A year out from the local government elections, PHIL JARRATT asks the Friday swillers what issues are important to them.
Bloke 1: The only issue is leadership, because we are largely leaderless. The council doesn’t seem to know where it’s going and there is no underlying or consistent philosophy. When the current mayor stood for election in 2020, her campaign wasn’t necessarily all about leadership, but she was basically saying she was going to weed out corruption and misogyny and change everything, which implied leadership. But it hasn’t worked out that way. The only area where she’s at least tried to show some leadership is affordable housing.
Female Voice 1: Is losing a CEO evidence of lack of leadership?
B1: It could be, or it could have been just a simple case of doubling your salary. And the main contribution of the outgoing CEO seems to have been the Noosa 2.0 Plan, which is more staff-centric than of community interest.
Ringleader: We’re heading down the rabbit hole of whether the current mayor has shown leadership or not, but right now we haven’t been presented with an alternative, so perhaps we should focus on the issues.
Bloke 2: Every election for years has been about leadership. There’s a smorgasbord of issues surrounding that, but they’re really only decorations. The fundamental question is who do we choose to lead.
Female Voice 2: I got the feeling that the last [council] election wasn’t so much about leadership but about change. I associate with a lot of mums of young kids, and they tended to get behind Clare because she was more like them – younger and female, and we all love a bit of gender equality! But I don’t think she ran on leadership. She didn’t promise that and she hasn’t really shown it.
B2: The core question is whether a stepping-stone leader is going to be re-elected as a keeper leader. The stepping-stone leader got herself a stepping-stone CEO but he didn’t stay for long.
Ringleader: In a year’s time people will have forgotten his name because he didn’t stay long enough to make a real imprint. And I tend to think that a good CEO will always be a non-issue in elections because they just get on with the job.
FV1: Does anyone think that if given another chance, Clare might grow into leadership?
FV2: I think the electoral system where you have to nominate as a mayor or a councillor, but not both, makes it difficult to get a mayor with experience. How do you get one? Only by asking a councillor who might aspire to be mayor to risk a position in council by running. I think that’s a real problem.
Ringleader: Currently we have four male councilors who hold the balance of power and don’t want to lose it by running for mayor.
B2: At least two of them are considering it. Of course, very few people know they’re running until they’re told! [Laughter]
FV2: I’ve talked to a few people who ran for council last time and got close, and I have to say there’s not a lot of enthusiasm at the moment.
Ringleader: Some very good people got pretty close, but do we think there’s an alternative mayor among them?
FV2: I’m not even sure they’re interested in having a go for councillor.
Bald Bloke: I know we’re meant to be moving on, but I think Clare puts a lot of energy into the job. Yes, like [outgoing CEO] Scott Waters, the question about how long she’ll stay around hangs over her, but right now she’ll go to the opening of an envelope and say all the right things. On the affordable housing issue, I sometimes wonder if it’s not a proxy for a developer to go in, but she’s doing a lot of work in the community and not stepping on too many toes. There’s a particular side of politics represented in this group but outside of that there is a lot of support. That’s what I’m hearing. She’s politically savvy.
FV2: Rather than is she doing a good job, it’s the feeling she’s not doing a terrible job.
Ringleader: We keep coming back to Clare. Has she actually stated that she’s running again?
B1: Yes, I’ve seen it in print.
B2: She’s had a look elsewhere and nothing has opened up, so she’ll be here.
Female Voice 3: We have to remember that Tony Wellington only lost to her by fewer than 100 votes. My impression is that she’s not that interested. Interested in her own career, but not in what’s happening to Noosa.
Ringleader: Okay, can we work on the assumption that Tony isn’t interested in going around again and that Clare is?
FV1: What about Frank Wilkie? Do we think he might run? I would put money on it.
B2: I think both Wilkie and [Brian] Stockwell are at the stage where they’ve been councillors for quite a while and the magic might have worn off, particularly if the mayor’s not your cup of tea. At a certain stage either of them might decide to throw their hats into the ring on the basis of, if I win, I win and if I don’t I just get on with my life. In many ways those are the most dangerous candidates because there’s a certain recklessness involved. I’d argue that they’re both very good councillors, but they’re not mayors. Neither of them can make quick, ruthless decisions and I think that’s what mayors have to do. That’s what leaders do, and they don’t need the last decimal point of evidence before they act. I don’t think Frank sees that the ship is on fire early enough. He has to be told, and then he gets it. Brian sees that the ship is burning earlier, but then spends too much time making himself look clever by putting out the fire. [Laughter]
Ringleader: Please can we move back to the issues?
