Local Senate voting may be more interesting than local lower house results in federal poll

This month’s federal election seems unlikely to change the Hunter’s political landscape, though it may well change the nation’s.

Labor has held the federal seat of Newcastle since federation, and there’s no reason to believe that the current Labor incumbent, Sharon Claydon, will have any difficulty holding it comfortably in this month’s election.

But there’s still plenty to hold interest in other aspects of local voting results, particularly for the Senate.

The number of candidates standing for the seat of Newcastle (seven) is pretty much on par with the size of past fields for a regular federal election, with candidates from Labor, Liberal, Greens, Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party (UAP), The Christian Democrats (CDP), Animal Justice (AJP), and the Great Australian Party (GAP).

Only the GAP, formed last year by former WA One Nation Senator Rod Culleton, hasn’t stood candidates in Newcastle before, though the UAP and AJP didn’t field candidates in 2016.

For parties with no realistic chance of winning a House of Representatives seat such as Newcastle, one of the primary reasons for still standing local candidates is to boost the party’s Senate vote.

Every voter in NSW participates in the ballot to elect candidates to fill the six NSW Senate seats up for election at this poll, and the method of Senate voting is now similar (though not entirely the same) as for the NSW state upper house.

Contrary to widespread misunderstanding, political parties do not control how voters’ preferences are allocated – voters do this themselves, particularly now that registered tickets are no longer used for the Senate.

A formal vote for the Senate (on the large white ballot paper) now requires a voter to number at least six boxes above-the-line (from one to six in order of preference), OR at least 12 boxes below-the-line, from one to twelve.

Except for the GAP, all the parties standing in the seat of Newcastle have at least a realistic chance of winning a Senate seat – though the odds would be long for the AJP and a little less so for the CDP.

This election will be a normal half-Senate election for six NSW Senate seats, whereas the previous (2016) election was for all twelve NSW Senate seats, which were spilled as a result of a double dissolution of the federal parliament.

Because of the way that Senate terms are calculated after a double dissolution election, most of the major party Senators elected in 2016 will be up for re-election at the federal election after this one.

Three of the six NSW Senate seats at stake in this election are currently held by non-major party Senators (Greens, UAP, and Liberal Democrats).

Half-Senate elections require a significantly higher quota for election than full Senate elections, making it much more difficult for minor parties to win seats.

The Liberal Democrats are almost certain to lose their Senate seat in this election.

Both the Coalition and Labor are each certain to win at least one, probably two, and possibly three, of these Senate seats.

The Greens will be fighting to retain their sole NSW Senate spot, and their current NSW Senator, Mehreen Faruqi, will face election for the first time, after being appointed to replace former Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon, who resigned from the parliament in August last year after losing the party’s preselection ballot to Ms Faruqi.

If the Greens don’t retain this seat, it’s likely to be won by Labor.

The UAP, bolstered by Clive Palmer’s long and lavish advertising campaign, will be hoping to retain their incumbent NSW Senator, Brian Burston, who was elected for One Nation in 2016, but who fell out with Pauline Hanson and switched to the UAP in June last year.

They are likely to be vying for this Senate spot with other right-wing parties, such as One Nation and the Christian Democrats.

If one of those parties doesn’t win this seat, it is likely to go to either the Coalition or Labor.

The recent NSW election demonstrated again that an increasing number of voters are choosing to vote differently in lower and upper house elections, and this little-studied phenomenon is one of the more intriguing aspects of modern election behaviour, including in our region.

Sound and fury of State Election signifies little change for Hunter seats

The NSW election is now done and dusted, with all its sound and fury signifying not very much in terms of obvious political change in the Hunter.

While results were still being finalised at the time of writing, NSW voters have given the NSW Coalition its third term, probably with the thinnest possible majority (47 out of the 93 Legislative Assembly seats).

Labor appears to have increased its representation by two seats, taking Coogee from the Liberals and Lismore from the Nationals.

In the Hunter, all sitting members were returned with increased majorities. While both the Liberal and Labor vote were down across the state, Labor picked up positive swings in local seats (Charlestown, Newcastle, and Wallsend).

