‘Queen of woke’, ‘fun police’: How Clover Moore has outlasted nastiness – and six PMs

This story is part of the February 22 edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

Clover Moore’s inner sanctum in Sydney’s Town Hall may be the grandest office in Australia. Soaring ceiling, glittering chandelier, baronial fireplace, huge arched windows. You could rule an empire from a room like this. Moore contents herself with running a city, a job she loves when she’s not contending with minor irritations. At this moment, for instance, she is looking with dissatisfaction at the tea in her white porcelain cup. There’s not enough tea. “More, more, more,” she says to the man who poured it.

He leans forward and pours again, bringing the level of the liquid closer to the brim. Moore glances around the table at the cups of her guests. “You should put more into the other ones, too,” she tells him. “You wouldn’t get a job in a cafe.”

The bloke with the teapot is her chief of staff, Adam Cox. “I wouldn’t,” he agrees in a neutral tone. Top-ups are offered and the meeting begins. Cox, entirely unruffled, settles back in his seat: a seasoned traveller accustomed to riding out bumpy weather, including the occasional storm in a teacup.

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Moore is an intense personality. “Difficult,” says one of her former staffers interviewed for this story. “Control freak,” says another. She is also some kind of political genius: popular, powerful and apparently undefeatable. In the time that Moore has been lord mayor of Sydney, the nation has had seven prime ministers. And her two-decade reign at Town Hall isn’t the half of it. She was a member of NSW state parliament for 24 years. Before that, she served for six years as a councillor. By the end of her current mayoral term in 2028, she will have held public office for almost half a century. What’s more, she’ll have done it as an independent, without the backing of a party. “She’s without doubt the most successful female politician in Australian history,” says the ABC’s chief election analyst, Antony Green.

Ideologically, Moore is progressive. Physically, she is small and dainty, with close-cut brown hair that used to be spikily styled but these days is usually brushed smoothly back from her forehead. In the little red shoes she often wears, she looks like a pixie – you half-expect her to have pointed ears. Nevertheless, she is a commanding figure. Her employees address her as “Lord Mayor” and accord her a degree of deference unusual in an Australian workplace (“Yes, Lord Mayor … Of course, Lord Mayor …”).

Having entered politics as a community activist representing the then hard-scrabble suburb of Redfern, Moore has gradually acquired the aura of a grande dame. There’s something regal about her bearing. When she carries out official duties – presents certificates at a citizenship ceremony, for instance – you can see people suppressing the urge to curtsy.

‘It’s the stuff of dictators and monarchs to have somebody hold absolute power for more than 20 years.’

Christine Forster, former Liberal member of Sydney city council

In the street, where everyone calls her Clover, she is a celebrity. A long-time supporter of Sydney’s annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, she is also a perennial star of the parade. Moore rides in the back of a convertible with Alex Greenwich, the independent parliamentarian who has held her old state seat of Sydney since she anointed him her successor in 2012. Greenwich says being out and about with her puts him in his place: “I think I’ve got a pretty high profile. I keep on winning elections. But Clover and I will walk around the marshalling area before the parade and people will give me their phones so I can take a photo of them with her.”

Later this year, Moore will turn 80. She appears to be as fit as a fiddle – the word “sprightly” might have been invented for her – and by all accounts she’s as driven as ever. “I’m still very excited about the work,” she says. But her critics believe change at the top is overdue. Christine Forster, a former Liberal member of Sydney’s 10-person city council, says a preponderance of independent councillors endorsed by Moore – who are known collectively as Team Clover – has given the lord mayor too much clout: her long-term domination of the council and a compliant bureaucracy means the city is effectively her fiefdom. “I mean, it’s the stuff of dictators and monarchs to have somebody hold absolute power for more than 20 years,” Forster says. “It’s just not healthy. Particularly as the City of Sydney is the economic powerhouse of the country.”

Moore’s husband, retired architect Peter Moore, tells me he’d have been in favour of her quitting before the most recent mayoral election, last September. “I was ready for her to stop,” he says. “But, you know, I’m happy she was re-elected. It’s what she loves.” Clover Moore puts that another way: it’s what she is. One afternoon, I attend her significant projects meeting, a monthly gathering where staff report to her on the progress of the council’s infrastructure program. Before getting down to business, she informs the group that I’m there because I’m writing a profile piece on her. She tells them that in essence it will be a story about the city. “I am my job,” she says, to dutiful laughter.

