Lord mayor Clover Moore still determined to make Sydney a better place to live
After four terms she could be excused for resting on her laurels. But Sydney’s longest serving lord mayor Clover Moore says she still has a lot to achieve as he eyes a historic fifth term.
NSW
Don't miss out on the headlines from NSW. Followed categories will be added to My News.
She’s a model of steely conviction, a proponent of progressive policy, champion of the underdog and thorn in the side of the major political parties, some developers and, more recently, Moore Park golfers.
She’s for the environment, net zero emissions, green spaces, affordable housing, drought proofing, gay rights, 24-hour trading, a walkable sustainable city, an integrated light rail system, local government, supervised injection rooms in Kings Cross, 40km/h speed limits on the CBD fringe, late night bars and cycle lanes in the nation’s most populous city, one that for as long as anyone can recall has been congested with cars.
With her cropped black hair, slash of dark lipstick and signature constricting chokers, Clover Moore – with her bag of expansive green socialist platforms – looks and once sounded more like a 70s punk rocker than your typical Australian politician.
Yet according to the man who knows her best, her husband of 52 years Peter Moore, his wife is way “too sensitive” to be taken for a punk rocker – and though she lived in London for five years in the 1970s, the Sex Pistols and fashion punk doyenne Vivienne Westwood never held any sway over North Shore-born and raised Moore.
“Her mother used to say to her ‘You know Clover, I don’t know how you’re going to live life because you’re too sensitive about everything’,” retired architect Peter says during a rare interview.
“But when it comes to things she believes in, she’s tenacious too,” he adds, confirming what Sydneysiders have long known.
“She has grit and determination when she believes in something.”
After 52 years of married life, Peter is still in awe of his wife, the high school teacher and mum-of-two who was elected to South Sydney Municipal Council as an independent alderman in 1980 after protesting a Labor council decision to resurface a Redfern park with easy-to-maintain asphalt.
She went on to become an activist protester opposed to state Labor premier Barrie Unsworth’s “offensive” Monorail, its proposal to demolish the Woolloomooloo Finger Wharf rather than restore it, and the 1990s overdevelopment of Darling Harbour.
“Redfern’s Sydney City Council was like another world back in the 80s,” Peter Moore says, looking back on the craziness his well-mannered wife – a product of Loreto college at Kirribilli and Dominican Convent at Moss Vale – brought home with her.
“It was filled with all these (American short-story writer) Damon Runyon characters and totally different to her North Shore upbringing. They thought she was some kind of grenade that visited them. They’d never seen anything like it, but she loved it and she loved the work,” he says.
When some of those Runyonesque characters in state government would go on to sack the Sydney council Moore was serving on in 1987, the “grenade”, then making early plans to run for lord mayor, went off.
Moore, then about 43, leapt into the bigger pond of state politics in 1988 seizing the seat of Bligh (later renamed Sydney) from the Liberal Party in her first attempt. In 2004, following some encouragement from outgoing Sydney lord mayor Lucy Turnbull, she was elected lord mayor.
She would hold the seat of Bligh/Sydney for four terms before the state government created what became colloquially known as “Clover’s Law” in 2012 to prevent a MP from also being a local councillor and thereby forcing her resignation.
Moore’s first major defining act as the new Sydney Lord Mayor, recalled her husband last week, filling with pride at the memory, was to buy Pyrmont’s 1.8ha harbourside strip Pirrama Park, then earmarked for apartments, and transform it into a community park.
Green space. Acquiring it and preserving it. It would become one of the cornerstones of her years in governance.
“That was her move – to give the people of Pyrmont, which was so overdeveloped – a harbourside park,” Peter says.
“That’s the first thing she did – and that’s the sort of thing that keeps me interested in her work after all these years. I really appreciate that she’s adding to the life of the city.”
It’s been suggested that Canberra-born architect Peter, whom she met when both were studying at University of Sydney – she English, history and archaeology and he, art and architecture – was instrumental in shaping the woman who has become Sydney’s longest serving lord mayor and is eyeing a historic fifth term at next week’s local government elections.
Peter doesn’t believe this to be the case, although when asked to name a selection of Sydney landmarks he loves best, he cites the parkland around the Art Gallery of NSW in The Domain and credits the vision of Governor Macquarie “for giving us Centennial Park and the Botanic Gardens”.
