By Phil Jarratt
Noosa’s legendary former mayors Noel Playford and Bob Abbot talk to Phil Jarratt about success, failure, and the personal toll of political career.
We were moving from the Noel era to the Bob era.
Noel: In 1988 the council was broke, so I told them to forget about spending money, we had to pull our heads in and get it under control, which made the vision even more important. But you have to remember that not everything was my idea. At that point Bob had more experience than I did, so there were his ideas, and some of the others had good ideas too. When we were doing the strategic plan, we went out to every community and had sessions in their halls, and then reported back.
Bob: We went out grass roots first and built it from there. It was interesting because we did the strategic plan in ’96 and we sent it to government six weeks before the ’97 election, and we had candidates standing in front of the council chambers tearing it up. That was the context. Noel had had enough and was running only as a councillor, and there were three of us from the strategic plan subcommittee in the mayoral race – me, Vivien Griffin and Phil Blakeney. That was the order it finished in too, I won with 53 percent, but Vivienne had 36 percent, so the strategic plan had wide community support, and yet these candidates were there tearing it up! That gave us the impetus to move forward.
Noel, you’d had enough of the top job?
Yes, and I didn’t intend to run as a councillor either, but after years of having a stable council through successive elections since 1988, by ’97 quite a few councillors had decided to give it away, and we knew Bob was going to be mayor, and that he’d have no experienced support.
Bob, now you’re the boss – are you going to do things differently?
Bob: My management style was very different in that Noel led with knowledge from the front, and I didn’t have that. I failed Grade 10 and I found out later in life that I’m fairly severely dyslexic. A lot of stuff I did by rote or by feel, and I’d learnt to trust myself. I led from the middle in the sense that I surrounded myself by people who were smarter than I was. I can remember after about a week as mayor walking into CEO Bruce Davidson’s office and saying, I know absolutely bloody nothing about what I’ve got to do! Bruce gave me a copy of Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Successful People and told me to read it over the weekend and we’d try again on Monday. We did and it worked really well. I now had a real understanding of what my needs were and how I was going to manage this process and succeed.
Noel: Bob likes people to think he hasn’t got much brain power, but I think what he just said shows that’s not the case. In ’88 we’d had a plan and we’d essentially delivered on it. The community had gone from calling us watermelons to understanding that we had a formal plan in place and they were generally happy with it. But now I knew that we needed a new narrative to replace environment versus development. It had to be more nuanced than that, and I knew that we had to start anew, and I just didn’t have the oomph for it. That’s when you have to let it go, and Bob started with fire in the belly.
Okay Bob, so what is this new narrative?
Bob: Eventually it became about sustainability, as in how do you sustain this vision we have of Noosa? And the message to me was pretty clear. A protected environment was no good to you unless the economy was in good condition too, and you couldn’t guarantee that if the population was turning over every few years, so we had to create a community that attracted people to stay and raise a family, so we gave them a swimming pool. Noel was dead against that because he always swam in the river (laughs), and so did I, but the moment we gave them a pool, things began to happen. We started to do more things like that, including a community grants program. And I could negotiate with the developers. It was easier for me than it was in Noel’s era, because back then we were clashing with them. Now the rules were in place, so we could talk.
When amalgamation reared its ugly head in 2007, Bob, you were mayor but Noel had retired. Then suddenly you were shoulder to shoulder at the barricades.
Bob: There’s two places you don’t want Noel Playford and me. One is shoulder to shoulder, the other is back to back. And if we’re back to back, you’re in trouble. (Laughs) But we lost that fight. I think that may have been the toughest battle I ever fought. I ended up with a serious kidney infection and I was in hospital for eight days while all this stuff was going on. On the ninth day the big protest march in Brisbane was on. I told the doctor I was going and he argued, but on the morning a car came to pick me up and I went.
Noel: We’re all ready to march to Parliament House, and then royalty shows up in this chauffeur-driven car! Bob gets out, addresses his faithful subjects, then hops back in the car and goes.
Bob: Well, I stirred them all up as the march took off, and as it was finishing I showed up and started stirring them up again! But by the time I got back to Noosa I was buggered.
Bob, I’ve never understood how you could be part of that fight, put your health on the line for it, then turn around and run for mayor of the amalgamated Sunshine Coast Regional Council.
Bob: I thought long and hard about it. I understood people saying that I’d gone to the dark side, but what I understood about myself was that I’m like Noel – I don’t like giving up. There was only one way to be sure that everything we’d fought for was protected, and that was to have somebody in the top job. I got 73 percent of the vote but I copped it from quite a few people.
How was your term as mayor of the Sunny Coast?
Bob: It nearly killed me. I was going to do eight years, but by the last year of the first term I knew I couldn’t. I was getting death threats slipped under my door at night. The stress was enormous, and the staff down there hated what I was doing. To me it was all about sustainability, putting that Noosa ethos into the whole region to protect it long-term.
I don’t want to go over the de-amalgamation campaign too much, but let’s get to 2014. The battle has been won, it’s time to get the band back together, right?
Bob: Well, before we go there I have to say one thing, because if I don’t others will. When I was mayor of Sunshine Coast, I wouldn’t come out and defend the de-amalgamation campaign on a matter of principle. The people of Maroochydore and Caloundra had strongly supported me to run a combined council and I couldn’t be seen to divide it. Once I got out, it was different.
Noel: I never expected Bob to say anything while he was in power. How could he? But in 2012 Campbell Newman gave us his support and said that if elected he’d put it to a vote, and that was when it was appropriate for Bob to have a say.
Who knew Campbell Newman would be on our side?
Noel: There was no point going to Labor. They did it, so they weren’t going to undo it! But Newman became opposition leader and he came up and sat around the table. Campbell was making the right noises but I was down the other end of the table and I said, that’s fine for you to say, but you’d promise anything at this stage. He looked at me and said, I’m a man of my word. Then I knew we had him, because he’s a military guy, his word is his bond. As long as he got elected, we were right. And we walked him out of the office and straight into a press conference.
Noosa Council is back and you both stand again, Noel as mayor, Bob as councillor who becomes deputy mayor. Did you feel that short term worked the way you’d expected?
Noel: I regret that I got myself tied up in detail. Work had been done to set up the structure again, but it was a nightmare. I said to the councillors, I’m going to have my hands full getting this organisation running functionally, you’re going to have to do the community stuff. But too much attention to detail is one of my failings, and I would have been better off giving other people more power in fixing the organisation. Bob and I were intending to only be there for two years, to get it set up, but I could have done that better.
Bob: We were there for a specific reason. I knew he’d bury his head in the detail and I’d have to explain things to the new councillors. But without wanting to sound arrogant, I felt I owed it to the community to be there.
Noel: That’s the only reason I was there too, but we didn’t make the plan well enough over that two years, and I think that’s still being felt today. If you don’t have the vision you become a community services deliverer, and that’s all. I’ve been looking at the current corporate plan point by point, and I don’t see a vision or the goal.
Bob: And that’s probably a good note to finish on. We’ve looked at the time before Noel and I were involved, and now we’re looking at the time after our involvement. We’re two very different characters and we do things differently, but undeniably powerful when we’re pulling in the same direction.
