5

Sydney City Council

For me, the whole experience of those years in Woolloomooloo was transformative and opened up a completely new world of left-of-centre, community, and Labor politics. I became more determined than ever that I wanted to commit my life to the struggle for a more just and peaceful world.

At age 22, I came upon what may have been another fork in the road of my life. I had been very interested in acting at school, and, while living in Woolloomooloo, I had joined an amateur theatre group led by the well-respected actor Allan Penney. The group operated in an old church hall at 228 Forbes Street, Darlinghurst. I had been cast in a play that was to be performed in Newcastle, but to accept the part I was obliged to shave off the bushy beard I’d acquired. Meanwhile, I’d been preselected to stand as an ALP candidate for the Fitzroy ward in the 1974 Sydney City Council elections — an opportunity that had arisen when the previously chosen candidate had stood down at the last moment. This was my first chance to serve my community through elected public office. Crucially, the candidate photographs had been taken and the election material had been printed with a bearded me — shaving my beard off now was not an option if I wanted to go through with the election. I chose politics, declined the acting role, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I wasn’t elected to the council in the 1974 election, but was, by then, a very dedicated environmentalist, partly in response to the rampant development of the city and partly to the sand mining occurring near Forster.

Although I was living in Sydney, I still had a deep love for the bush and especially for the north coast of New South Wales where I’d grown up. I established the Forster-Tuncurry Area Conservation Society, with me as president and my old friend Terry taking on the role of secretary. We campaigned on local issues for a few years, but I was travelling to Forster for various public meetings of the group, and eventually the tyranny of distance made it impossible for me to continue.

Back in Sydney, I was passionately committed to a very different future for the city than that advocated by the aldermen and the political party who controlled the council. The party in power was called the Civic Reform Association, and it was dominated by the interests of property developers in the city. The Civic Reform Association wasn’t the Liberal Party operating in the local government arena of the Sydney City Council, although it enjoyed their support. Rather, it was a separately incorporated entity, with major corporate vested interest groups as part of its formal structure, including the Master Builders Association. These groups, and their members, were profiting from the demolition of the historic buildings of the city and the rapacious pursuit of development at all costs. I was particularly outraged by the destruction of heritage buildings and the threat to whole neighbourhoods — Woolloomooloo was at risk, and so were many other communities.

Low-income earners and the long-term working-class residents of the city were being forced out by bad planning decisions. I wanted to be elected to the council and had a real conviction that this was my calling. I moved to Surry Hills and began to develop a political platform to drive deep changes in Sydney City government, which for a hundred years had been dominated either by big business interests or by the right wing of the ALP. I was strongly supported by two wonderful working-class mentors, Fred Miller and Len Devine, who welcomed me into their Surry Hills homes. They believed in me and actively supported my aspirations in the ALP. Len was the former federal MP for East Sydney, and Fred later became the state member for Bligh. I am forever grateful for their kindness and that of their families. At the time, I had ambitions to be the federal member for Sydney, but, as fate would have it, this was not to be. My opportunity to serve in the national parliament did arise later, although by another and somewhat unexpected pathway.

In 1974, I also began teaching law at the New South Wales Institute of Technology. Later in the year, I worked as the manager of the New South Wales Environment Centre, which was located on Broadway near the intersection with Glebe Point Road. I was in this office when I heard the news of the dismissal of the Whitlam government on 11 November 1975, and, with thousands of other people, joined the big spontaneous protest march in the city streets that afternoon.

Some months later, in August 1976, I organised a creative demonstration against Governor-General Sir John Kerr at Sydney’s Wentworth Hotel in response to Kerr’s unconstitutional dismissal of the Whitlam government and the appointment of Malcolm Fraser as prime minister. It involved a dignified but highly effective walk-out of a Sydney University Law Graduates’ Association luncheon, where the guest speakers were Sir John Kerr, Chief Justice of the High Court Sir Garfield Barwick, and Bob Ellicott QC, who was the Fraser government’s attorney-general at the time. All three men had been participants in the events surrounding and following the dismissal of the Whitlam government. Network TV cameras filmed the walk-out, and all major papers covered the story. The special branch of the New South Wales police force stood by impassively as we conducted our peaceful objection. Many of my fellow protesters went on to become prominent lawyers, judges, and state government ministers.

