New Lord Mayor Sally Capp has skills to get job done, writes John Masanauskas
SALLY Capp is officially our Lord Mayor and now the hard work begins — but the early signs are good, writes John Masanauskas.
Opinion
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MELBOURNE Lord Mayor-elect Sally Capp was among friends when she attended a Property Council of Australia breakfast event in the CBD this week.
It was one of her first public outings since comfortably winning the by-election on preferences last week and she was clearly enjoying the accolades from attendees, many of them developers.
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As the executive director of the Property Council’s state division until the campaign, Capp had been keen to see the launch of a major report on how Australian cities stack up globally.
In fact, the new Lord Mayor had played a role in the commissioning of the report by British urbanist Professor Greg Clark, and was looking forward to sharing the research with her new colleagues and staff at the City of Melbourne.
It was understandable that Capp took up the invitation, but during the election campaign, she decided not to attend a Property Council lunch event featuring state Treasurer Tim Pallas. It was a good idea — her opponents had tried hard to portray her as the developers’ lapdog during the long mayoral campaign.
Capp pledged not to take any election donations from developers, but the link with the property industry will follow her to Town Hall, where she was officially sworn in on Thursday as the city’s 104th Lord Mayor. That is inevitable, but the test will be how Capp deals with the issue and manages the competing interests of inner-city residents, businesses and community organisations.
So far, the signs are positive, with the Lord Mayor promising to work for all of the municipality as a true independent. Capp was briefly a Liberal Party member, but she has also worked closely with ALP figures, including former premier John Brumby, who sent her to London as the first female Victorian Agent-General in 2009.
Now the roles are reversed somewhat: Capp is top dog at Town Hall while Brumby is chairman of waste firm Citywide, a Melbourne City Council subsidiary.
A challenge for the new Lord Mayor will be working out the inside politics of the council and forming relationships with the other 10 councillors. Five were elected on the team of her predecessor Robert Doyle and include Deputy Lord Mayor Arron Wood. Another is Melbourne University academic Nicholas Reece, an experienced Labor Party operative and an adviser to Julia Gillard when she was prime minister. Both Wood and Reece support Capp and will be a valuable source of advice and encouragement as she settles into her new role. They are happy with her pro-business stance and policies such as pushing ahead with the $250 million redevelopment of Queen Victoria Market.
More challenging will be convincing councillors of her ambitious idea for a local version of New York’s High Line park. Costing hundreds of millions of dollars, the elevated linear park would run between Federation Square and Etihad Stadium and involve roofing over rail lines.
The project would need state and federal government support, as well as considerable private investment. It would be a test of Capp’s ability to activate her extensive networks to support a bold vision which some believe is pie-in-the sky stuff.
The new Lord Mayor will also have to navigate the Town Hall bureaucracy, which has the real power in council in terms of day-to-day management and setting agendas and plans.
Already there is the whiff of tension in the air with reports that Capp declined an offer by council CEO Ben Rimmer to install one his offsiders as interim lord mayoral chief-of-staff. Capp has appointed journalist-turned-strategic communications adviser Ben Hart to the job after he helped run her successful election campaign.
Over the next few months, the Lord Mayor will need to decide, with other councillors, whether to extend Rimmer’s $460,000 contract beyond February next year. Former premier Jeff Kennett, who publicly supported Capp’s candidacy, told the Herald Sun last month that he suspected Rimmer would be gone by the end of the year amid concerns about senior staff leaving and low morale at the council. The council hierarchy strongly contests the charge of low morale; however, Rimmer is perceived by some to be an overly controlling chief executive. The interaction between Rimmer and a new Lord Mayor who, herself, has extensive experience as a CEO will be fascinating.
Capp’s supporters believe she is the right person to take the reins at Town Hall after the massive upheaval caused by the sexual harassment scandal which ended Doyle’s tenure after nine years in the job.
They trumpet her as a cleanskin, a consensus leader who will use her private- and public-sector experience to rebuild trust in the organisation and bring fresh ideas fit for the 21st century.
But humble ratepayers, whether residents or businesses, will most likely be keen to see the Lord Mayor focused on the basics such as keeping rates low and ensuring that city streets are clean and safe.
It remains to be seen whether Capp will embrace a culture of councillors taking seemingly endless overseas junkets to “sustainability” talkfests and promoting too many politically correct social agendas.
John Masanauskas is the Herald Sun’s city editor
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