Libertarians who fear “smart cities” technology will be used to curtail freedoms have been elected to councils across New South Wales after the Liberal party failed to nominate more than 130 of its candidates.
“Smart cities” is a broad term that encompasses the use of technology to collect data on people’s movements to help guide local government planning on matters such as traffic, rubbish collection and reducing carbon emissions.
Fringe groups have used the concept to promote claims including that governments will track people’s activities and eventually not permit them to travel more than 15 minutes away from their homes.
The Libertarian party and at least two independents who have spoken out against smart cities together won 11 seats at the NSW local government elections.
In their “local council freedom manifesto”, which is available on their website, the Libertarians promise to “take a chainsaw to” smart cities, which they label a “dumb idea”.
“If we don’t take a stand against so-called ‘smart cities’ now then we are on the slippery slope to a China-style, 24/7 surveillance state and social credit system,” the manifesto said.
The Libertarians’ sole NSW state MP, John Ruddick, said his party was “opposed to anything to do with smart cities, 15-minute cities, the whole lot”.
He said describing the Libertarians’ “fears” as a conspiracy theory was an “insult designed to shut down debate”.
“In medieval times they used to proscribe free thinkers as heretics as a way of shutting them up,” he said.
Dr Shadi Shayan, a lecturer in construction management at the University of South Australia, said smart cities planning involved using sensors, cameras and other devices to collect data simply to “improve how things work”.
Shayan said smart cities had been co-opted by fringe groups because of “a fear of the unknown” and councils should be transparent about any data they collected to prevent this from happening.
Associate Prof Dr Chris Fleming from the University of Western Sydney said people were right to be cautious about their privacy but the conspiracist fear of George Orwell’s 1984 “coming true” was unwarranted.
“That is incredibly wrong-headed,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any real consensus on what a smart city is.”
Dr Joanne Gray, a lecturer in digital cultures at the University of Sydney, said there were “worthwhile criticisms” of the way big companies collected people’s data.
“But spinning this sort of conversation towards conspiratorial thinking is very harmful,” she said. “It creates a sense of fear, which is long understood to motivate people when it comes to politics.”
The Libertarians picked up nine council seats after preferences were counted on Tuesday, with only Liverpool still to be called, down from the 15 seats they had expected to win immediately after the 14 September elections.
In the Hunter Valley, the independent Jessica Jurd and five candidates affiliated with her were elected to Cessnock council including the new mayor, Daniel Watton, who toppled Labor’s Jay Suvaal.
Cessnock was one of eight councils left without a single Liberal candidate after the party’s spectacular failure to submit its nomination paperwork by the deadline.
Last year Jurd brought a notice of motion to a council meeting demanding answers about smart cities, despite Cessnock not being signed up for the initiative at the time.
Her speech to council appeared to conflate smart cities with both the NSW six cities region plan and the 15-minute city urban planning initiative, in which neighbourhoods provide basic amenities such as shops and schools within a 15-minute radius by foot or bike.
“I’m not putting out conspiracies,” Jurd said at the time.
“I’ve only gone off the facts that I have been given. Nobody’s talking about their freedom getting lost. I’m talking about what is involved with these smart cities, six cities, I don’t know what you want to call it, because they keep changing the name.”
Watton was the only other councillor who supported Jurd’s motion. He told the meeting that Cessnock might not be signed up to smart cities but he wanted a report on what it would entail.
“I watch trends,” he said at the time. “I observe things, just like everyone. I have a critical mind and I want to be ahead of the curve.”
Elsewhere, the election analyst Ben Raue said the Greens had a “rough” result in Sydney’s Inner West council, where Labor was returned to a majority. He believed this could be partially due to the pro-Israel campaign group Better Council which targeted inner-city seats.
In Sydney’s Northern Beaches, another one of eight councils where the Liberals failed to nominate a single candidate, Mandeep “Sunny” Singh was elected from below the line.
Singh was meant to be on the Liberals’ ticket but technically ran as an independent after he lodged his own nomination form, reportedly not realising party HQ was meant to do it.
Australian National University politics lecturer associate prof Mark Chou told the Guardian in September that political parties – including those opposed to mainstream ideas – were increasingly viewing local government as a “strategic front”.
Chou and his team reviewed 3,816 candidates running in the NSW council elections and described the Libertarian party – formerly known as the Liberal Democrats – as the “most significant fringe group”.
Luke Dean, a Monash University researcher who worked on the project, said this week that Covid lockdowns had been a catalyst for the “political awakening” of candidates who ran on platforms focused on increasing people’s personal freedoms.
“The NSW local elections have been … the first time when they’ve been able to run some of those candidates to really test whether or not they can get people elected,” he said.
“Overall, I would suggest that in the grand scheme of things, these candidates would consider what’s been achieved pretty successful for most of [them].”
