planning, we approve developments and design the city. We are the city managers. And we have a housing problem. Yet if we want, like cities the world over, to require a developer to include 10 per cent of affordable units in their multi-unit developments, we can’t do that. We have not been given permission to from the State Government.”

Time and again in interviews for this story, aspirants called for greater co-operation between Greater Hobart councils and

between those councils and the State Government.

Eccleston says such collaboration is especially important at this unaccustomed time of rapid growth and lagging infrastructure.

“For the past 20 years council was all about providing services, about trying to stimulate any kind of investment and growth and manage the natural environment, but the Tasmanian economy has changed. That’s a good thing, but we also need a changed mindset and a holistic regional plan for our city.”

The State Government’s announcement of a 10-year infrastructure plan as a priorities pipeline is a step in the right direction, he says, but it’s vital that everybody talks. “We clearly need much more productive and long-term relationships. With seven existing council members seeking the mayorship, whoever prevails and whoever is on the next Hobart City Council needs to put their campaign aside, collaborate and reach out. We need a consensus view and a shared vision about the future of the city. The risk is that if the next council is fragmented that may be difficult to achieve.”

Tensions between Greater Hobart councils need to transform into solutions-driven relationships, he says. “It is going to require councillors in all of the local government areas to balance the interests of their immediate constituents with the needs of the overall city.”

He says the Hobart City Council area is at a tipping point with housing availability. Like aldermen interviewed for this piece, Eccleston sees a pressing need for infill residential development (not so much the carving up of backyards as broad-brush repurposing initiatives) to increase population density. “In the 21st century, nearly all cities are becoming more concentrated. There’s infill development so people have access to employment and services, and that just hasn’t happened in Hobart.

About 90 per cent of the Greater Hobart growth of the past decade is on its fringes, including Margate, Brighton and Sorell. “It’s in the interests of the peripheral councils to develop new land to expand their rate base, but a sprawling city has a whole lot of unintended consequences in terms of congestion and the need for infrastructure and new schools,” says Eccleston. “We need to plan for that growth.”

Federal funding anticipated to arrive via the Hobart City Deal for major infrastructure projects should respond to the following questions, he says. “What’s the population of Hobart going to be? Where are the next 20,000 residents going to live? What are the housing and infrastructure needs, so we have a liveable yet productive and inclusive city?”

Nearly every larger city in Australia uses a long-range planning and policy framework, he adds. “They are not perfect, they need to be adapted, but they are something to work with.”

Many campaign pamphlets talk about the same thing, give or take a carefully worded position on the proposed kunanyi cable car, a Northern Suburbs light rail (looking likelier with this week’s new Macquarie Point masterplan) or festival funding model. Dominant issues include the liveability, housing affordability and availability, traffic congestion, public transport and rates affordability (and the desirability of winding rates back to or below the consumer price index).

Leading candidates abound in ideas in the planning space beyond the delivery of core services such as roads and rubbish.

Many though, conjure visions which council is powerless to realise on its own without the sort of reform Reynolds has referenced. Our civic leaders can play an influential leadership role, but who will bring everyone together? Will it be up to the next Lord Mayor to lead co-operation between groups and steer regional collaboration and planning (with the regional umbrella body, the Southern Tasmanian Councils Authority, now without a full-time leader)? Who will try to re-establish the crosspollinating sitdowns that used to happen annually between Parliament and Hobart City Council before grinding to a halt several years ago?

“There is no point in having our Parliament and Town Hall [in such close proximity] when we don’t sit down at a round table,” says Zucco. “Any alderman or City of Hobart that says they are going to fix the traffic problems are absolutely living in a dream because the Hobart City Council can’t on its own fix the traffic problems. It needs to be done on a collective basis between the Hobart, Clarence, Glenorchy and Kingborough councils and the State Government”.

When Reynolds asked her father, historian Henry Reynolds, to speak at her campaign launch, she guessed he would bring context to the conversation. And he did, along with an analogy of Hobart being not so much at a crossroads as on a large roundabout with lots of entry and exit points.

“Life has speeded up and this is a new experience for Hobart,” he said. “Tasmania is emerging from many years if not generations of slow growth. stagnation and demographic stasis, when more people left than came in. That, in a way, was easy to manage and there were advantages to economic stagnation [including the preservation of many heritage buildings].

“In many ways a much more prosperous society is to be welcomed, but it does create very many great problems.”

We were like many other places facing similar growing pains. Hobart, he warned, was becoming more stratified through property ownership than at any time since convict days. But the 80year-old saw hope in an emerging wave of activism resisting obscene inequality, responding to climate change and embracing democratic values through local engagement.

How should the story progress in Hobart? That is up to you and your carefully chosen representatives. Every vote counts.

Your postal vote must be received by 10am on Tuesday, October 30. The Lord Mayoral candidates are Darren Alexander, Jeff Briscoe, Tanya Denison, Mike Dutta, Bill Harvey, Robert Mallett, Peter Sexton as well as those interviewed for this story