Linda Scott was a Labor councillor for three terms until she stood down last year. She says she has never forgotten her first encounter with Moore. The freshly elected Scott had arranged to pay the lord mayor a visit. When she arrived, she says, Moore announced that she was never going to retire. “It was the first thing she said to me: that she planned to die in office – she’d have to be taken out of Town Hall in a box.” Like the staff at the significant projects meeting, Scott laughed in response. “I thought she was joking. Then she said it again, so I took her very seriously.” Moore says she has no recollection of the conversation.

Moore at Sydney Town Hall. “She doesn’t do mateship, which is unusual in Australian politics,” says one former councillor.Credit: Nic Walker

Like Liechtenstein, Moore’s realm is small but rich. The local government area over which she presides – official title City of Sydney, but let’s call it Cloverland – measures 26 square kilometres and has fewer than 250,000 residents. (The population of Sydney’s total metropolitan area is more than 5 million.) It takes in the central business district and has 33 suburbs wholly or partly within its boundaries, from Dawes Point in the north to Rosebery in the south, from Newtown in the west to Centennial Park in the east. The council has assets worth $15.8 billion, and spends close to $800 million a year, so Moore is in charge of a sizeable enterprise. One morning, she takes me to Green Square, a 278-hectare swath of land between the CBD and Sydney Airport. Once the city’s industrial heartland, it is being redeveloped as the highest-density residential area in the country. When construction is complete, its sleek apartment blocks will house 63,000 people. More than half that number have moved in already. This is urban renewal on a major scale, and Moore finds it thrilling.

Our walk through the precinct is highly orchestrated, with council staff waiting at points along the route to rattle off facts and figures and draw attention to the amenities – the green spaces, the aquatic centre, the bike paths, the stormwater recycling scheme, and so on.

Moore, smartly dressed and snappily accessorised (red lipstick, red nail polish, red and black sunglasses, the red shoes), supplements the commentary with enthusiastic remarks of her own. “Sorry, Lord Mayor,” says her chief operating officer, Kim Woodbury, when he accidentally speaks over her. At a park, we pause beside a waterway where, on a previous visit, Moore saw a brood of ducklings. Disappointingly, no ducks, big or small, are in evidence today. “They didn’t get the memo,” murmurs urban design co-ordinator, Jesse McNicoll.

With husband Peter, a retired architect, in 2007.Credit: Steve Lunam

In the futuristic library, a largely underground structure entered through a glass pavilion, we buy salads in cardboard boxes from the ground-floor cafe. The food comes with eco-friendly disposable cutlery, which Moore abandons after a few minutes, declaring she’s going to use her fingers instead. “Wooden utensils aren’t that good, are they?” she says. “Very sustainable but not very usable.”

While we eat, conversation turns to The Daily Telegraph, the Sydney tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp that has campaigned against Moore for as long as anyone can remember. She attributes this partly to her opposition when she was a state parliamentarian to a NSW government decision in the mid-1990s to lease part of the old Sydney Showground to Murdoch’s Fox Studios. There’s also the fact she’s female, progressive and an independent. “They’re three things the Telegraph wouldn’t like,” she says. “It’s been unrelenting nastiness.”

There are politicians for whom negative publicity is water off a duck’s back. Moore isn’t one of them. “She’s very thin-skinned,” a former member of the council’s media team has told me, reminiscing about a meltdown he witnessed after The Sydney Morning Herald reported that a smaller than usual crowd had turned out for the city’s New Year’s Eve fireworks: “Clover went absolutely f---ing spare.” Today, though, Moore has received cheering news. The Telegraph has published an editorial praising her for a council proposal to allow bars and clubs in parts of the CBD to open 24 hours a day. “It’s time to party around the clock”, whoops the headline.

Moore will tell you she’s always been in favour of partying. When she was in state parliament, she introduced a private member’s bill designed to make it easier and cheaper to open small bars. As lord mayor, she has encouraged Melbourne-style use of inner-city laneways as places for drinking, dining and mingling. It was the NSW government, not the council, that tried to reduce alcohol-fuelled violence by imposing since-lifted lockout laws (no entry to licensed venues after 1.30am, last drinks at 3am) in parts of the city. Still, the council is responsible for planning approvals that place restrictions on pubs’ and bars’ opening hours, noise levels, and the pavement space available to patrons for outdoor revelry. Consequently, some of Moore’s constituents see her as chief of the fun police. Jeering erupted at a community forum last year when she said, “The work we’ve done in laneways and small bars had really sort of put us in front of Melbourne …”

“What crap!” shouted a man in the audience. “Lies! All lies!” yelled another. Moore pushed back. “No, no,” she said pleasantly but firmly, sounding like the schoolteacher she once was. “It’s true.”

