‘Peace & Goodwill’ During First Meeting of Newly Elected Inner West Council

There was ‘an ambience of peace and goodwill’ at the first business meeting of the newly elected Inner West Council on Tuesday 22 October, 2024, writes Hall Greenland.

An ambience of peace and goodwill descended on the first business meeting of the newly elected Inner West Council on Tuesday night. Even the reliably irascible Mayor only lost his cool once – and briefly – cutting off and admonishing a Rozelle resident who was speaking in the public forum to oppose the installation of plastic-grass fields in Callan Park. 

The one sharp division of the night was Labor’s motion to make the promises in its election platform Council’s priorities. The Greens Councillor Liz Atkins pointed out Labor had not received a majority of votes at the election, that forcing Council to ‘holus bolus’ adopt its entire platform was hubris in the extreme, and that absent costings and public consultation she wasn’t going to vote for it. The conservative independent Vic Macri and the Liberals Vittoria Raciti agreed with her which meant the Labor motion only passed 8-7. 

Council’s response to high rise housing push in the Inner West

The key issue on the night was Inner West Council’s response to the push from the Premier Chris Minns and the developer lobby for (much) more high-rise housing in the Inner West. 

Labor has adopted a sharp practice of moving multi-paragraphed motions on big planning issues without showing them prior to their introduction to the other Councillors, let alone the public. The non-Labor Councillors then have to consider and vote on the motion almost immediately. This happened again on Tuesday night.

Before the elections the Labor majority rejected a report from the Council staff critical of the Minns planning changes and adopted a set of 13 ‘planning principles’ of their own. These were sprung on a Council meeting and were broadly in agreement with the Minns ‘reforms’ for more high-rise housing. In response, the Minns government agreed to let the Council do its own planning changes, as long as they were done quickly. 

These ‘principles’ were put out for public comment in July.  The consultation was basically via an online survey which less than 1% of the adult population responded to. Two residents spoke to Tuesday’s meeting pointing to the tiny response and the big flaws in the design and reporting of the survey. 

Nevertheless, the strategic planning director summed up the community response as ‘acknowledging the need to increase housing supply whilst balancing the conservation of local heritage and character … It also recognises the need for additional infrastructure and community facilities to support growth in the Inner West’. Some 84% of respondents nominated more public open space as a precondition for higher density development.

Letter writers to the Sydney Morning Herald have done it, but the Greens on Council have never subjected these Labor planning ‘principles’ to critical examination despite these ‘principles’ offering few safeguards to the natural and built environment – for either current or new residents. 

For starters, the ‘principles’:

• offer no assurance of community input to any planning changes, 
• contain no provision for upgrades to amenity, such as more public open space, to meet the needs of an increased population, and 
• provide no guarantees to protect either the natural environment or the character and heritage of the Inner West. 

The affordable housing ‘principle’ – 30% of housing on government owned land should be public housing – is clearly weak. Despite its claim to be a champion of housing affordability, the only major upzoning exercise by IWC this year contained just 1% ‘affordable’ housing. 

At the public forum at the beginning of the meeting, residents raised some of these shortcomings – and Kobi Shetty, the local Greens MP for Balmain, has also highlighted them. Yet the Councillors voted unanimously for these ‘principles’ to be the basis of the new planning code (or Local Environment Plan) for the inner West. 

Controversial sunlight and size reduction regulations for apartments spiked

One ray of sunshine (literally) was that Labor backed off entertaining the recommendation from the NSW Productivity Commission to reduce sunlight requirements to new apartments. The Greens had alerted the media to a Labor Notice of Motion on the agenda which appeared to endorse this change from the notoriously neoliberal Productivity Commission. In the face of a backlash, Labor abandoned it.

However, Council has now voted unanimously to quickly draw up a new LGA-wide Local Environment Plan that aligns with the Minns push and based on Labor’s ‘planning principles’. It will be submitted to the state government without any prior public exhibition.

Meeting ‘a sea of unanimously adopted resolutions’

The Greens Councillors did strike some positive and critical notes at the meeting. They moved to open up Council’s advisory committees for wider representation (they are currently hand-picked by a majority Labor committee) and for the committees to have the power to make recommendations direct to Council.  Yet when those improvements were rejected, the Greens voted to accept these carefully curated talk-shops anyway.

This acquiescence was the motif of the first Council business meeting.  The night was a sea of unanimously adopted resolutions. The Labor majority is in some ways ‘progressive’ and the mayor is an astute responder to outbreaks of resident discontent. Labor, along with the two newly-elected conservative Councillors, can command an overwhelming 10-5 majority on crucial issues. All this can be dissuasive of any Greens initiative or opposition, as it will appear to be doomed. 

The report on Council’s investments (some $230 million), for instance, was adopted unanimously after a speech from one Labor Councillor boasting  IWC is the only NSW Council 100% divested from fossil fuels. But the Greens did not raise the issue of investments or contracts with companies with links to weapons manufacturers, or with the genocide and ethnic cleansing by Israel in Gaza and Palestine. 

Greater firepower in Labor ranks of Inner West Council now

There does appear to be greater firepower deployed in the Labor ranks this term. In the past the mayor, Darcy Byrne, very much bossed the Inner West Council meetings, with mostly mute Labor Councillors reduced to raising their hands when required. It now appears, on the evidence of this first meeting, that Labor Councillors Philippa Scott, Jess D’Arienzo, Chloe Smith and Mat Howard will play larger or more voluble roles this term.   

Those Councillors are all returning, re-elected Councillors, now experienced in the ways of Council. In comparison, there is only one returning Greens Councillor. The four new Greens Councillors are very much on a steep learning curve and this should temper any judgments for the time being. 

Hall Greenland is a former Councillor on Leichhardt Council where he served as chair of its planning committee. He is currently President of Friends of Callan Park and also a member of the Greens.