ONCE upon a time there were 14 fig trees.
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But they are only half of this story.
Newcastle City Council has been paralysed by the saga of Laman Street and the proposed removal of its green cathedral arch. The garbage trucks still rumble through quiet suburban streets each morning, and rates notices arrive in letterboxes every three months like clockwork.
Councillors insist, in the way they tend to do, that they are ‘‘getting on with the job’’. The business of running a city goes on.
But the truth is that the city has not been able to move beyond the Laman Street fiasco, which seems no nearer to a resolution after what seems like an infinity. Councillors, bureaucrats, community members and the media have been consumed by the future of 14 trees.
But this article is not about the trees. They haven’t been the story for some time.
Two political battles have been running through the corridors of City Hall during the life of this council. Laman Street has brought them both out into the open.
The first is an internal power struggle. It’s the same struggle that came to the surface last November when former general manager Lindy Hyam quit and several councillors stood side-by-side calling for lord mayor John Tate’s head. The battle lines are drawn around personal alliances and rivalries among councillors and management.
The second is a political war, waged mostly by Newcastle’s political left and by grassroots community groups, for the city’s hearts and minds.
The word that seems to scare a council most is ‘‘dysfunctional’’.
For almost two years, Newcastle councillors did everything in their power to shake off the tag their predecessors had worn like a crown of thorns.
The last elected council had been tarred by perceptions of inaction and constant infighting. The saga of the ‘‘very large rock’’ on Shortland Esplanade that took three years to remove wore the public’s patience thin, as did the infamous meeting blow-ups, including during a debate in 2007 about hot chips being served at the proposed new Surfhouse in Merewether.
Few councillors survived the 2008 election, and the new cohort began their term with a spring in their step.
In the months before the resignation of general manager Lindy Hyam, councillors and senior managers all painted a rosy picture of the progress made during the previous two years.
In interviews at the time, councillors of all colours insisted that while they disagreed on issues, the mix was right and the group worked well together.
But while councillors kept their dirty laundry hidden from the world, tensions were bubbling beneath the surface. Cracks appeared. And then the dam burst.
HYAM’S resignation has left those tensions out in the open.
‘‘It’s been a symptom of having no general manager for nine months,’’ Labor councillor Nuatali Nelmes said.
‘‘There’s no discipline within the organisation to control the agenda.’’
Councillor Aaron Buman, one of Hyam’s biggest supporters, said the council ‘‘fell apart’’ when she left. Buman said the acting general manager, Rob Noble, did a fine job, but wasn’t in a position to have any great influence on an environment that had already become ‘‘toxic’’.
‘‘When Lindy left the wheels fell off the organisation. So much damage was caused and we haven’t recovered,’’ Buman said.
Hyam did not want to be interviewed for this article, but the reasons for her resignation are the city’s worst-kept secret. For months, tensions built between lord mayor John Tate, the general manager and senior staff members.
At one point last year, Tate was confidentially required by the council to apologise for public comments that suggested wrongdoing.
In a rare interview published just weeks before her resignation, Hyam gave an insight into the escalating tension. She said it was partly caused by the local government system, in which councillors were effectively a board of directors, and the general manager was like a chief executive officer, responsible for the day-to-day running of the organisation.
Councillor Bob Cook was more blunt. ‘‘What Lindy did wrong was try to control [lord mayor John Tate] and he didn’t want to be controlled,’’ Cook said.
For months, Tate’s running mates at the last election, councillors Bob Cook and Graham Boyd, acted as go-betweens until the relationship completely broke down.
When Hyam eventually quit, many councillors blamed Tate.
Seven councillors called a media conference on November 19 last year at which they demanded the lord mayor quit in light of general manager Lindy Hyam’s shock resignation.
The seven – Mike Jackson, Nuatali Nelmes, Graham Boyd, Bob Cook, Scott Sharpe, Aaron Buman and Mike King – said Tate had to go.
Their loss of faith in the lord mayor was an inescapable element of the political battle.