Anyway, at the library, where she has finished her lunch – I’m still trying to cut lettuce with the wooden knife – she is taking the win. A tick of approval from the Telegraph. Wonders will never cease. “Did they have a nice photo today?” she asks her communications manager. “Yes,” he says. “Beautiful.”

At the entrance to her apartment in Redfern is a hallway covered with framed photographs of Moore with famous people she’s welcomed to Sydney. “The shaking-hands-with-royalty corridor,” her husband Peter calls it. Moore hoped to add to the collection last October when Queen Camilla, on tour with King Charles, inspected the Green Square Library. Regrettably, the Queen’s minders wouldn’t allow pictures. “She was in our library,” says Moore, sounding a little peeved.

The apartment is smart and spacious but by no means palatial. While Moore changes for her next appointment, Peter explains that they bought the place as temporary accommodation when their nearby family home was undergoing a major renovation. The idea was to rent out the apartment after they returned to the house, but by the time the construction dust had settled, Moore had decided she preferred to stay put. Peter had drawn up the renovation plans himself, but says he didn’t mind at all. “We love it here.”

With husband Peter and daughter Sophie in Paris in the 1970s.

I get the sense Peter would love it in a tent if that was where Moore wanted to live. Those who know the couple say they’re an extremely tight unit: for the 55 years of their marriage, Peter has been Moore’s most trusted ally and closest confidant. As lord mayor, she treats him as an unpaid consultant, seeking his views on anything and everything but especially urban design: he studied town planning as well as architecture.

“The council work is fantastic. Just so interesting,” Peter says, adding that he has always been willing to pitch in to help Moore. “When we were first married, she was teaching. And we wouldn’t spend a lot of time having sex because we’d be marking all these essays right into the night.” He cracks up at his own joke – I think it’s a joke – and it strikes me that he and Moore are a match made in heaven: Miss Highly-Strung Go-Getter meets Mr Affability. While Moore runs Sydney, Peter runs the household, freeing her from domestic distractions. He makes clear to me that, when it comes down to it, her wish is his command.

One of Moore’s superpowers is her flair for self-promotion. While fellow councillors have come and gone, barely noticed, she has made herself the face of Sydney.

“Years ago, Clover had Professor Peter Singer, the animal activist, give a lecture at Town Hall,” he says. “After the lecture, she said, ‘We’re not going to eat meat any more’.” Peter, who cooks for the pair, had no objection. “I go along with those sorts of things.” Of course, Moore is away working a lot of the time. “Every now and then I sneak a sausage sandwich,” he says.

Moore says Peter’s counsel is invaluable: “He’s always been very politically savvy and wise.” Also, he has a good eye. He accompanies her when she goes clothes shopping, picking out garments he can tell will hang well on her. “He treats me like a building,” she says. “You know, the architect.” It’s part of their routine that before she goes out, Peter gives her outfit the once-over: “He likes to pass an opinion.” Today she is wearing a glamorous black suit. “Do I look all right?” she asks him.

“You look fantastic,” Peter says. Smiling, Moore takes the lift down to the street, where her driver awaits.

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One of Moore’s superpowers is her flair for self-promotion. While fellow councillors have come and gone, barely noticed, she has made herself the face of Sydney. At every stage of her career, her appearance has been distinctive. In the early days, she had long, fluffy curls (she refers to this as her Charles II phase). Then came the short, spiky hair and the dog-collars, which gave her an edgy, theatrical look, as if she were auditioning for a role in Cabaret, or a place in the Dykes on Bikes brigade at Mardi Gras. At civic events, she has always been front and centre. For instance, when Santa Claus arrives at the tree-lighting ceremony in Martin Place each year, Moore is in the sleigh beside him. “She is mobbed,” says council chief executive Monica Barone.

In addition to the 2000 people who work for the council, Moore has 22 personal staff. “Essentially, the role of those people is to make the lord mayor look good,” says former councillor Christine Forster. “It’s a PR machine for the lord mayor.”

