MOORE THE UNSTOPPABLE Ahead of the City election in September, Ben Raue of The Tally Room reflects on the rise of Sydney’s longest-serving lord mayor and wonders what the future will hold. lover Moore came to power in the City of Sydney in 2004. Her first tilt as lord mayor followed a dramatic border change that significantly expanded the voter base of the council beyond the CBD and the business vote. There is a long history of state governments fiddling with the boundaries of the City for political advantage. This dates back to the first big expansion in 1949 when the council extended beyond Surry Hills, Kings Cross and Pyrmont to the borders it encompasses today. That expansion took place under a Labor government.
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The next Coalition government reversed most of those changes, handing parts of the council to surrounding jurisdictions and placing most of the southern suburbs into South Sydney council. This left the City with a relatively small residential population, and the CBD. The Labor state government merged Sydney and South Sydney in 1982, only for a Coalition government to separate the councils in 1989. The South Sydney of the 1990s stretched from Rosebery and Camperdown all the way up to Potts Point. The current council was created in 2004 when the state Labor government amalgamated the suburbs of South Sydney with the businessdominated City of Sydney. Labor had good reason to be optimistic about
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their chances in a new City which had been consolidated with a council with strong Labor representation. Labor therefore had high hopes for former Keating government minister Michael Lee who was picked as the party’s 2004 mayoral candidate after he lost his seat on the Central Coast at the 2001 election. However, Clover Moore threw a spanner in Labor’s works. Moore — who had been in politics for a quarter of a century — was the state MP for Bligh at the time, having held the seat since 1988. Much to Labor’s irritation (whose hierarchy referred to Moore as “the Witch of Oxford Street”), she won the mayoralty comfortably while also bringing with her on the ticket four