‘‘Relationships between councillors are still cordial and businesslike but less fraternal than previously,’’ Boyd said.
‘‘In part this is the result of councillor Tate’s lack of team-building skills and leadership inclination, and his political propensity to change alliances from issue to issue.
‘‘Overall, though, I would say that there are respectful relations between councillors and staff. However, we have never really got over the incident where councillor Tate was required to apologise to the five senior managers.’’
The apology centred on a statement Tate made to the media in July last year over surf club funding. A report to council said council executives believed their relationship with the lord mayor had been ‘‘severely compromised’’ and was ‘‘affecting the effective functioning of council’’.
The issue of Tate providing an acceptable apology was unresolved for several months.
ON the other side of the fence, Tate doesn’t shy away from the fact he actively resisted the Hyam administration and a culture that ‘‘excluded the community and councillors’’.
Under Hyam, community forums were discontinued and replaced with Newcastle Voice as the council’s primary method of public consultation.
Tate said councillors had no input into the direction of Newcastle Voice.
Councillor Sharpe provided a different view, and said Newcastle Voice was far more representative than the former community forums, where ‘‘the same five people used to turn up every time’’.
Hyam got along well with then-Newcastle MP Jodi McKay, a bitter political opponent of Tate.
Late last month, Tate was given a hero’s reception when he arrived in Civic Park to attend a Save Our Figs rally.
The new darling of the city’s green movement, he has been branded a ‘‘political chameleon’’ several times for keeping varied company during his long career in local government.
At one point, Tate stood for election on a ticket with Peter Barrack, the former Newcastle Trades Hall Council president, and a former member of the Communist Party. He directed preferences to Liberal Tim Owen at the recent state election (helping Owen defeat McKay), was strongly backed by the business community when he ran for State Parliament in 2007, and before that he aligned himself with former Labor minister for the Hunter Michael Costa.
These changes of colour are often cited by his rivals on the council.
Tate volunteers much of the information.
‘‘It’s pretty clear in my mind that I’ve fundamentally always been an independent. What that means is I’m not limited by, or bound to, any political grouping. That’s the way I started and that’s the way I’m going to finish. I’m free to make judgments on issues as I see them,’’ Tate said.
On Laman Street, he said it was the same. He initially voted to remove the trees and changed his stance late last year.
‘‘I’m close to [Labor and the Greens] in this instance. I accepted the arguments [the community] put forward on the trees and I support that point of view.
‘‘We need to get back to a closer relationship with the community. Once you stop listening to the community, you need to not be there.’’
This is where the paths of the council’s political groupings diverge quite dramatically.
Tate is, by any definition of the word, a ‘‘populist’’.
Others, such as councillor Mike King, believe it is their role to occasionally make an unpopular decision.
‘‘The example I’d use is Julia Gillard,’’ King said. ‘‘In purely marketing terms, the carbon tax is a dog. It’s a tax on something people can’t see, or feel, or touch. But does she pack up? No, she’s out there banging the table and selling it. That’s leadership.’’
Buman has been outspoken about the same issue. Perhaps too outspoken, after recent email and Facebook comments directed at members of community groups made headlines.
‘‘I love it when people say: ‘You’re not listening to the community.’ What is the community? It could be a football team or it could be every ratepayer,’’ Buman said.
‘‘This council has to make some tough decisions and we won’t because the ‘community’ will just polarise the issues.’’
The fundamental issue here is a question about to what extent the council should be beholden to the wishes of community groups. Some, like Save Our Figs, have been incredibly well backed and organised. Save Our Figs claim the weight of public support is impossible for the council to ignore.
But even with more than 11,000 signatures on a petition, does that give them a right to shape the council’s policy?
THE elephant in the room is the influence of the Greens, Labor and the traditional left-wing politics of the city. Almost all recent councils have been dominated by the left.
The group that left in 2004 included four Greens, four from Labor’s left faction, and four independents.
