Council election 2020: Gary Pead announces candidacy for Gold Coast mayoralty

There is a new contender for the position of Gold Coast mayor – and he’s kicked off his campaign with a bizarre request of fellow candidates.

THE Gold Coast’s newest mayoral candidate has called on fellow challengers to abandon their tilt at the top job so he can take on Mayor Tom Tate himself.

Serial candidate Gary Pead is the fifth person to announce a run for the mayoralty ahead of next month’s council election.

At the last mayoral election he missed the deadline to nominate because he was giving a TV interview, but he now says Brett Lambert, Mona Hecke and Virgina Freebody must withdraw from their campaigns in deference to his “experience”.

Gary Pead is running for Mayor again. Picture: Mike Batterham.

“I will be calling for the other mayoral candidates so far to withdraw from the mayoral nomination in favour of my long-term experience and ask them to stand as councillors as the Coast needs the backup of good people to replace the existing councillors,” he said.

“My first action when elected will be to move to declare the Gold Coast city under a state of climate emergency and will create an emissions-lowering city and take on the finance industry for my affordable housing project.

“I will attempt in a very short time to clean up local council politics across all of Queensland.”

Mr Pead announced in late 2015 he would run for mayor but failed to nominate in time and missed the deadline because he was giving a television interview.

Gary Pead ran for mayor in 2016 but ultimately failed to nominate Picture: Jerad Williams

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He later declared he had no intention of running for mayor and that missing the deadline was “all part of a plan’’.

Mr Pead, a former Labor Party member who contested the state seat of Mermaid Beach in 2015, later ran as an independent at the 2016 federal election in the southern Gold Coast seat of McPherson.

He ran again in Mermaid Beach in 2017, receiving 305 votes.

Mr Pead said he was passionate about multiple issues including climate change, housing affordability, the environment and opposing the controversial Adani mine.

The candidate declared he wanted to form an alliance of mayoral and council candidates called “People before Profit Gouging” in a bit to solve what he believes are the biggest issues facing local government, with plans to contest the state election in October.

He said the alliance would be “an attempt to change the failed politics of the past 30 years in Australia in favour of genuine community candidates, not party-political sycophants and self-interested political career candidates”.

Nominations open from tomorrow and close on March 3.

The election will be held on March 28.