The Liberals also recorded a slight positive swing in Charlestown, but their vote dropped more than 9% in Newcastle and nearly 5% in Wallsend.

The Greens also lost ground in Newcastle and Wallsend, though many in the party are relieved that their vote didn’t collapse given the factional divisions that have beset them in recent times.

The media response to the election result has been intriguing.

Despite winning seats from the Coalition, Labor’s campaign performance has been widely criticised, while that of the Berejiklian government has been applauded, despite losing four seats (three previously held by the Nationals and one by the Liberals).

Certainly, against expectations of a knife-edge result, Labor fell short, and may well have blown their chance of winning in the nightmare final week for their state leader, Michael Daley.

But after the 2011 electoral landslide swept away 28 of the 48 seats Labor then held, most pundits predicted a three term recovery for the party. After two terms, Labor is well within striking distance for the next state election in 2023.

 (An interesting aside is that the former Labor state member for Newcastle, Jodi McKay - the current Labor member for Strathfield - is now being touted as a potential NSW Labor leader, despite the fact that she was instrumental in preparing the ground for the Coalition government’s decision to cut the Newcastle rail line and oversaw disastrous changes to our local bus system, and was duly voted out in the largest anti-Labor swing in that 2011 landslide).

While initial focus is understandably on the Legislative Assembly, where state governments are won and lost, attention will soon shift to the NSW upper house, which is likely to see several interesting additions, including former federal Labor leader, and now One Nation MLC, Mark Latham, who will have a parliamentary seat for the next eight years.

Data from Legislative Council voting in local booths can be a treasure trove for anyone interested in patterns of political behaviour.

What leaps out starkly from the data is how differently many Labor and Liberal voters vote in the upper house.

For the non-major parties who stood in local lower house (Legislative Assembly) electorates, the difference between their party’s lower and upper house vote is usually minor (e.g., Legislative Council votes cast for The Greens in the electorates of Charlestown, Newcastle and Wallsend are within a few percent of the Green vote in those Legislative Assembly seats).

However, Labor’s Legislative Council vote is significantly less (often by more than 20 percent) than its Legislative Assembly vote in most local booths, particularly in Wallsend, where Labor’s Legislative Assembly vote in this election is around 64 percent, while its Legislative Council vote is less than 40 percent.

Where are these votes - nearly a quarter of all the votes in the electorate - going?

The huge Legislative Council ballot paper offered voters plenty of choices, but unfortunately the Electoral Commission’s election night counting method (which bundled many of the smaller group tickets and all below-the-line votes into a single “Other” category for the booth counts) makes it difficult to draw evidence-based conclusions about this on a booth or electorate level.

This “Other” category, which will be separated out and counted at the central counting centre in Sydney over the coming weeks, comprised around 14 percent of the vote in the three local electorates.

Among the groups not buried in this “Other” bundle, One Nation recorded an 8.4 percent upper house vote in Wallsend, higher than The Greens vote there, and two percent higher than One Nation’s state-wide average.

The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party vote (also itemised in the booth count) is on 4.4 percent, pretty much spot on its state average, but unusually high for a predominantly urban electorate.

It’s clear that many Wallsend (and to a slightly lesser extent, Charlestown and Newcastle) voters are quite happy to have a Labor government, but want a more politically diverse upper house.

However, the rise of the far right – in Australia and other parts of the world - should concern all of us, and this local drift toward supporting far right parties accentuates the need for a more politically aware community, where the beliefs, practices and policies of these kinds of groups can be exposed and discussed in a way that informs people’s voting preferences.

(* the voting figures given in this article were accurate at the time of writing, but may change as the final count proceeds).

Greens on the edge of political precipice

As someone who helped start and shape The Greens political party in the early 1990s, I find it sad and painful to watch the ructions that are currently tearing that party apart.

I should begin by clarifying that I now view all this as an outside observer rather than an active participant.

I’m no longer a member of The Greens, having not renewed my membership this year after 28 years of continuous membership.

This included eight years as Newcastle’s first Greens councillor (between 1991 and 1999) and many other experiences as an active member, including heading The Greens NSW Senate ticket in 1998, running as The Greens Lord Mayoral candidate in Newcastle in 2012, and filling many other roles for The Greens at local, state, national and international level.