Riding the new cycleways in the lead up to Cycle Week in 2007.Credit: Peter Rae

In fact, Moore’s team – which costs ratepayers about $4 million a year – consists not only of communications types but policy advisers, a speech-writer, administrative staff and protocol officers. What’s true is that her flacks, along with the council’s media people, are expected to diligently publicise her achievements and promote her agenda. When, in 2021, Michael Koziol, then deputy editor of Sydney’s The Sun-Herald, requested an outline of Moore’s accomplishments, he was sent an 18-page, 6500-word dossier.

Journalist Candace Sutton was hired as Moore’s communications manager at a time when the lord mayor was under heavy fire over the building of cycleways, which motorists complained disrupted traffic and reduced parking space. It was Sutton’s task to turn opinion around. In an entertaining article on the Daily Mail Australia website, she writes of pumping out a steady stream of bulletins that cast Moore in a positive light: she had at least three dozen media releases on the go in any given week. One day, she was summoned to the lord mayor’s office – not her splendid HQ at Town Hall but her day-to-day workspace in the concrete tower behind it – where she found Moore standing, agitated, by her desk. According to Sutton, Moore told her that she had just had a distressing experience while walking through the middle of the city. “I could feel the hate vibes coming out of people,” she said. “What are you going to do about it?” Sutton writes that in that tense moment, various solutions came to mind: “Medication? Meditation? Or three deep breaths? Maybe I could just quit on the spot.”

Sutton ended up staying in the job for three months, in which time she grew to admire Moore’s gumption. On Ride to Work Day in 2010, the then 64-year-old lord mayor cycled into Hyde Park, where she had an accident while dismounting. Gamely, she went ahead with the scheduled media conference, giving the assembled reporters a speech on the joys of bike-riding. A subsequent X-ray showed she had fractured her ankle. Her next public appearance was in a wheelchair.

Moore in 2010 after fracturing her ankle in a fall on Ride to Work Day.Credit: Edwina Pickles

Former staffers, even those who are fond of Moore, speak of struggling to match her round-the-clock devotion to duty. In Cloverland, you’re always on call. “She does expect a high level of commitment,” says Jonathon Larkin, who relished his role as Moore’s senior communications officer, but after four years opted for a less-pressured existence. “To be honest, I couldn’t keep up. It can exact a price, working at that kind of pace.” Tammie Nardone, Moore’s research and policy officer when she was in state parliament, remembers long days in the office followed by evenings at community meetings with her boss. She recalls with amusement Moore’s reaction to learning that Nardone had broken up with a long-term partner. “She said to me, ‘Oh, I’m so glad that I can keep you distracted by giving you lots and lots of work.’ ”

Moore is unapologetic about her reputation as a hard-to-please employer. ‘I set very high standards.’

A former member of the council’s media team says he was worn down by the end of his time with Moore. “You’re walking on eggshells,” he says. “You’re never quite sure which way she’s going to react and what she’s going to demand.” Speaking of eggshells, Sutton writes that she once ducked out to Woolworths and bought a carton of eggs, which she left on her desk. A passing secretary noticed they were from caged hens, not free-range, and “leapt back as if at an escaped lion. ‘Put them away! Don’t let Clover see them!’ she said.”

I get a hint of the kind of ship Moore runs when she talks to me about slipping literacy standards. “The people who work with me all have degrees, yet half of them can’t write,” she says. Having taught English, she’s a stickler for correct grammar, and when a document with mistakes in it crosses her desk, she doesn’t spare feelings: “I correct it and send it back.”

Moore is committed to increasing the number of green spaces in the City of Sydney.Credit: Courtesy of Clover Moore

Corporate-speak gets a red line through it, too. “I don’t like ‘stakeholders’. No one is allowed to ‘reach out’ to anyone else.” She can’t stand “moving forward”. “Everyone is ‘moving forward’,” she says, exasperated. Moore is unapologetic about her reputation as a hard-to-please employer. “I set very high standards for myself and for everyone around me.”

Here’s the thing, though. It’s exhausting being Clover Moore. “I feel like I’m always sitting for exams,” she admits. In the small hours of the morning, she lies awake in the dark, brain buzzing, mentally running through her to-do list. “I don’t know if I’m a worrier but I’m very conscientious. And I’ve got a lot on my plate.”

A devout Catholic, Moore says her religion is a great help to her. “I really pray a lot. I say the rosary in the middle of the night, most nights.” In the past, she has gone on silent retreats at a Carmelite priory south-west of Sydney. “I was doing that quite frequently, actually.” She also went on a Vipassana meditation retreat, where it was forbidden to speak, read, write or look anyone in the eye. Self-adornment was banned, too. “No make-up and no eye contact – that was really hard,” she says. “Especially the no make-up. I didn’t feel myself.” Anyway, she stuck it out for a week. Soul-searching is worth the effort, it seems to Moore. “I’m a bit of a seeker. That might be about the dysfunctional childhood. I don’t know.”