A love for beautiful urban environments is, he maintains, is just an interest the pair have always shared.
He notes Clover has always been enthusiastic and passionate about life.
It was one of the things that first attracted him to her.
“She was always an enthusiastic person and she was unlike other girls I took out,” he recalls.
“She was enthusiastic about everything and we complemented each other. We’d go on one of these Greek archaeological sites while we were travelling and there’d be lots of broken columns and things and tourists would come up and asked us what’s going on here and we could tell them because Clover knew the history and I knew about the architecture.”
After working his way up from a role with the Commonwealth architect’s office to a private firm in North Sydney, the newly-married couple decided to throw caution to the wind and relocate to London in about 1970.
During five years there, while he worked for Chamberlin, Powell and Bon – designers of the Barbican art gallery – and later designed public housing, his wife taught children with behavioural problems in the inner London borough of Hackney.
The experience informed the couple who, upon their return to Australia in 1975, settled soon after in Redfern where she soon set about tackling local government to make the area more family friendly for the couple’s two young children, Sophie and Tom.
Peter shares his wife’s dream that Sydney will realise its potential as a city of villages, much like London, New York and the great cities of the world. For five decades he has supported his wife’s work – initially by contributing art to her activist newsletters and later by helping explain to a steady stream of worried constituents development applications that threatened their boundaries.
“I used to help her with that a bit, before she became lord mayor. That sort of expertise I could just supply but she doesn’t need that from me now,” he says.
These days he keeps himself busy minding the couple’s two dogs and “keeping house” at the Moores’ new Moore Park apartment, one the couple moved to four years ago during renovations on their former long-held Redfern house. The development sits at the edge of an urban renewal project that is one of Moore’s current great devotions.
Appetite for renewal
If Moore’s critics believe she has grown stale in the job after 41 years in politics and almost two decades as lord mayor, they only need take a brisk 10,000-step walk of the new $13bn Green Square urban renewal development that occupies 287ha of formerly contaminated flood-prone Defence Department land in the city’s south to have their opinions altered.
Hemmed between South Dowling St, Phillip St, Botany Rd and Bourke St and taking in parts of Zetland, Alexandria, Waterloo, Rosebery and Beaconsfield, Moore, bubbling with energy and excitement, can barely contain her excitement for the development and transformation of a former marshland into high-density living space, shopping precincts and community facilities for 61,000 people, 30,000 of whom have already moved in.
She is proud of the project and has every right to be.
Launched in 1995 under then state minister for urban affairs and planning Craig Knowles as a designated growth area for South Sydney, the site was tied up in red tape for years as the original developers of the project, the NSW government agency Landcom, the South Sydney Development Corporation, South Sydney Council under then mayor Vic Smith and design consultants including Cox Richardson clashed over the vision for the precinct.
It would only finally start to take shape a decade later in 2006 during Moore’s first term as lord mayor.
It was during her fourth and most recent term, however, that it has started bearing splendid fruit.
“When I inherited it I’d been a defender of the urban environment so it became a question of how can we make this work and so we developed a policy of design excellence – developments have to go through a designed excellence process and this is the sort of work you get – not boring work,” she says, gesturing to some of the impressive high-density high-rise buildings on our three-hour walk last week.
She credits the success of the project to development partners including Mirvac and a design panel Moore established in 2007 – the Sydney Design Advisory Panel – overseen by acclaimed architects such as Ken Maher, Peter Mould, Richard Johnson and Kerry Clare among others.
Our walking tour begins at Dyuralya Square at the northern fringe before we head southwest to a gleaming new underground 3000sq m $61m public library, Green Square Library, designed by architects Studio Hollenstein in association with Stewart Architecture on the southern verge.
As we walk, she points to the work of esteemed architect firms – BVN (designers of Green Square Primary School), Stutchbury Architecture (designer of Jonyton Ave Creative Centre and Banga Community Shed), SJB, Koichi Takada, Fox Johnson (Waranara Early Education Centre) – and the newly opened community facilities, including the Matron Ruby Park, and highlights bioswales that will help manage stormwater run-off, trunk drainage systems, separated cycleways, a water recycling plant and sustainability centre, landscaping and trees for a future canopy.