Naturally, when people who know my long-term association with The Greens find out that I’m no longer a member, they want to know why.

My reasons have more to do with what was happening with the local Newcastle Greens group than with the state and federal Greens, and I made my decision not to renew well before the recent furore surrounding sexual assault allegations against NSW Greens MLC Jeremy Buckingham.

But I do recognise patterns in what’s happening now from my own long experience in The Greens.

The Greens are now mired in factionalism.

In the NSW Greens, factions emerged slowly from personality-based conflicts between key members in the 1990s (particularly between early NSW state MPs and their supporters), which then gradually merged with geographical affinities (e.g., country v city) and different philosophical and ideological emphases (e.g., individualist v collectivist and environment v social justice).

Mixed with personal political ambitions and agendas, mistrust, and plain bad behaviour, the divisive potential of this has festered slowly but relentlessly into the factional fracas we see today.

Ironically, some of the most factionalist members of The Greens are those who most stridently deny and decry factionalism. The bald, self-centred hypocrisy of some of these members in invoking principles that they have previously demonstrated they don’t really believe in is startling.

Another key problem for The Greens has been an influx of members who are attracted to the party from a vague sense of political affinity, or from friendship or social networks, and who join online or via mass on-the-spot recruitment campaigns, but who have little understanding of, or care for, The Greens four core principles (ecological sustainability, social and economic justice, grassroots democracy, and peace and nonviolence).

One of the key reasons for my disillusionment is that the four key principles on which we founded The Greens in the ‘90s are hardly known by many current members and rarely discussed or considered inside the party.

Raising them with some members these days is more likely to arouse a sense of impatience or irritation than interest.

In the early days, I was particularly attracted to The Greens commitment to “doing politics differently”. These days, The Greens have all but abandoned that project. They've become instead a process-averse organisation.

Some Greens members regard the very word “process” with thinly veiled contempt, with no apparent awareness of what this represents for a party with a professed commitment to grassroots democracy and “doing politics differently”, both of which are pretty much all about process.

The Greens are now paying a high price for this process-aversion. If the recent Victorian state election is anything to go by, they could be almost wiped off the state electoral map in March.

I still have enormous respect and admiration for the integrity and achievements of some Greens parliamentarians, such as David Shoebridge, who will head The Greens NSW Legislative Council ticket at the next state election.

I also like and respect Jenny Leong, whose parliamentary work I’ve admired since her breakthrough election as the inaugural state Member for Newtown in 2015.

But she made a significant error of judgement recently in using parliamentary privilege to override due process and call on Jeremy Buckingham to resign from parliament on the grounds that she believed the sexual assault allegations against him to be true.

Like Ms Leong and many other Greens members, my personal view is that the version of events outlined by Ella Buckland, the woman who made the allegations against Mr Buckingham, are sincere and credible.

However, I also believe in the presumption of innocence and the principles of procedural justice, and I don’t believe that my personal view should trump the application of these key principles.

It’s one thing to believe someone, and quite another to presume the role of judge and jury: that’s the pathway to kangaroo courts and lynch mobs.

And that’s the line that Jenny Leong transgressed in her understandable desire to stand in support of Ms Buckland.

In doing this, she has opened herself up to criticism from those who support Mr Buckingham, many of whom bear the greatest responsibility for factionalising The Greens.

I’ve witnessed first-hand how some of these people operate, particularly in Newcastle, and I know from personal experience that most of them have no real understanding of these principles, and no genuine commitment to them: for them, they are merely arguments of immediate convenience, readily ditched when it suits their agendas.

Today’s Greens party is almost unrecognisable to me as the party I helped to form, and I’m not sorry to be out of it, though it hurts to see what it’s becoming.

For all that, I still consider The Greens policies to be superior to those of any other parliamentary party, and on these grounds I’m likely to remain a Greens voter. 

I also know that The Greens membership still includes many talented, intelligent, committed and principled people, and I wish them well in their struggle to re-orient the party back toward its core principles, and to a proper understanding and respect for the role of process in grassroots democracy.

Ultimately, that's all that will save The Greens from a tragic descent into political obscurity.

