On a sunny spring morning, the Sydney lord mayor, Clover Moore, leaves her apartment in inner-city Redfern to walk to her town hall office. Under a canopy of mature London plane trees along Bourke Street, the 79-year-old, who recently won a record sixth term, sets a brisk pace.
All politics is local, and Moore’s career began on these streets. In the late 1970s, Moore created a lobby group, Redfern Community Concern, to fix up a little park in Kepos Street and improve local traffic. This was her springboard to becoming an alderman in South Sydney council in 1980 before a two-and-a-half-decade run as an independent in state parliament. In 2004, she began her unbroken 20-year stint as lord mayor which continued this year with another win in September.
The recent election victory is not our first subject of conversation, but when we get to it Moore describes the last election as “pretty awful”. The major parties and independent hopefuls were on her heels, but despite predictions she had run her race, she still won, cutting a deal to make the Labor candidate her deputy. “We didn’t hear any new, fresh ideas, most of them were just things we were already doing. But they just wanted to get rid of me. So it was personal.”
Ageism, she believes, was at play. “Oh yes,” she says, crinkling her nose. But she says it’s the latest in a line of challenges from working in male-dominated councils and parliaments to acting on climate change. One gets the impression Moore sees ageism as just another hurdle to be hopped.
“All those battles I fought, I’m fighting that one too. I believe you should judge people on what their ability is and their energy and their health. Plenty of young people aren’t doing much.” Later, she laughs and calls herself a “lifetime learner” in the job. Even now, she won’t be drawn on whether this is her last hurrah as mayor. “I’m focusing on the next four years. If people keep going on about it, I will run again,” she jokes. “Just to spite them!”
Moore likes to walk to work as often as she can. She says hello to a young man pushing an elderly resident in a wheelchair outside a Catholic aged care home as we turn into Albion Street, Surry Hills. Moore grew up Catholic on the north shore – her father was a water board paymaster and her mother a teacher – and still attends mass. Is faith important to her? “Yes,” she says, quickly and with conviction.
She has held that faith while retaining the support of the large LGBTQ+ community in Sydney. Moore was a Mardi Gras parade judge as early as 1986 and has marched or been on a float in the parade annually since 1992. Cardinal Edward Clancy once took her own parish priest aside at St Francis church in Paddington, she says, claiming that parishioners were upset she was in the Mardi Gras one Saturday night then taking communion the next morning.
She also invoked opposition from this city’s most prominent Catholic, George Pell, who opposed Moore’s staunch support for opening a medically supervised injecting centre in Kings Cross.
“Cardinal Pell was old school and harking back to the 50s and yet other members of the church are really practical, doing Christ’s work in a really practical way, the way he would do it,” Moore insists. “He [Jesus] wouldn’t do it in a George Pell way.”
We reach the corner of Crown Street and, having been so engaged in laughing at these old religious schisms, Moore only now realises we have overshot her planned route by a couple of blocks, so we double back south to Shuk cafe, where she likes to sit outside and greet constituents passing by.
We order coffee when a tall, middle-aged man in a velour tracksuit happens by and asks Moore about the election, then pulls up a chair to share his ambitions with the mayor, among them opening a food truck. She is a good listener.
He veers on to a critique of million-dollar milk crates – a reference to a long vetoed public art sculpture – before Moore adroitly changes the topic by noting his outfit. “Very colourful,” she says.
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Moore was a schoolteacher in 1977 when she and her architect husband, Peter Moore, moved into a modest terrace on Bourke Street, Redfern. “This area was very bleak,” she recalls. Yet the couple never left the eastern edge of Redfern.
They raised children Sophie and Tom on the same strip as the Dandy bacon factory, the ACI glassworks and the Resch’s brewery – pungent with its hops – which have all since been demolished for residential developments, such as the one where the couple now live. The apartment overlooks a large, lush park where the Moores regularly walk their black Staffordshire terriers Bessie and Buster.
Over coffee we talk about the Moores’ four grandchildren. Sophie’s 12-year-old twins, Harry and Sienna, live in London. Moore is hoping their mother will bring them back to Australia to live, a point she made earlier in our walk. “I’m hoping to see more of them,” she says eagerly. Son Tom, a gardener, is raising his family on the Central Coast so she sees a lot more of his two children, Connor, 12, and Alex, 10, who will be joining their grandmother at the city’s annual festivities soon.
Moore’s own children had inner-Sydney childhoods, but some research suggests that such childhoods are harder to come by. A NSW Productivity Commission report released in February noted an exodus of people aged 30 to 40 from Sydney and that it was on track to be a “city with no grandchildren”. Does she worry about that? “You’d know living in our area that’s simply not true,” Moore argues.
“It’s full of families with children. Bourke Street public school is bulging.” She says some developers are now building three- and four-bedroom apartments to accommodate families.
Nevertheless, Sydney is the least affordable city by far in Australia. “That’s a big problem,” she nods, but argues Sydney has done more than other councils to provide affordable housing. She laments the lack of action on negative gearing and capital gains tax breaks and puts the blame for housing affordability on the levels of government above her own. “Either federal government or the state, there’s been a decade of governments not doing what they should have been doing.”
We head towards Oxford Street, past jackhammers at work. She has, she says, unfinished business as mayor. “Reaching net zero by 2025 is one,” she says. “Completing our work in Oxford Street is another. Completing our work in Chinatown. There’s lots to do.”
Moore, a one-time “strong Labor” supporter (in the Whitlam era), has never soured on the ideal that Sydney can be a haven across the financial and social divides. “For us, it’s really important that the city is not just for one tier of people,” she says. “It has got to be a city for everyone.”
Moore’s energy seems driven by a curiosity for challenges, quoting the late US president Theodore Roosevelt, that “the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing” and adds her own enthusiastic coda: “City-making, it’s all-embracing.”
So how will she know when the time is right to leave public life? “Oh, it might be a family decision. Peter and Bessie and Buster might want me at home more often, although post-Covid you can do a lot of work at home, too, so it makes a big difference. I’ll see. I’m a worker. I like working.”
That formidable energy aside, does she ever have any long, dark nights of the soul where she thinks the job is just too difficult? “Oh, I struggle with sleep a bit,” she confides quietly. “That’s the reason why I walk a lot – if I have exercise during the day, I can wind down. The work is so engrossing and engaging, it’s hard to shut it out, unless you’re exhausted physically too.”
Walking is meditative, a way of finding balance with work, and experience has taught her there will be a path through whatever problem lingers in her mind. “There always is a way through it, yes.”
