Perth in need of a rebound and someone to deliver

Perth is in search of a new identity, and a new lord mayor, after a miserable chapter of tumult that resulted in the suspension of the entire council.

Broadcaster Basil Zempilas. Picture: Colin Murty

Perth is in search of a new identity, and a new lord mayor, after a miserable chapter of tumult and mismanagement that resulted in the McGowan Labor government suspending the entire council.

By Saturday night the city’s new council will have been ­decided in a count of about 6000 ballots.

The challenge of homelessness in the inner city has dominated the campaign. The frontrunners for lord mayor are Di Bain, a former ABC journalist, Seven’s AFL and Olympics broadcaster Basil Zempilas and entrepreneur ­Brodie McCulloch.

A year ago Zempilas wrote about inner-city homelessness with incendiary effect in his regular column for The West Australian newspaper.

“I make no apologies for this, the homeless need to be moved out of the Hay and Murray Street malls and the surrounding areas. Forcibly, if that’s what it takes,” he wrote. “I’m sick of being told by people who don’t live and work in the city like I do that it’s not that bad — actually, it’s worse.

“The look, the smell, the language, the fights — it’s disgusting. A blight on our city.”

Zempilas said on Friday his words were insensitive and he wrote them in frustration shortly after his six-year-old daughter and wife Amy were confronted by a man on the street who exposed himself. At the time, the family lived in a city apartment. They have since moved to the garden suburb of Floreat created for the 1950 Empire Games.

“The city is well placed to add population but we need to clean the city up, make it safer and make it friendlier,” Zempilas told The Weekend Australian.

He has listened to advocates for the homeless and proposes to adopt Brisbane’s “bed-down” model of converting carparks that are empty at night into places for the homeless to sleep as an interim measure.

Bain’s homeless plan includes working with hotels and backpacker hostels to provide interim accommodation, compiling of a list of homeless people “so the city can better target services and be accountable for results” and a shuttle bus to take vulnerable people to service providers.

Her plan has the endorsement of Noongar elder Ben Taylor, a longtime Aboriginal activist who lives in social housing in the City of Perth and despairs at the numbers of homeless Indigenous people in the city.

Former ABC journalist Di Bain.

“She listens to us and she has that compassion,” Mr Taylor told The Weekend Australian.

Bain, who also lives outside the centre of Perth on the Swan River with her investment banker husband John Poynton, has been working to re-energise the city for three years in her role with Activate Perth, a not-for-profit that aims to build a year-round calendar of events to draw people into the central business district.

Zempilas, a clear communicator with a genial style, is known to be popular with the city’s elderly residents who have the time and inclination to fill out their postal ballots. Bain has impeccable connections with city businesses, which account for about 20 per cent of eligible votes.

Candidates know there is much to do to restore the City of Perth’s reputation. It emerged from the construction phase of WA’s resources boom looking shabby. By 2018, empty shops and rough sleepers blighted a restaurant and retail district that had just a few years earlier enticed Tiffany, Louis Vuitton and Kailis pearls to set up shopfronts. In August this year, an inquiry into the City of Perth tabled in state parliament painted a picture of poor leadership with rampant factionalism, dysfunction, poor governance and interference in admin­istration.