Sydney lord mayor rivals warn of ‘post-Clover Moore vacuum’

Clover Moore has centred Sydney’s bulking bureaucracy around her reign, with political opponents nipped in the bud amid fears a succession would ruin her legacy.

Lord Mayor Clover Moore addresses a City of Sydney council meeting on Monday. Picture: Jane Dempster

Lord Mayor Clover Moore has centred Sydney’s bulking bureaucracy on her reign, say insiders, who described a “post-Clover” political vacuum with opponents nipped in the bud amid fears a succession would ruin her legacy.

The 78-year-old Lord Mayor is poised to secure an unprecedented sixth term at Town Hall, extending her reign over Australia’s global city to more than two decades, but insiders said her opposition had failed to frame her tenure as having come to its natural end.

“No one is prosecuting the simple point that ‘it’s time’,” one Liberal operative said, pointing to Labor’s harnessing of that sentiment in bringing the NSW Liberal government’s record 12-year rule to an end.

“There’s a way to do that with Clover but no one is prosecuting it properly … People didn’t vote out the Perrottet government in anger, it was just time for a change.”

What a post-Clover Town Hall would look like, however, remained unclear. “There’s no one there to replace her, no one has her profile or hold over Sydney,” a council insider said.

Ms Moore’s long list of political opponents claimed she “cut the head off” potential successors or those who had the talent to potentially hasten her exit.

Former councillor Jess Scully, long seen as a future mayor, left in 2023 citing a lack of parental leave.

The Lord Mayor has discretion of her Team Clover ticket and to accommodate the return of former councillor Jess Miller has “dumped” to an unwinnable position councillor Emelda Davis, who is understood to be “furious”.

Ms Miller is “back and reading the room”, while councillor Adam Worling also has mayoral “aspirations”.

The longstanding belief is that independent NSW Sydney MP Alex Greenwich, a Clover ally and who succeeded Ms Moore in parliament in 2012, is the most likely pick.

Insiders pondered whether Mr Greenwich would look to jump from Macquarie Street to Town Hall, given its higher profile and that the 2023 election result didn’t turn his own vote into a pivotal one in a minority Minns government.

Others suggested the distinct lack of succession planning was down to Ms Moore’s eagerness to remain in the role as long as possible, but also not to jeopardise her “legacy”.

“It won’t be someone from her own team … it would wreck her legacy,” one former political adversary said.

Former Wentworth independent MP Kerryn Phelps detailed her exit from Team Clover when a Sydney councillor in 2017, saying she saw “no prospect of a working relationship” with the Lord Mayor who, after her exit, alleged the ex-MP had a “lack of understanding” of the city’s policies.

“This was code for ‘disagrees with the Lord Mayor’,” Professor Phelps wrote in her April memoir.

“I (was) ghosted by the team and staff allied to ‘Team Clover’, some of whom would overtly turn their backs on me at functions.”

Sydney chief executive officer Monica Barone has been in her position since 2006, “embedded” by the Lord Mayor, having worked with her when on South Sydney Council, and whose yearly performance review was a one-on-one conversation with Ms Moore until last year.

The lord mayor’s office, established before Ms Moore assumed the position, has also ballooned to employ 22 full-time staff and is allocated almost $50m across the coming decade. “It’s a huge bureaucracy … (Ms Moore) has centred it on herself,” one source said, pointing to the council’s asset-heavy, debt-free coffers.

Others claimed Ms Moore had “gerrymandered” internal resources to aid her political machine, noting she had more staff than government ministers.

“She’s popular and successful, you can’t deny that – but she’s also put (systems) in place that have facilitated that,” they said.

Ms Moore has outsourced key services such as waste collection but let bureaucracy sprawl.