By Cara Waters
Roxane Ingleton would likely be elected lord mayor of Melbourne next week – if the City of Melbourne operated on a standard electoral system of one vote for every voter.
Analysts agree the Greens lord mayoral candidate would be the favourite to win the election if it were not skewed by a decades-old rule that allocates two votes for businesses.
Roxane Ingleton is the Greens lord mayoral candidate for the City of Melbourne. Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
“I would expect residents to vote in accordance with what they normally do at a state and federal level, which is a strong Greens vote,” says analyst Kos Samaras, who has conducted research for rival candidate Arron Wood’s campaign.
“The landscape would be incredibly different, absolutely,” Ingleton says.
Even with a system skewed in favour of business votes instead of the residents who have elected Adam Bandt as their federal representative and Ellen Sandell as their state representative, Ingleton thinks she still has a chance.
“It’s on a knife-edge,” she says. “It really just depends on where the primary votes land and how those preferences fall.”
Ingleton works full-time as a midwife and has been attending electoral events and meeting voters during the campaign while juggling sleep during the day and working night shifts.
When asked why she wants to be lord mayor, Ingleton jokes that she’s sick of the night shifts and hears it’s not required for council.
“This is not my first rodeo,” she says. “I’ve run as a deputy in the last two elections. I’m passionate about local government. I think it’s the area of government where you have the most tangible effect on your immediate community and the world around you.”
The Greens flagship policy for the City of Melbourne election is for housing, calling for inclusionary zoning requiring 30 per cent of housing to be affordable in new developments on land owned by the council or the state, before it is sold to developers.
Ingleton works as a midwife and says it will stand her in good stead as lord mayor of Melbourne. Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
Ingleton acknowledges housing is more the domain of the state and federal governments but defends the policy focus amid a housing crisis.
“Some of our policies absolutely rely on us being able to work with the state government on making some changes there,” she says. “But some of our policies overall, in relation to housing are quite literally council responsibilities ... like to lease out council owned land to build more affordable homes for key workers.”
Other key policies for the Greens include improving bike lanes and having more parks in the city and more tree cover and canopy cover to help cool the city and provide habitat for biodiversity.
Ingleton says this campaign can be characterised by what the Greens have not promised when compared with other candidates.
She opposes the rates freeze promised by Wood and incumbent lord mayor Nick Reece arguing that 63 per cent of residents of the City of Melbourne are renters who will not benefit from a freeze.
“We’re seeing a lot of populist, attention-grabbing policies,” she says. “A rate cut or rate freeze just equals job cuts and service cuts, where we’re much more interested in spending money on building infrastructure than spending money on subsidising the use of that infrastructure.”
Ingleton says she would rather build a new swimming pool than subsidise people to use a swimming pool, taking a dig at Reece’s election promise of $2 swimming lessons.
“As bizarre as it sounds, we’re one of the only candidates in the race putting forward a slightly more fiscally responsible platform,” she says. “We’re not coming out with $10 million for an ABBA concert … [Wood’s latest policy announcement] or spending our ratepayers’ money to pay for coffees for people who who aren’t even residents in the city of Melbourne [a policy from Anthony Koutoufides].”
Ingleton is optimistic about her chances and says the Greens have had “more chance in this election than we’ve ever had”.
“I think it’s been a really great campaign for us,” she says, notwithstanding claims this week from renters advocate and Victorian Socialists federal senate candidate purplepingers, Jordan van den Lamb, that she is “a bit of a slum lord” after renting out a property in North Melbourne that was infested with mould.
In a response published on the Greens website, Ingleton says once notified of the mould, she sourced a dehumidifier and engaged a qualified tradesperson to deal with it.
She declined to comment further.
Ingleton says she often gets asked what makes a midwife qualified to be lord mayor but says the people who ask this may not really understand what’s involved in being a midwife.
“It’s such a layered job that in terms of my relationships that I need to build with people, my mediation skills, advocating for my patients, mediating between my patients and the doctors, there’s a lot of politics that happen there,” she says.
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