B2: You can’t talk about the issues in the abstract.
Ringleader: But we can consider them in the light of which people might know how to deal with them? For example, the mayor has put herself out front on the accommodation issue, but what part of it can she fix? In a recent online survey 12 per cent of respondents nominated short term accommodation [STA] as their important issue. Does anyone here think that this, plus affordability and all the other side issues, is going to factor in the runup to the election?
BB: It’s done and dusted.
B2: Housing shortage is built into our DNA. The decisions made 30 years ago accurately foresaw the now.
Ringleader: I presume you mean the population cap?
B2: Yes, because it was understood that a population cap would make Noosa a more desirable place to live, people would come and because there’s limited supply, prices would go up. The only part of the whole picture that wasn’t seen is STA. It should have been stomped on as soon as it emerged, but the real estate industry targeted Wellington when he tried to do something about it, and now they’re reaping the reward.
Ringleader: So why isn’t it still an issue?
BB: It was at the last election but everyone has played their hands now.
FV1: So do you think if I was a pro-STA candidate with a strong following at the next election I’d get in?
B2: I reckon it would go the other way. If you demonised STA and the councillors who sat on their butts then you’d get in.
Ringleader: So it’s an issue but it’s a negative one?
B2: Most issues are.
B1: Which brings us back to leadership. This is one issue that people have tried to grapple with and have failed. STA threw a curve ball at the community, but where do we go from here?
B2: The politics of it is you promise to wind it back. It might take five years or so, but it’s a start.
Ringleader: What about affordable rental accommodation? It seems to me that apartment buildings are going up around the place but none of the people in need are going to be able to afford to live in them.
B1: There’s stuff going on we don’t know about yet, but it’s all a drop in the bucket. It’s like there are 15,000 people who want to live and work here and the council is working on finding accommodation for 150 of them. It’s never going to balance out, but it’s also not really a council responsibility.
FV1: The real issue is that businesses can’t find people to work for them because there’s nowhere to live.
Ringleader: So never mind the homeless, let’s focus on the barista who’s forced to live in Gympie! [Laughter]
B2: I believe that about two-thirds of the council staff don’t live in the shire.
BB: That’s right, and if you look at the rich suburbs all over the country, workers are travelling there every day from somewhere else they can afford. It’s not just a Noosa problem.
B2: I think the implications of all of this are that there will continue to be a cohort of the very wealthy in Noosa and a cohort of people who are struggling. The rich will just recalibrate and enjoy Noosa more and more ostentatiously, but Struggle Street will get bigger and bigger, people will just stay home. That’s what the future electorate of Noosa will look like: more people who can’t afford to enjoy Noosa and resent that.
B1: A lot of people moved here for the dream and now they feel it’s been taken away from them.
FV2: Because they can’t afford the dream.
Ringleader: Oh, come on. There’s a lot more to the Noosa dream than consumerism. You can walk in the National Park, you can swim in the bays or surf on the points, there’s a lot of wonderful stuff that everyone can afford.
B2: But in five years it won’t be worth doing. Congestion will have taken over.
FV1: Our experience is that we can find places where you can still do all those wonderful things. We’ll watch the sunset over the river with hardly anyone around and think, is this Noosa being loved to death!
Ringleader: I think we’ve fast-tracked the congestion story because we’ve just lived through three Covid years with no breaks in the tourism cycle. It’s been relentless but now it seems to have slowed again at certain times, which makes me feel that there is still hope.
B2: A million people living within an hour’s drive within the next 20 years, that’s what’s going to happen.
B1: So we knew 30 years ago that this would happen, and now we have the state telling us that we have to have 68,000 population or we’re not doing what was agreed in the SEQ plan. These are the realities that we have to learn to live with, and that’s why we need leadership.
B2: That’s fine, but it’s not holding because we didn’t foresee the day-tripper invasion which puts pressures on top of a relatively stable resident population, and unless we get proactive now, there’s no hope of controlling it. And there’s no sign of that happening. In the past the existential threat was over-development and we got proactive about it. Now we’ve got the next wave which is every bit as big a threat. We need a very clever strategy on it, and we need it now.