There was an over-the-top Sydney Morning Herald editorial on 4 August 1976 condemning our actions. The editorial asserted that ‘there is a danger that in emphasising the puerility of individual “protests” of this kind the reality of what we are witnessing in the campaign against the Governor General is obscured. It should not be. The campaign is a sinister one, mounted, co-ordinated and paid for by sinister people for sinister reasons. The purpose of the campaign is to create a climate of violence, intimidation and harassment.’ Such a ridiculously extreme response was utterly unwarranted: we had engaged in expressing our right of freedom of speech in a peaceful protest about an issue of deep concern to almost 50 per cent of the Australian people. This extreme editorial was the inspiration the very next day for Frank Hardy and Donald Horne to decide to form ‘Citizens for Democracy’, a national protest movement that organised huge rallies around Australia in support of constitutional reform and in opposition to the sacking of an elected government by the governor-general. I became part of the organising committee.

During 1976, I moved out of Woolloomooloo and rented a house at 423 Crown Street, Surry Hills — just a few blocks from the hospital where I was born. I lived in a tiny attic at the top of the house for two years, paying for the environment group Friends of the Earth to operate in the two floors below, and participating in their work and activities. I also established a free local newspaper called The People’s Paper, funded by my own modest income and by advertising. Through this, I championed progressive environmental and social policies, and attacked what I saw as corruption in the Sydney City Council.

It was also around this time that I did something that my parents thankfully never found out about; as committed golfers, they would have been horrified by my actions. I was a vehement opponent of the South African apartheid regime, and so I attended a demonstration against visiting South African golfer Gary Player. I didn’t set out to get charged, but my determination to stand by my convictions led to me being arrested and moved off the golf course by Inspector Longbottom, who was the head of the special branch of the New South Wales police. This moment was captured in a much-publicised photograph of me, Inspector Longbottom, and fellow-protester Meredith Burgmann, who later became the president of the New South Wales Legislative Council. I was taken to the local police station, fingerprinted, and charged with a public-order offence, which I recall was ‘disturbing the peace’. I was subsequently acquitted of the charge in court.

In 1977, I was elected to the Sydney City Council as an alderman representing the Flinders ward, which included Surry Hills, Centennial Park, and South Paddington. The council became much of my life for the next six years, and, together with my progressive colleagues Steve McGoldrick, Tony Reeves, and later Stan Ashmore-Smith, we championed many social and political issues in one of the most controversial and reforming periods in council history. During that time, the Civic Reform lord mayor and a major Sydney corporation were exposed in the media as having engaged in improper conduct, long before there was any ICAC. Tony Reeves led the exposure of their secret dealings, which ended up on the front page of the National Times newspaper and in a tabloid called The Sunday. The lord mayor tragically died on the day the material was published.

Through our council work, we were able to help shape a transformation in the policies of the city on environmental issues, town planning, and community services to better serve the residential areas and to support the greening of the central business district. A lot of things we did were in parallel with some of the more popular and mainstream policies of the progressive Greater London Council, such as our strong stand in opposition to racism and our stand on nuclear issues, but we certainly weren’t emulating their model and had our own plans for Sydney. I am proud of the fact that many of the issues we stood up for all those years ago have since gained support in the community: energy conservation, urban forests, renewable energy, regional cycle ways, greening city buildings, rooftop gardens, and many more. Even so, some other issues we strongly supported still haven’t been embraced by New South Wales governments of any political persuasion. In particular, wider metropolitan Sydney still lacks an effective public transport strategy.

One policy our council implemented was to level a 2 per cent tax on new development in the city centre to fund low-income housing. We didn’t want Sydney to be a city just for the rich; we wanted it to be a place that supported a social mix of people. But not everyone agreed — most notably the state Labor government of Neville Wran. It was this policy that, I believe, prompted the state government to take radical action to regain control of our council. In 1981, they amalgamated the Sydney City Council with the perceived Labor Right-controlled South Sydney Council to create a mega-council with 27 elected aldermen. The legislation to do this was introduced without notice by the state government on the night of the press gallery Christmas party. The incoming city councillors stripped the progressive aldermen of their positions, even removing our desks and dumping papers and possessions into cardboard boxes. My colleagues took their cardboard boxes and held a media conference on the front steps of the Town Hall. Happily, the alliance which took over the council soon fell apart, and my colleagues and I were reinstated to our leadership positions.

