They changed the game to try and stop her from playing, but Clover Moore fought on regardless and has just won an historic fourth term as Sydney Lord Mayor.
That she could be elected to serve another four years on top of the 12 she’s already offered should be enough to prove her success. But the fact she won despite a massive, ongoing campaign to try and oust her from all public positions, just cemented her place as one of the most resilient women in government we’ve seen.
The Independent Moore is seen as such a threat by the NSW Government (particularly those in the Shooters Party) that it first changed legislation in order to ban councillors from also serving as state MPs — something that forced Moore to give up her seat as an Independent in the state government.
But that wasn’t enough, it then legislated to force business owners in the City of Sydney to vote, with their vote holding twice the power of a regular citizen vote. Back in 2014 when the change was legislated, Moore said her resolve to run for Mayor was only made stronger.
But sadly for the blokes who tried to change the rules of the game to stop Moore from playing — some who’ve since been forced to resign of have been sacked — even rigging the democratic system against her wasn’t enough.
The fact is that Moore isn’t so disliked by the residents of the City of Sydney, those who actually vote, nor it seems even by businesses in the area — despite what you might read in the Daily Telegraph, which has been running an ongoing and relentlessly negative campaign against her for years.
Those who actually vote gave Moore a 9% swing on Saturday.
The fourth term means that Moore is on the path to far outlast any of those who attempted to bring her down, already surviving six premiers over her past 12 years as Mayor.
Moore was kindly on hand to help us officially launch Women’a Agenda back in 2012. She was an absolutely fitting choice back then, yet we couldn’t have foreseen just what she’d have to survive over the next four years to stay in power. At the time she was preparing to leave NSW politics — following then premier Barry O’Farrell’s legislation restricting councillors from serving as state MPs (remember what happened to him) — and declared that the treatment of women in politics had reached the lowest point in her career. That was just days after Alan Jones had declared that Moore, a long with a number of other women in power, were ‘destroying the joint’. Sadly such treatment of women would only get even lower.
But none of it could break Moore’s will. Back in 2012, Moore told us that her determination only gets stronger when others attempt to dismiss her, thinking she won’t have the community power or resilience to stay on. “[Now they say] ‘if only we’d given her the grass for the park, then she would have gone away!'”
Success is so often the best revenge, and certainly is in this case.