In 2008 the city voted to elect four Labor councillors (reduced to three after Mike Jackson quit the party and later joined the Liberals) and one Green. The chamber now contains three Labor, one member of the Greens, two Liberals and six independents, including many who have voiced traditionally conservative views about the need to cut non-essential services and reduce debt.
The fact that the community groundswell on Laman Street is being driven, in part, by prominent Greens such as former councillor John Sutton is not going unnoticed.
‘‘Laman Street is a political campaign by the Greens,’’ said Liberal councillor Brad Luke, who called for the council to be investigated last week.
‘‘It was started by individuals who [wanted to save the trees] and it’s been totally hijacked by the Greens and run as a political campaign.
‘‘The city of Newcastle has moved on from being the extreme left. The people of this city have moved on from the extreme left.
‘‘This has been a shock to the minority groups who have been allowed to control the agenda in Newcastle ... and that’s not good for the city.
‘‘Council represents those views, but at the end of the day we have to make relevant decisions based on facts, not conspiracy theories.’’
Several councillors who back the removal of the trees have expressed that same view.
Michael Osborne is the lone Green on the council, and he says the chamber has noticeably lurched to the right.
‘‘The last election really changed the complexion of the council. The people elected a far more conservative council,’’ Osborne said.
‘‘There’s an expectation in the community that local government is the closest to the people and they’ll be listened to. Now their comments end up in a graph and we don’t really listen to what they say.’’
Sutton, who has helped guide the strategy of Save Our Figs, said the Laman Street campaign had actually been driven by a diverse cross-section of the community, rather than being a vehicle of the Greens or the left.
But in general, he agreed the council was one of the most conservative since the 1970s. Sutton was a councillor in the early 1990s, when Labor’s John McNaughton was lord mayor and when most votes would be ‘‘John Tate and I versus the rest’’.
‘‘As a councillor, you’ve got a duty to constantly engage with your community. And you don’t suddenly assume a mantle of wisdom ... when you get elected,’’ Sutton said.
Labor’s Tim Crakanthorp agrees the council is polarised.
‘‘It is an evenly split council and some independent councillors have changed their vote to suit their own circumstances,’’ he said. ‘‘However that is the make-up of the council and we just have to get on with the job and deliver for the community.’’
Fellow ALP councillor Sharon Claydon said she believed it was important for councils to ‘‘reflect the diversity of the community’’.
‘‘I’ve always had an issue that there are only two women on council,’’ Claydon said. ‘‘We have to be able to understand and accept difference, and put aside petty rivalry. That’s the challenge for the next 12 months.’’
THE notion that the council could be investigated, sacked and an administrator appointed because of the Laman Street saga is a political non-starter.
First, because with only 12 months until an election, and a lengthy process required, it would be pointless, and needlessly controversial, to make councillors redundant when ratepayers and residents will deliver their verdict in September 2012.
The prevailing view is that the issue is too hot for the state government, particularly Newcastle MP Tim Owen, a Liberal, to touch. Tate directed preferences to Owen at the last election, which makes intervention a tricky prospect.
Regardless, the tense stand-off has not made the past few months easy for Phil Pearce, the council’s new general manager. Among other issues, he must juggle a very frosty relationship between the lord mayor and his heads of department.
In a short interview, Pearce was careful not to be drawn into any of the recurrent arguments.
He did confirm that he had given staff a guarantee there would be no major structural change for at least 18 months, and that he wanted an increased focus on community engagement.
‘‘I think that my vision for the council is to reflect best practice in local government,’’ he said.
‘‘We need to have an emphasis on customer service, community engagement, accessibility and respect, and an emphasis on information technology.’’
Independent Shayne Connell found himself ostracised by several fellow independents last week, after deciding at the 11th hour to support the independent assessment of the fig trees.
Before the meeting, councillors thought he would vote to have them removed.
Connell, the youngest member of the council, now finds himself with few political allies in the chamber.
As the odd man out, he gets the final word on the state of the council.
‘‘I’m the youngest person in the room, and I’ve looked around for examples of role models,’’ he said.
But three years into his term, he’s still looking.