Latest Throsby catchment plan now open for comment

The latest plan for Throsby Creek and its catchment is now available for public comment.

The 3,000ha Throsby Creek catchment includes many of Newcastle’s oldest and most densely populated areas, including the suburbs of Adamstown, Broadmeadow, Carrington, Georgetown, Hamilton, Islington, Kotara, Lambton, Mayfield, New Lambton, Tighes Hill and Waratah; and public parks and facilities such as Blackbutt Reserve, Lambton Park, Braye Park, Broadmeadow sports grounds, Newcastle Showgrounds, Tighes Hill TAFE and Islington Park.

The latest plan (the Throsby Creek Catchment Agencies Plan 2018-2024) is the third integrated plan for the catchment, following the 1989 Throsby Creek Total Catchment Management (TCM) Strategy, and the 2001 TCM Strategy.

The 1989 plan was the first in Australia to be developed under a “Total Catchment Management” approach, bringing the community, local politicians, and about a dozen government agencies and councils with various catchment responsibilities together for the first time to plan the future of the creek and its catchment.

Before 1989, the Throsby Creek that flowed through Islington, Tighes Hill, Maryville and Carrington was a dirty stinking urban stormwater drain that nobody wanted to be near.

The government agencies responsible for managing various aspects of the catchment had operated mostly in their own bureaucratic silos, leaving affected communities increasingly frustrated at their inaction and buck-passing.

Community pressure was instrumental in initiating the landmark 1989 strategy, and community participation became one of the hallmarks of the preparation and implementation of the strategy.

The 1989 strategy and its 2001 follow-up produced a rehabilitation program for the catchment that has transformed Throsby Creek into the valued aesthetic, recreational and ecological asset that it is today.

During the 1990s the Throsby Creek TCM strategy was regarded as the go-to model for transforming urban waterways around Australia.

As Newcastle projects go, it’s one of our city’s great success stories, and testimony to what can be achieved when a community is united in purpose and action – an all-too-rare occurrence in the past two decades of projects imposed by successive Sydney-centric state governments on often unwilling local communities, usually at the behest of sectional interests.

The plan now on public exhibition may lack the razzle-dazzle of its more famous predecessor, but it’s a solid basis for improving the health, amenity and safety of the creek and its catchment.

It includes sections on:

·         ecosystem health and biodiversity

·         water quality

·         gross pollutants (litter)

·         flooding

·         implementation

Among many other things, the plan commits to developing a Mangrove Management Plan for the creek, identifying a “trigger point” for dredging accumulated sediment in the main channel, water-sensitive urban design (WSUD) in new development and infrastructure works in the catchment, identifying further bush regeneration projects, further naturalising creek banks, and supporting community education and participation initiatives.

However, the most important thing about this plan lies more in the fact of its existence than in the detail of its contents.

The real threat to an urban waterway like Throsby Creek is that it will again be forgotten, and degrade through neglect.

Debate there may be over some of the plan’s proposals for action, but having a plan at all means that the neglect of bad old days before 1989 is unlikely to return.

The Throsby Creek Government Agencies Committee that has developed the recent plan, and will be overseeing its implementation, is chaired by Newcastle MLA Tim Crakanthorp, who initiated the committee in 2016 in response to community requests.

The committee includes representatives of City of Newcastle, Hunter Local Land Services, Hunter Water, Lake Macquarie Council, Roads and Maritime Services, TAFE, Port of Newcastle, and Port Waratah Coal Services, and two community representatives.

The plan will be on public exhibition until 13 November.

Copies of the plan are available online at the consultation website: https://yourvoice.hunterwater.com.au/throsby-creek-government-agencies-committee. Suggestions and questions about the plan can also be posted via this webpage.

Another Newcastle Council democracy SNAFU

Readers of this column will be aware that the record of some of the current batch of Newcastle councillors, including the Lord Mayor, suggests that they have little understanding of, or regard for, local democracy.

The most recent crisis caused by the council’s disregard for local democracy demonstrates the kind of problem that this lack of leadership creates and perpetuates.

