Bring it on, says the mayor who rules with an iron fist

ONKAPARINGA mayor and long-term councillor Lorraine Rosenberg wants to make a fresh start after the next election. But after the golf club fee scandal, will voters want her back?

Lorraine Rosenberg at her Willunga Hill farm. Picture: Matt Turner

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THE real question isn’t whether Onkaparinga mayor Lorraine Rosenberg will be voted back in to office in November but why she would want to run again?

The atmosphere on her council is so toxic that the Local Government Association of SA’s Joy Baluch Award presented to Ms Rosenberg last month was soured by the fact her own council had rejected her nomination in January.

After the win, a long-serving councillor criticised her as being unworthy of a leadership award, saying the council was so unharmonious that half the members weren’t even speaking.

Ms Rosenberg has grown a very thick skin over her 66 years.

She says that a powerful reason for staying is that if she walked away it would look as though she had done something wrong.

Despite all the bad publicity directed her way over the Onkaparinga Council golf club and credit card governance scandal, she doesn’t feel that way at all.

“I’ve met so many dedicated, talented volunteers over the years and if I just wander off into the sunset, they’re going to go, ‘Well, maybe that was true then’,” she says.

“Also, whether it’s a bad time to leave or not, what have I done wrong?”

Lorraine Rosenberg with cattle at her Willunga Hill farm. Picture: Matt Turner

Even so, it hurts. She feels wounded by the criticism on a personal level but also fears the governance debacle has stained not just her record but the standing of local government in the state.

“People with their funny little Facebook posts, they treat you like you’re made of wood,” she says.

“Their whole aim is to embarrass, to hurt, and they succeed. I think the thing that hurts me most about this whole golf saga is that it has tainted local government, it has weakened the respect for local government across the state.”

Three months after news broke about the council’s chief executive, Mark Dowd, and his $6800 Kooyonga Golf Club ratepayer-funded membership, paid on top of a generous annual salary – not to mention a suite of credit-card funded Apple products including a watch – she is willing to call it “a cock-up”.

As mayor, she referred the golf club decision on to a committee and had no vote at the council meeting which considered Mr Dowd’s argument that doing business with Chinese investors they were trying to attract was more likely to happen over a golf game in the city.

Once the decision was made, her job was to promote and represent it.

It was only later that she realised how bad it looked. “We didn’t put a test on it that said ‘How does this actually look to the average ratepayer?,” she says. “There was none of that.”

Ms Rosenberg says that having recognised the problem, she wanted to get out in front, get the money repaid and apologise but was advised not to by “just about everybody that I spoke to”.

“I was told ‘No, no, you can’t do that, you’ve got to defend the decision to the death’,” she says. “I think that’s where we went wrong. Then I get accused of not being able to say I’m sorry.”

Ms Rosenberg with Onkaparinga Council CEO Mark Dowd in 2013. Picture: Naomi Jellicoe

If it sounds as if Ms Rosenberg is obsessed with the petty dramas of the past few months, she isn’t.

She has been in local government since she was in her early 30s, a young biochemist with a first-class honours degree living at Sellicks Beach in a house that cost $14,000 and a job at Flinders Medical Centre working on brain hormones. She has enough perspective to see this as another storm to be weathered.

Joining local government as a young woman says a lot about Ms Rosenberg’s character. At Sellicks Beach, she spent so much time agitating for her small community to get better public transport, a playgroup, or a kindergarten that going on council was the logical next step, even though she was newly married with a baby on the way.

Once elected in 1985, she didn’t want to walk into a meeting not knowing what to say so she completed a local government diploma by correspondence.

By the time she entered the chamber for the first time, she knew how meetings ran, how to get money, and how budgets worked.

Ms Rosenberg with “Ramsay”, the Activate Ramsay Place mascot at a council event. Picture: Sara Oliphant

In the early 1990s, with the State Bank fiasco shaking the state’s foundations, she went to a meeting and heard a speech by the local Liberal candidate for the 1993 election.

She wasn’t impressed and told Jennifer Cashmore, a former Liberal minister. Ms Cashmore asked her whether she was interested in standing for Parliament.

She was and won the new seat of Kaurna against Labor candidate John Hill who subsequently beat her at the next election in 1997, holding the electorate for 17 years.

