Not so fast with the Gender Card

a response to Karen Cook-Langdon’s article

It’s okay to bounce into Noosa politics as a candidate without much knowledge or understanding of how council works, but that’s what many candidates did at the recent election. Obviously, most aspiring councillors would have been surprised to get elected. Ms Cook-Langdon ran a precise campaign, performed well at the public meetings I attended, and was one of four candidates, separated by a hundred or more votes, all of whom could have claimed the sixth and final spot on councillor team. She may have been perceived as a champion for the Short-term Accommodation (STA) industry, but Ms Cook-Langdon had more strings to her bow, and was wanting to add more social issues to her campaign, affordable housing and community health to name but two.

But, as she notes, the election was focussed on the New Noosa Plan, which crowded out many other important issues. There’s a couple of good reasons for this. First, the Plan had just come back to council from the state government requiring some additional information and amendments, not the least of which was clarification of the STA provisions. Second, the previous council had promised to deliver a new town plan, and it was arguably the most important issue for the future of the Shire. After all, an environmental ethos in the built and natural environments was what very many Noosans prided past councils on delivering.

It is arguable that only by having diligent planning staff, and councillors prepared to stand up to developers who looked for court appeals to deliver their applications, that the shire is what it is today. I believe residents understood this, and I was not surprised to see how well the best incumbents did at the polls. The electors put Crs. Wilkie, Stockwell and Jurisevic in the top three positions by a long shot. They likely knew that, without them, the future might just be different.

While the STA regulations appeared rushed, they were not proposed without wide community consultation, town meetings, and very many individual submissions. The fears from those seeing the STA juggernaut engulf our suburbs over recent years came to the fore, and I believe the councillors did the right thing by changing the planning staff recommendation for a laissez faire system, which really was not the best outcome unless you were looking to make a living from whole-house, short-term rentals. Most people don’t want to do this, and obviously prefer suburbs that are calm of traffic, where they know their neighbours, where kids ride bikes in the streets, and where weekends are not disturbed by rowdy visitors whooping it up to all hours. I, for one, was glad it was mostly the men who saw this and was very disappointed, but not surprised, that Ms Jackson voted against the changes.

As to a ‘male-dominated mindset’ taking control of the campaign, this was certainly the case with the election of the new mayor. The astounding post-election revelations of the campaign by Dominique Massoni, one of the so-called ‘good guys, a combination of defeated former councilors, LNP politicians, and self-confessed conservatives, showed a remarkable ten-year effort by these men to effect regime change.

Ms Cook-Langdon’s calling out the re-election of a ‘man who served on the previous council who made life for the only female councillor quite unpleasant’, is somewhat disingenuous in that it ignores the fact that this latter councillor quite often made life difficult for her colleagues. Of course, it was this councillor, along with the campaign manager of Future Noosa, and their legal adviser, who thought it was OK to threaten defamation action against many Noosa residents for sharing a Facebook post. And, in the case of the campaign manager, even threatening people who didn’t share the post. Without a doubt, this was one of the lowest points in the election campaign. It shut down much social media discussion, while covering for a time when Future Noosa’s campaign manager was under media scrutiny for admitting to being a property developer.

Yes, gender equality is important, but bad behavior is not confined to any gender, as is so often demonstrated. And, when it comes to electing representatives, let’s remember that it is the electorate who puts the councillors in place. In my view, having good candidates is the first priority, but more women on council is a great thing. I too am watching council meetings for both good behaviour and poor behaviour, and I certainly agree that any paradigm of “divide and conquer”, from either gender, is not what the electorate expects of their councilors, especially in these fraught times.