Oh lord, it’s high farce in the corridors of power

The unseemly squabble between councillors in the Clover Moore camp over who gets to be Deputy Lord Mayor has brought an element of high farce into the hidebound gravitas of Town Hall ritual – especially as in 2006 Ms Moore moved to abolish the position outright when there was a chance Greens’ Councillor Chris Harris might get the job.

The five opposition councillors then walked out, leaving Ms Moore with no quorum and a ripper press story emerging from the normal tedium of these meetings.

Mayoral notes soon circulated around the opposition offices, relenting and agreeing to hold the election. The councillors filed back into chambers to vote a 5-5 dead heat between Clover’s nominee Robyn Kemmis and Cr Harris.

Cr Harris then won in a Sale-of-the-Century style roll of the barrel, which is how these things are bemusingly decided in Councils when a vote is tied. Ms Moore had habitually used her Lord Mayoral extra casting vote to decide tied votes but the rules prevent this when electing leadership positions.

Clover got her long-odds revenge by taking the Chair of all Council’s seven committees, each name again pulled out of the barrel after a tied vote. Committee Chairs also get an extra casting vote.

Then at the last  election the Moore Party gained one more Councillor, giving her a majority, and all executive positions have since remained firmly among her Party members. Ms Moore has shown no more inclination to abolish the Deputy Lord Mayor (DLM) position.

Council watchers thought the fun and games were over until, in a surprise vote last month, Clover’s partyliner Phillip Black was elected DLM. Marcelle Hoff had previously held the post and was expected to hold it among persistent rumours that she had been anointed as Ms Moore’s successor, while other scuttlebutt had her running for Ms Moore’s other job as MP for Sydney.

The vote raised eyebrows, The Sydney Morning Herald reporting a previous announcement that Cr Hoff would be visiting China as DLM. The Lord Mayor ignored it all, announcing without comment the election of Cr Black.

But last week the issue blew further open with The Herald reporting, to denials all-round, that Cr Black had twice threatened to resign if he didn’t get the position, and had called Cr Hoff ‘a hog’. The plot thickened, the report claiming that Cr Hoff had lent the Moore team $30,800 to cover campaign debt after Cr Black had failed to come up with his share of the bill.

Dear dear. Why being DLM should matter so much is mystifying.

The position brings no real power – the incumbent gets an extra one-and-a-half personal staff, a bit of a pay rise, and a chauffeur and Council car to use on Council business. There is of course also the debatable honour of being number two, with a “Lord” in front of your name.

But there is also extra exposure because the DLM deputises for the Lord Mayor at openings and functions, something that comes up fairly often as Ms Moore splits her time between her two jobs.

At the time of the Chris Harris mini-drama, he was about to stand against Ms Moore for the seat of Sydney, which explains Clover’s move to abolish the DLM position when facing even a 50-50 risk of an opponent getting the gig – an attempt to deny Harris oxygen. In the event Ms Moore won the seat with an increased vote, making her concern look exaggerated if not slightly paranoid.

Meanwhile the current DLM squabble is unbecoming, the combatants looking more like kids fighting over who sits next to the car window than lordly governors of Australia’s biggest city.

by Michael Gormly