Labor wins Newcastle Council election

The recent Newcastle Council election has given the city its first Labor controlled council since the early 1990s.

After their bitter experience of Jeff McCloy’s brief and dramatic stint as Newcastle Lord Mayor from September 2012 until his ICAC-induced resignation in August 2014, Newcastle voters returned to what they knew in the subsequent 2014 Lord Mayoral and 2015 Ward 3 by-elections.

In September’s election, Labor’s Nuatali Nelmes was reelected Lord Mayor, and Labor won one seat in Wards 1 and 2, and two seats in Wards 3 and 4, increasing their council representation from five to seven.

Sitting Labor councillors Declan Clausen (Ward 3) and Jason Dunne (Ward 4) have been joined by newcomers Emma White (Ward 1), Carol Duncan (Ward 2), Peta Baartz (Ward 3) and Matthew Byrne (Ward 4).

Depending on who you’re listening to, Labor’s electoral success was either a ringing endorsement of Labor’s management of council over the past three years, or a consolidation of voter retreat to the devil they know, the least worst alternative after the debacle of the McCloy experiment.

The expected close challenge from the key conservative Independent group led by Lord Mayoral and Ward 2 candidate Kath Elliott didn’t materialise, with Elliott achieving less than half of Labor’s 42.6% in the Lord Mayoral contest.

The Elliott election campaign was clearly not as well bank-rolled as Jeff McCloy’s 2012 campaign, and almost certainly suffered from its association in voters’ minds with the discredited McCloyal bloc, despite the involvement of local “celebrity” candidates such as former NBN news-reader and Liberal candidate John Church, who won a seat in Ward 1, and former jockey Allan Robinson, who retained his Ward 4 seat.

They are joined by Elliott, who won a councillor seat in Ward 2, and Andrea Rufo, who held his Ward 3 position, making them the second largest political bloc on the new council.

The big losers were the Liberals, whose council representation dropped from four (one in each ward) to a solitary Ward 2 position, held by Liberal council stalwart Brad Luke.

The Liberal Party’s council campaign imploded very publicly, due partly to procedural and internal factional issues which resulted in the party disendorsing its Lord Mayoral candidate and its entire Ward 3 and Ward 4 teams, and partly from growing voter dissatisfaction with State and Federal Coalition governments. They, too, almost certainly suffered from their close association with the McCloyal bloc.

The Greens council representation fell from two to one, though their vote was relatively stable - slightly up from their 2012 result in the Lord Mayoral contest and in Wards 2 and 3, and slightly down in Wards 1 and 4.

Locally, The Greens have struggled to match the electoral successes they enjoyed in the 1990s and early 2000s, when they achieved 3 and 4 council seats, and drove a policy agenda that placed Newcastle Council at the forefront of local government innovation and achievement. In the 2008, 2012 and 2017 council elections they won 1, 2 and 1 seats respectively, and their influence on council policy setting and organisational culture has declined commensurately.

The sole Greens representative on the new council will be John Mackenzie, who took over the safe Ward 1 seat from retiring three-term councillor Michael Osborne.

Dr Mackenzie is an experienced and skilled environmental campaigner and policy advisor, but has little experience with either local government or the grassroots Newcastle community. How he manages the complex internal and external political and strategic challenges associated with his position as the new local public face of The Greens will play a key role in the future of The Greens in Newcastle.

One sad consequence (at least from my perspective) was the loss of Greens Councillor Therese Doyle, who, after internal factional ructions in the local Greens group, ended up taking on the difficult challenge of holding her Ward 2 councillor seat.

Despite a tremendous campaign effort by her and her community support group that improved The Greens’ Lord Mayoral and Ward 2 vote from the 2012 election, the numbers didn’t fall her way.

In her five years on Newcastle Council, Doyle was a diligent and principled community representative who worked closely with grassroots community groups across the city to give voice to their aspirations and concerns.

Unfortunately, this kind of work isn’t always visible to the great mass of voters, particularly in large council areas such as Newcastle, and elections can be cruelly unjust in failing to appreciate such a contribution.