The recent problem arose when the council released its “Birmingham Gardens Village Centre Draft Domain and Traffic Plan” for the area at the intersection of Moore St and Wilkinson Ave, Birmingham Gardens, in May this year.

The plan proposed a number of public domain improvements to the area. One significant improvement was completing the remaining missing link in the cycleway between Wallsend and the university.

However, the council officers who prepared the plan were apparently unaware that their proposal, which would remove most of the current parking (21 out of 38 spaces) available for Regal Cinema patrons, would render the cinema financially unviable and force it to close.

The Regal Cinema has become something of a local cultural icon since it was saved by a concerted community campaign after its previous closure in 2007.

It offers a unique local cinema experience, very different from the big cinema chains (if you haven’t experienced it yet, you really should, because its fame is spreading throughout film industry circles around Australia).

When the council plan was released, the Regal and its supporters conveyed their views to the council officers in no uncertain manner, via more than 2000 written submissions (a council record), a 450 signature petition, and many emails to councillors.

As so often happens in organisations and governments who want to tick the necessary public consultation boxes but don’t really want to hear, or have to deal with, what people have to say, all this seemed to fall on deaf ears.

Council staff gave no indication that they were interested in changing their plan to accommodate the massive expression of community concern about its impact on cinema patrons.

The Regal operators then applied to address the elected council via the council’s Public Voice system. This was initially refused, but was eventually granted after the Regal objected.

The Public Voice session held at Newcastle City Hall on Tuesday, 18 September attracted the largest turnout I can remember for such a meeting in Newcastle: more than 500 people filled up the council chamber, the overflow room and the corridors and foyer.

The meeting began with the council’s Labor majority using its numbers to refuse permission for the meeting to be filmed (for a possible ABC Australian Story), even though all the council’s meetings are video recorded for publicly available webcast.

As Independent councillor John Church (who voted against the refusal) remarked, “we’re a public democracy, so why shouldn’t someone be allowed to film us?”

The plan presented by council officers at the meeting was very similar to the exhibited plan, with little apparent attempt to accommodate the cinema’s concerns about the loss of parking.

Regal programmer George Merryman’s presentation on behalf of the Regal was followed by some perplexingly belligerent and bizarre questions and suggestions to Mr Merryman from some of the Labor councillors, canvassing whether the Regal wanted the council to do nothing in the area, and whether the Regal could turn a profit by changing their operating days and hours.

Some councillors, however, made pertinent observations.

Independent Councillor Kath Elliott observed that the council survey distributed as part of the initial community consultation process hadn’t even asked about parking.

Liberal Councillor Brad Luke observed that a significant part of the plan was attempting to solve a safety problem with pedestrians and cyclists (mostly university students) crossing illegally at the roundabout near the cinema, but there was no apparent attempt to understand the reasons for this behaviour, or whether the proposed plan would solve that problem.

Greens Councillor John Mackenzie also questioned whether the current plan would solve the problems it attempted to address, and noted that the council needed to find a way of doing this without compromising the cinema’s viability.

A few days after the meeting, the council released a statement saying: “The Project has been put on hold due to a number of issues raised through the Public Voice process.  Further investigations and community consultation is now required.”

The real issue is how and why things came to this point in the first place.

Despite the council’s statement, there were no “issues raised through the Public Voice process” that couldn’t or shouldn’t have been known early in any genuine community consultation process.

The issues involved were relatively simple to identify (if not to solve), and it should not have required a massive community mobilisation to have them heard and dealt with through a genuine community engagement process much earlier in the project timeline.

The problem is twofold: at the administration level, it’s Newcastle Council’s chronic unwillingness and inability to cope with genuine community engagement, and, at the elected level, it’s the gaping lack of leadership from the elected council in steering the council administration toward local democracy.

Margaret Henry: Commemorating a Great Novocastrian

This month marks the third anniversary of the passing of a great Novocastrian.

Margaret Henry’s death from pancreatic cancer on 9 September 2015 at the age of 81 left a gaping hole in Newcastle’s public life and in this city’s progressive social change movement.

Margaret and I were close friends, and in preparing to introduce the inaugural Margaret Henry Memorial Lecture, delivered by prominent Novocastrian and founder of Renew Newcastle, Marcus Westbury, on 12 September, I’ve had the opportunity to reflect again on her legacy to our city.