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The youngest of three daughters, Clover Collins was raised in suburban Gordon, on Sydney’s upper north shore. From the outside, it looked like a standard middle-class upbringing, but the Collins family had a secret. Clover’s father was an alcoholic. She says her mother, Kathleen, held down a teaching job to bring in much-needed money. “Catholics didn’t divorce. So she just pretended everything was fine.” Moore just got on with things too, but as an adult came to realise that living with the tension had scarred her. “It leaves you very sensitive and very vulnerable,” she has said.

Being sent to boarding school in the NSW Southern Highlands felt like an escape. Fellow pupil Anne Walsh says Moore was focused and disciplined: “She used to get up very early and walk around the school grounds learning her French verbs.” Moore also went to Mass every morning – even on Mondays, when the girls had the option of sleeping in. Walsh says her friend was lively and well-liked. “And she was so attractive to men. She had all these guys writing to her and visiting her.”

After graduating with an arts degree from Sydney University, Moore married Peter. The couple spent five years working in London and travelling around Europe before returning to Sydney in 1975. By 1979, when they bought a house in Redfern for $45,000, they had two young children, Sophie and Tom, and Moore was entering the political fray. She says she was driven by frustration. She had taken up petitions asking for Redfern to be made a little more kid-friendly: she wanted less asphalt, more grassy parks and playgrounds. A local alderman had told her, “You can’t have grass because we won’t see the glass to sweep it up.”

Moore’s first contested election in 1980, where she won a seat on South Sydney Council.Credit: Courtesy of Clover Moore

Winning a seat on South Sydney Council by a handful of votes in 1980, she set out on her extraordinary career. In 45 years, in local and state government, Moore has won all 15 elections she’s contested. For a few years in the 1990s, she was one of four independent MPs who held the balance of power in NSW parliament. In her electorate, home to the nation’s most out-and-proud gay community, her advocacy of equal rights for same-sex couples and her support during the AIDS epidemic made her something of a cult figure. In 1994, a whole contingent of “Clovers” marched in the Mardi Gras parade.

A decade later, Moore decided she could take on a second job – Sydney lord mayor. She promised that if she won the position, she would give her salary to charity, since she was already getting a parliamentary wage. In the 2004 mayoral election, she stormed to victory with 41 per cent of the primary vote.

Moore has always had the ability to simultaneously infuriate those on the left and right sides of politics. To have her calling the shots at Town Hall as well as spreading pixie dust at Parliament House in Macquarie Street sent blood pressure soaring in both the Labor and Liberal-National party machines. In 2012, NSW’s then Liberal-National government passed what became known as the Get Clover Bill, preventing dual membership of state parliament and a local council. Moore still bristles with indignation when she talks about it. She chose to leave parliament and remain as lord mayor. Two years later, the Coalition government again went after her, copying Victorian laws that gave businesses in the city of Melbourne two votes each, compared with one each for residents. The aim in Sydney was to boost the conservative vote and oust Moore. To the state government’s undoubted chagrin, she instead increased her share of the vote at the next council election.

Moore with the 1994 Mardi Gras contingent of “Clovers”.Credit: Courtesy of Clover Moore

In 2019, the then-federal energy minister Angus Taylor scored a spectacular own-goal when he accused Moore and her councillors of spending $15.9 million on travel in a single year. The correct figure was less than $6000. Taylor eventually apologised to Moore. “I just like the number of times she’s taken on powerful men and won,” says the ABC’s Antony Green.

It’s no longer automatic that, in Sydney, what Moore says goes. Yes, she easily won the 2024 mayoral election, getting twice as many primary votes as her nearest rival. And yes, Team Clover is still the biggest bloc on the council. But its four votes in the 10-person council do not comprise a majority, so in order to put her policies into action, Moore needs the backing of a couple of the other councillors (two of whom are Labor, two Green, one Liberal and one independent). She doesn’t expect this to be a problem. “We’ve got some really nice people on council,” she says.

