When I told the chemist I was running for council, he reached under the counter and stood up holding a shotgun. “You’ll need one of these,” he said.
I never intended to go into politics. I was a teacher, just back from several years in Europe with my husband and two small children.
We found a terrace on Bourke Street, Redfern.
Compared to London’s civilised inner-city living, community facilities and green parks, the playgrounds in Redfern were run-down, dangerous, littered with broken glass, surrounded by barbed wire and padlocked for most of the day.
I wrote letters and took up petitions, which made no difference at all. So I ran for council.
In the beginning, I’d go out doorknocking by myself. It was daunting, stuffing flyers with my address into the mailboxes of dangerous squats. Once, I looked around to see someone following me, carrying an iron bar.
People told me that as an independent I wouldn’t have any power. But once elected, no one on the council was interested in the things I was, so I was free to get trees planted and improvements made.
“I wish we’d given her the grass for the park,” the then Labor Mayor said years later. “Then she’d have gone away.”
Successive state governments have tried to wrest control of the city council. They amalgamated councils, changed boundaries. I was so angry with their arrogance that I decided to run as an independent for the state seat of Bligh.
“You’re mad!” people said. “Independents never get elected.”
Bligh was considered a safe Liberal seat, but I spent six months walking door to door through Paddington, Kings Cross, Surry Hills, Darling Point, Woollahra and beyond.
The Liberals won in a landslide, but Bligh was so tight the counting went on for two weeks. What a sight! The Liberals had Cabinet doing their scrutineering; my team – a band of amateurs. But in the end I won.
Despite the boundary changes, I’ve represented Sydney since 1988. Now the Liberal Government has changed the laws to stop me acting as state member and Lord Mayor for what is essentially the same city area.
It’s all too predictable. In fact it’s the kind of manoeuvre that convinced me to run for Lord Mayor in the first place.
Eight years ago, the Government sacked the council, notifying the then Lord Mayor with a fax hand-delivered under her door. With a couple of weeks to run until the elections, Labor’s candidate was seen as a shoe-in.
Until that point I had never lost an election, and although I was incensed, I knew there was a real risk of failure. But because of the political manipulation in sacking the council, I believed running was the right thing to do.
I was an independent MP and had been a councillor before, but I had never run a government. I had no campaign money and no team.
I had just weeks to pull together a team of acquaintances and weld it into a government.
Being ready when opportunities arise takes preparation, and being prepared for an opportunity generally takes persistence – often in the face of criticism. It’s not an easy road, but it’s the only way to achieve real change.