Margaret’s six decades of activism reflected her passion, commitment and care for people with disabilities, Indigenous issues, women’s rights, built heritage, history, and arts and culture.

Margaret’s contribution to Newcastle was recognised when she was posthumously made a Freeman of the City, Newcastle’s highest civic honour, in January 2016.

Forthright to a fault, Margaret could be – and often was - brutally blunt and never shirked controversy; if you ever left her wondering what she thought about someone or something, you just weren’t listening.

This trait, and the usual reproval and acrimony that is the burden of those who speak truth to power, earned Margaret many enemies and detractors, who were quick to brand her with derogatory labels like “whinger” or “naysayer”.

In fact, much of Margaret’s personal life was spent helping people who had fallen on hard-times in various ways, and there’s no shortage of heartfelt testimonials from grateful recipients of her care and kindness, which often changed people’s lives.

These aren’t the stuff of news, but those who knew her best were well aware of this side of Margaret.

Margaret’s public life also involved helping people, whether in the form of shepherding through Newcastle Council’s disability access initiatives, or helping out Young People’s Theatre after fire gutted their building 1995, or the many other positive social and environmental initiatives for which she was partly or mostly responsible during her two terms as a Newcastle councillor, and in her many other roles in local community-based organisations over six decades.

But it is true that much of Margaret’s activist life was spent trying to prevent bad things from happening.

Margaret was no Pollyanna; she had a finely-tuned and well-practiced sense of outrage, and if something looked like it might happen that she thought shouldn’t, she was right there.

From the destruction of heritage buildings in the aftermath of the 1989 Newcastle earthquake, to the more recent controversies of the Laman St trees in 2012 and the destruction of our railway line , Margaret was a sentinel of the city, ready to spring into action when needed.

In the early ‘90s Margaret founded Save Our Rail, which for more than two decades valiantly withstood the relentless campaign by local vested interests to cut the Newcastle rail line, before it was sacrificed at the altar of vested interest by a captive and incompetent state government under the guise of “revitalisation”, amid reams of dodgy documents, corrupted processes, and cash-filled yellow envelopes to local politicians.

Margaret took her outrage about this to her grave, and I have no doubt that she’s rolling in it right now about what’s happened since.

Margaret was a strong believer in government and democracy.

By all measures, people’s faith in the institutions of government around the world is currently at seriously low levels, and this disillusionment is both the cause and the symptom of a pervasive crisis in democracy itself.

This finds its expression in many different ways, from Brexit to the election of people like Donald Trump who are demonstrably unfit for public office, and to the tacit - or even active - support for the appallingly inhumane treatment by governments (including our own) against refugees, in open defiance of their human rights, one of the supposed foundations of modern democracy.

At the local level, it’s reflected in matters such as the failure of Newcastle’s Labor dominated council to implement election commitments to improve community participation, and in the council’s recent decision to adopt a confidential proposal to shift council meetings from City Hall to the new City Administration building without any community consultation.

Some of these things hadn't happened when Margaret was with us, but it's not hard for those of us who knew her to imagine how she would have responded in these cases.

I can just imagine the outrage that Margaret would have felt if she’d been around when the news broke that Newcastle Council officers had negotiated a formal agreement with the Supercars organisation to prevent elected councillors from accessing information in the council’s contract with Supercars, and at the apparent failure of the elected council to do anything about this even after this was known.

Margaret knew the value of dissent in a healthy democracy, and her outrage about such matters would have spurred her to action.

Another of Margaret’s characteristics that her close friends came to know, is that she could have a devilish sense of humour.

I fancy that Margaret would have shared a hearty laugh at the ironic appropriateness of the acronym that has emerged from Newcastle Council’s recent rebranding from “Newcastle City Council” to a name (to quote the Council’s public statement) “befitting the city’s stunning revitalisation”: City of Newcastle.

Stunning indeed. Margaret would have dined out on that one for a long time.

Community shut out of historic council chamber decision

Newcastle Council’s ruling Labor bloc has voted to relocate the council chambers out of City Hall to the controversial new council administration centre being built in Stewart Avenue, Newcastle West.