Ms Rosenberg made the most of her victory, fighting for a mental health unit at the Noarlunga Hospital, pushing for new schools and a kindergarten at Seaford, and fixing a South Road black spot. She was also one of those who fought for the one-way Southern Expressway which was later mercilessly mocked.

“We (the Liberal government) were broke. I think we had a $7 billion deficit and, in those days, that was huge,” she says.

“The reality was we were designing a road that would take people to work and bring them home … yes, okay, we became a laughing stock but it did what it was designed to do.”

Parliament turned out to be a lonely place. Ms Rosenberg says it felt like an old boys’ club in which the few women MPs stuck together for support.

She also disliked the theatre of politics, preferring the directness of local government. During this time she separated from her husband – made him redundant and gave him a payout, she quips – and wanted to be there for her two children, Drew and Danielle.

Ms Rosenberg with her children Drew and Danielle in the 1990s.

Not afraid of a challenge, she applied for and got a job as general manager of the SA Fishing Industry Council.

“I didn’t know anything about the fishing industry, I don’t even eat fish,” she says.

“But I know about governance and I know about marine parks and we had just spent four years doing legislation about fish stocks.”

She was also elected to the new super-council of Onkaparinga which was an amalgamation of the councils of Willunga, Happy Valley and Noarlunga and, in 2007, became mayor.

“I thought as mayor you’d have some major influence; well, I was wrong about that,” she says.

In her first term, she juggled the new duties with her job but, after four years of taking recreation leave to tend to council matters, she signed on full-time.

“I thought ‘Seriously Lorraine, you made the choice to run for mayor’ so I decided if I won again, I would resign (from work).

“I’d set myself up reasonably well financially, the farm was pretty well paid for and I had some super.”

That was seven years ago. Now a grandmother – Ms Rosenberg has never remarried – she runs her cattle farm at the top of Willunga Hill on her own, although the fences are done by a contractor. She loves the farm and comes from a background of hard work.

“I’ve never been handed anything for nothing,” she says.

She had chooks but they were taken by foxes so one of her next projects is to fence off the orchard and turn it into a chicken run.

“I see things in the garden, things I need to do today and my next free day is 10 days away but the garden does wait,” she says.

Ms Rosenberg on her wedding day in 1972.

Her children support her every step of the way as she braces for the fight of her professional life. As well as convincing ratepayers to trust her for another term, there is unrest within the Local Government Association, which she heads, and which is at loggerheads with the Marshall government over its commitment to introduce council rate-capping.

The LGSA hates it, saying that services will suffer if rates are capped but the State Government campaigned on it and sees it as a vote winner.

“If rates are capped, it would save ratepayers an extra $6 in metropolitan Adelaide and I don’t know that people in the metropolitan area are ready to save $6 when they risk losing a park, or staff, or even a library,” Ms Rosenberg says.

She is proud of her Joy Baluch Award, particularly because she was good friends with the fiery and controversial Port Augusta mayor who died in 2013, and says the Onkaparinga Council would be less bitterly divided if the Ombudsman complaint had been dealt with internally.

She completed a first response to the complaint on her own, but when it escalated to a formal process she felt compelled to get legal advice which cost $22,000 and caused another ruckus. Last week, the council abandoned an independent inquiry into credit-card spending that included thousands of dollars on Apple products, including the watch, saying it had cleaned up its act and was no longer needed. That decision is now under review.

Ms Rosenberg’s campaign poster in 2006. Picture: Stephen Laffer

Ms Rosenberg defends her management style which she says is very much by the book, and is backed up with a stern, Julie Bishop-style glare.

“I am a very serious individual. I don’t joke much and I rule in my role with an iron fist,” she says.

“With 20 people around the chamber, you can’t let them go so I tend to take the rules and the process very seriously.” If she is returned as mayor after the November elections, Ms Rosenberg will rule over a much different chamber with the current 20 councillors reduced to 12 – a change approved by the State Electoral Commission.

It will look and feel different and make for better decision-making, she says. A fresh start for everybody, she hopes.

Before then, she has to stare down a large field of contestants who smell blood after the damaging events of this year.

But Ms Rosenberg is unperturbed.

“I usually have a field of about 11, the lowest I’ve had was about nine,” she says.

“With a population of 170,000, if you can’t get 10 people capable of doing the job then there’s probably something wrong.”