Despite our political differences, my mum and dad were proud that I’d been elected to the council in 1977 — and re-elected in 1980. My father still would have preferred me not to be an ALP councillor, and he wrote me a letter at one stage suggesting that I should form a political party of my own. When I visited Forster, we would get into angry political debates. I would fly to Taree and be met by Mum and Dad, and before we got out of the airport, Dad and I would be fiercely raging against each other’s political views. My mother tried to keep the peace as best she could, but we were both of strong convictions, and as a young man I was hot-headed and unforgiving. It sure made dinner conversation volatile and unpredictable.

My father remained a lifelong advocate of the conservative side of politics until he passed away, but I still loved him very much as my dad. Mum, on the other hand, gave out ALP how-to-vote cards for me in the city-council elections, much to my father’s disdain. She even handed one to Patrick White at the Centennial Park booth, and I’m sure I got his vote. When I was acting lord mayor for a brief time in 1983, I honoured my mother by making her the acting lady mayoress when I hosted a scheduled civic reception on behalf of the city for a visiting delegation.

During this time, I was a high-profile figure in Sydney and appeared regularly in the media, championing a wide range of political causes as a city alderman. I was often in The Sydney Morning Herald and News Limited papers and on the nightly TV news, as well as speaking on radio, which was my favourite medium. The Sydney City Council never seemed to be out of the news in those days. For the first time in my life, I secretly wondered if my birth parents ever saw me and perhaps recognised a family resemblance.

My dad, though it pains me to say it, had very prejudiced views towards Aboriginal people — views that were deeply ingrained and a product of growing up in a different era. Working on tackling and changing this ugly underbelly of prejudice in Australian society was to become a large part of my life’s work both inside and outside the Parliament of Australia, but I’m sure my father must have been mortified when, in 1978, his son left his secure and tenured job as a law lecturer to become a lawyer working for the Aboriginal Legal Service (ALS). I stayed there for the next six years, until I was elected to the House of Representatives in March 1984.

The ALS was based in Redfern and covered much of New South Wales, from the Queensland border to the Murray River, and out into the central west of the state. The solicitors and Aboriginal field officers were wonderful people to work with, and we formed bonds of friendship that have lasted throughout the years. In six years, I learnt so much about the way Aboriginal people have been treated in this country.

One of the many high-profile cases I was involved in concerned the shooting of a young Aboriginal man, Ronald ‘Cheeky’ McIntosh, in the town of Moree in 1982. He was shot dead by some non-Aboriginal men, and two others were wounded in the attack. The town became a powder keg, with the local Aboriginal community both enraged and grieving for their loss. My boss at ALS, a young Paul Coe, judged that we urgently needed to send legal reinforcements to Moree and asked me and another solicitor, Chris Lawrence, to book a flight and ‘get up there immediately’. All the flights were booked out, but we could get one two days later. Paul hit the roof and told us angrily, ‘Charter a plane and get up there now!’ I couldn’t believe what he was saying. Budgets were tight, and the ALS didn’t charter planes; that was something only rich people did. But Paul insisted, and he was right to do so — once we got up there, we found the town in crisis.

We arrived at the Moree ALS office to find a huge meeting of local Aboriginal people being addressed by the police minister, Peter Anderson, and one of the deputy commissioners of police. The room was packed, with standing room only, and everyone was openly weeping, the minister and deputy police commissioner included. Most of the Aboriginal people were distraught and many were wailing uncontrollably. I will never forget the sight as long as I live, it was just so sad and distressing.

Chris and I worked with our local colleagues to get on top of the issues and talked to as many people as we could to give support to the community. We then took a few minutes out to have a coffee at a local milk bar and fell into conversation with the proprietor, at which point the most amazing thing happened.

‘What you fellas doing in town?’ he asked.

We told him we worked for the ALS and were here for the next few days, at least — until things settled down.

‘It’s a scary place right now, and we don’t know what’s going to happen next,’ he said. ‘Funny you blokes are in here, because earlier today my girl [his staff member] stopped work to talk to her boyfriend who came in to see her. They were talking about the killing, then she got upset and ran off, and I haven’t seen her since.’

We knew immediately that we had found one of the perpetrators. We went straight to the Sydney Homicide Squad team leader and reported what we’d heard. Not long after, the offenders were apprehended and subsequently convicted of manslaughter.

I learnt a big life lesson through that experience, when reflecting on Paul Coe’s response. As a leader, when you’re confronted with a critical situation, you need to stay cool, be prepared to make big, courageous calls, and back your decision.