The proposal was listed as a confidential item in the 24 July council meeting agenda, without any forewarning that such a move was even being considered, ensuring the relevant business papers were kept under wraps until after the decision had been made.

The purportedly confidential papers were released the day after the decision, with only two paragraphs redacted.

The Local Government Act clearly indicates that confidentiality on a matter to be considered at a council meeting should be applied only to the extent necessary to preserve the relevant confidentiality, privilege or security.

But councils throughout NSW regularly abuse this, and exploit (or deliberately create) a modicum of legitimate confidentiality related to a small part of a larger potentially controversial item to hide entire reports and recommendations that are not legitimately confidential under a veil of secrecy until the relevant council decision is a fait accompli.

Newcastle Council has been at the forefront of this odious but regrettably common practice for many years under successive political administrations.

It’s usually a sure sign that senior council staff are worried that the case they are arguing has dubious merit, which might be exposed under the gaze of public scrutiny.

Putting a stop to it would be a doddle for any elected council with a half-serious commitment to open and transparent governance, but we haven’t seen such a beast in these parts for a very long time.

The current Labor Lord Mayor, Nuatali Nelmes, led the charge in support of the staff recommendation to relocate the council chambers, dutifully supported by her six Labor colleagues.

In a 7-6 vote, all the non-Labor (Independent, Liberal and Green) councillors voted against the recommendation on the grounds that the associated cost estimates (which remain confidential) were both too high and too vague, that the current chambers are a more appropriate council meeting place, and that the case for moving the chambers is not persuasive.

The staff report argued for relocating the chamber primarily on the grounds that the 1.6km between the new administration building in Newcastle West and the existing chamber would “create work inefficiencies and be counter-productive to the intended objectives of the relocation” of the council administration.

Watching the webcast, I found it hard to disagree with the dissenters, particularly when the main argument for relocation was essentially that it better suited council staff to have the chambers and Lord Mayor’s office close by.

Both the staff report and the contributions of Labor councillors to the council debate were silent on anything to do with local democracy, which is usually better served by creating and maintaining an appropriate distance between elected representatives and the council administration.

Moving the council chambers into the city administration space is a bleak illustration of the extent to which the current Labor bloc has drifted into (or even actively embraced) administrative capture - all, of course, under the usual guise of “teamwork”.

What fascinated me most in watching the debate was that even those who spoke against the proposal made no reference to the fact that such a momentous decision was being made without any community engagement or input.

Council chambers are the main arena of local democratic governance, the primary space in which – for better or worse – our elected representatives perform their key collective role as members of our city’s governing body.

It’s both a practical and deeply symbolic space, and much can be gleaned of a council’s history and organisational culture by observing the décor, spatial layout and seating arrangements of its chambers.

Notwithstanding the endemic abuse of confidentiality to shut out the public, it’s primarily a public space, where members of the community have an often exercised legal right to attend and witness local democracy in action.

I’m no nostalgic traditionalist, and I’ve been critical in the past of aspects of the current Newcastle Council chambers.

But the space has operated as an elected council chamber since 1929 and has a rich cultural history that belongs to the whole city community.

The meetings that take place there draw from and participate in the living heritage and symbolic gravitas that it has come to embody.

A decision about its future deserves more respect than to be slipped into a council meeting under dubious confidentiality, and dealt with in a single meeting without a skerrick of community input.

In a healthy local democracy, it should be second nature for elected representatives who are the temporary custodians of such a space on our behalf to at least think to consult with their community on such a significant decision about its future.

If the case for moving the chambers is genuinely persuasive, most of the community would support it, and local democracy would be healthier for the shared ownership of the decision.

Alas, not a single councillor stood up and said “given the nature and significance of these chambers and what is being proposed here, shouldn’t we at least let our community know what we’re thinking of doing, and ask them what they reckon?”

The staff report released the following day proposes handing the existing chambers, Lord Mayor's Office and Lord Mayor's Reception Room to the Museum “for future heritage curation, preservation and reuse for commercial purposes”.

The first council meeting in the new chambers/administration building is expected to be held around February 2020.