The new Green Square Library, she explains with pride, was the winner of the World’s Best Library 2019 award.
Another architectural jewel – the glamorous new Gunyama Park Aquatic and Recreation Centre, with its outdoor 50m heated pool, indoor 25m heated pool with adjustable floor to accommodate water polo, hydrotherapy pool with ramp and hoist for disabled access – won its designers, Andrew Burges Architects and Grimshaw, a prestigious Australian Institute of Architects award for public architecture.
Courage in convictions
Moore knows better than most what it means to be attacked and lampooned for doing her job.
Through four decades of life in public office, she has habitually been targeted by successive state governments, rivals, developers, misogynists, the media.
She was dubbed the “Bitch of Oxford Street” in 2004 during her campaign to become lord mayor, “The Bag Lady” in the years that followed as she hauled two large briefcases from Parliament House to the Town Hall while holding down two roles simultaneously as a MP and as lord mayor.
She’s had vile graffiti sprayed on the walls of her electorate office, has been verballed, punched, was once stalked by a convicted wife-killer, yet she’s never lost sight of the job or the responsibility of it.
“I think the people I represent are progressive and even if you’re attacked they can still see that what you’re proposing – the thing the media might be attacking – makes sense,” she says
“When I was opening the Bourke St bike lane officially for the first time I had Channel 7 there filming me and it was, you know, like I was opening a radioactive smelter or something rather than a bike lane. It was crazy stuff.
“When I talk to mayors in other cities, they say that when they did this they met with the same reaction. You know, people don’t like change but you know what else – a whole lot of people do. You know how I know this, because that’s the way they vote,” she says, citing as an example her support for medically supervised injecting rooms in Kings Cross in 2001.
“There was absolute outrage from everyone at the time and people said ‘You’re going to lose the election over this’, but my vote actually went up because people understood what this was … It might save lives and get people into treatment.”
It takes courage to be a great mayor, something Moore knows though she doesn’t ascribe the word to herself. It’s a lesson she learnt from one of her mentors, the independent member for the south coast from 1973-95 John Hatton, the MP who used parliamentary privilege to expose organised crime spurring the Wood Royal Commission into police corruption (1995-97).
“Some very good advice I used to get from John Hatton, is that in your heart you know what’s right. When you know what’s right, when you’ve done the research, you can stick to it,” she says.
“When I was being attacked about the bike lanes, the CEO said to me, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ and I said ‘Yes, it’s the right thing to do.’ And some people had to climb over all the construction to vote at the Bourke St polling booths that year and I got my highest vote there so you know, people do like you to take courageous steps I think.”
Something that has tested her fortitude in the past two years has been the pandemic, something she describes as “devastating” and “exhausting”.
“The City of Sydney was devastated more so than anywhere else in Australia apart from Melbourne with all its lockdowns. The industries that are prominent in the city were really affected,” she says, rattling off plans now in place to revive the CBD.
“You know, the hospitality, tourism, entertainment, education, performance. They all stopped. We have to incentivise shopkeepers to come back to the city. We gave rent relief to all of our tenants and we had a series of grants … and we’ve done our best to help them survive and get through it – supporting OzHarvest to feed people, feeding social housing tenants, relocating the homeless – the ones that would go anyway – looking after the business community. It was all of that – and Covid testing and more.
“But we’re coming out now for Christmas and we’ve got a whole lot of cultural events to look forward to and bring people back. The Festival of Sydney and Biennale.
“The government has appointed a night mayor – a commissioner for the night time economy and you know, as soon as you put on an event, people come. They love it. We hope that gives the city the push it needs to reactivate it and get people back so that then, by next year, they will be feeling renewed and be back in the city.”
Got a news tip? Email weekendtele@news.com.au
Pro-Palestine speaker’s visa under review after ‘celebration’ remark
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke is reviewing the visa of a US guest speaker who told a pro-Palestine vigil in Western Sydney that October 7 was a cause for “celebration”.
‘So, so devastating’: Mainstay deli shuts after 70 years
The closure of an iconic southwest Sydney deli has prompted its legion of customers to express how the institution – treasured like the Opera House – meant more than prosciutto and panini.