Schmoozing doesn’t come naturally to Moore. “She’s not a people person in the sense that a lot of politicians are,” says John McInerney, a former independent councillor. “She doesn’t do mateship, which is unusual in Australian politics.” Like McInerney, former Labor councillor Verity Firth admires Moore’s grit and capability, but Firth says she and the lord mayor had little personal connection: “I never felt camaraderie or warmth from her.” Kerryn Phelps fell out with Moore after being elected to the council on her ticket in 2016. The former Australian Medical Association president suggests in her recent book, Power of Balance, that Moore saw her as a rival and consequently sidelined her. Phelps writes that after quitting Team Clover to be an unaligned independent, she dreaded council meetings because any proposal she made would “more than likely be met with disdain”.

You could say Sydney residents as a group have a rocky relationship with Moore. They get white-hot angry about disruptions to the council’s garbage collection service. They haven’t quite forgiven her for the Cloud Arch debacle, in which the budgeted cost of an artwork commissioned for the city blew out from about $2 million to $22 million before the project was shelved. They grumble that under Moore, Sydney has lost “vibrancy”. (Another word she hates, by the way: “It’s so overused, isn’t it? Everything is ‘vibrant’.”)

On the plus side, she is praised for protecting and expanding parkland, championing light rail, creating a pedestrian boulevard in the CBD, opening new swimming pools, persisting with the installation of bike paths, and putting the city on track to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. Talking to Moore, I come to realise that she feels personally responsible for delivering a beautiful and liveable city to Sydneysiders, one and all. “There are some very rich people and some very poor people,” she says, as we glide through town in her chauffeured car, “and I’ve got to provide for everyone.” Her conviction that no one could do the job as well as she does is the reason she still goes door-knocking before elections, trudging up and down streets for hours at a time to maximise her vote. (Also, it’s good exercise. “Quite slimming.”)

‘No one has ever accused her of doing something sneaky for her own personal benefit.’

Former staffer

Moore is a hard-edged political operator, says former Greens councillor Chris Harris. “But if you’re a constituent of the City of Sydney, you couldn’t ask for anyone better as your representative. I have to say I have deep respect for her.”

She isn’t always good at reading the room, though. To make a few welcoming remarks at a Christmas party is fine. To hold the floor for 40 minutes is not, especially if you’re banging on about the wonderful work you and your team have done during the year. Yet that’s what happened at Town Hall last December. “By the end, people were talking among themselves,” one of the guests tells me. A former staffer found Moore a fundamentally poor public speaker: “She murders speeches. Kills the punchlines. Wanders off on tangents. But people forgive her for all that.” Why? “She is perceived as an honest broker. No one has ever accused her of doing something sneaky for her own personal benefit.”

Moore with her two dogs, Buster and Bessie in 2016.Credit: Janie Barrett

A straight-shooter, agrees Roy Bishop, who was Moore’s senior electorate officer when she was in state parliament. “I’ve sat in meetings where developers tried to hand over cash to her,” Bishop says. “Seriously, you had envelopes with cash in them.” Moore tells me she has no doubt Bishop is right but that she doesn’t recall the incidents.

Candace Sutton makes the point in her Daily Mail Australia article that before she worked for Moore, her career as a reporter had taken her to some of the world’s worst trouble spots. She’d had a gun held to her head in war-torn Bougainville and waded among bodies in Rwanda after the 1994 genocide. But “being responsible for Clover’s public image generated more PTSD”, she writes. A longtime associate of Moore tells me her office is a calmer and happier place than it used to be: “I think Clover has probably mellowed over the years.”

It’s worth remembering that Moore has weathered a lot, says her former communications officer, Jonathon Larkin. “I saw people behaving atrociously towards her. Belligerent, misogynistic, dismissive.” (In 2012, Moore was one of the prominent women infamously accused by broadcaster Alan Jones of ”destroying the joint”. Radio shock-jock Kyle Sandilands once said of her on air: “Go to the retirement village, you old clown.” She was 64 at the time.)

But thinking back to Moore’s political starting point in Redfern, Larkin reckons she has had the last laugh. “I remember someone in party politics saying that if the local council had just given Clover what she wanted – fixed the local playground and put down some grass – all their lives would have been a lot easier.”

Moore has four grandchildren and two beloved dogs, Buster and Bessie. She and Peter are probably financially secure: they recently sold the renovated Redfern house for $4 million. Perhaps it would be a relief of sorts to put politics behind her and spend some time with her nearest and dearest. I ask if this mayoral term, her sixth, will be her last. After all, Moore will be 82 when it finishes. She says she thinks so, but she can’t be sure. “I never want to say never.”

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