No Job for a Woman

by Sallyanne Atkinson

  I had briefing books prepared for me by all the departmental managers, and a couple of big events to plan for in the near future: the visit of the Duke and Duchess of Kent in April, a trip to East Berlin to launch our Olympic bid, and the annual budget to be brought down by June. I observed to a friend that I felt like a white mouse on a wheel – the faster I ran the faster the wheel spun.

  I made my first speech as Lord Mayor in the Council Chambers on 16 April, and began by thanking the people of Brisbane:

  Thousands of whom changed the voting habits of a lifetime to give me and my team the strongest mandate for more than ten years to guide and direct this city. We will not let them down. As Lord Mayor I represent all Brisbane people, of all political persuasions, from all walks of life … We take office with their permission, we seek to continue in office with their approval and on their behalf I will ensure that Brisbane is run with common sense, sound management, dedication and imagination.

  Today we are neither Labor nor Liberal but citizens of a common place in pursuit of a common goal … the growth and prosperity of Brisbane.

  When I look back now at that first term, the clearest pattern is of reaching out to people and involving them in the workings of Council. I set up the Lord Mayor’s Citizens’ Advisory Committee, a Student Representative Committee and community advisory boards in each ward. We held Cabinet meetings outside City Hall in the suburbs, an initiative later followed by other levels of government. Council officers had the new experience – not always a happy one – of having to talk to ratepayers, and local residents had the chance to put questions and comments to me and the chairmen of the various health, works, finance, planning, traffic and transport committees. The Labor administration had started outdoor concerts in the City Botanical Gardens and we took these into suburban parks. The establishment of regional Council centres meant that people could pay their rates close to home.

  In the early days, the big and pressing issues facing me were the garbage, the budget and the Olympics, and not necessarily in that order.

  The garbage problem, with its series of strikes and go-slows, had really begun in 1983 with the proposed introduction of the now-familiar wheelie bins. Back then the ‘garbo’ was a common early-morning sight and sound in every neighbourhood as he rattled the garbage can and slung it over his shoulder before jumping fences between backyards. The process of change ended up in court, over the validity of contracts between Council and the private enterprise contractors. Nothing had come before the Council Chambers as it should have and we in Opposition were allowed neither input nor information. The unions complained about lack of consultations and conditions for the men. It was a challenge. I realised that the Labor Council had always been hampered by the close relationship between the Party and the unions. It was rather like a family argument with everyone trying not to offend. I came into office with no political strings attached.

  Premier Bjelke-Petersen had offered emergency legislation that he had brought in the year before to end the electricity strike, when he had ‘confiscated’ workers’ superannuation. I said I wouldn’t need it and I thought he had been cruel and heartless. He said, ‘They deserved it’; the only time I saw the really hard side of Sir Joh. He did bring in an Act, in December, allowing us to vary the workers’ contracts if necessary, which included some fairly draconian fines for both contractors and workers. We never had to use it. Given that the fine for non-performance was $50,000 for an individual worker and $250,000 for a company, I wasn’t sure we really could, there would be few garbos able to stump up that kind of money.

  Meetings were held in the boardroom beside my office. I told union officials we would remain where we were, drinking cups of tea, until we made some progress.

  I realised I had the edge when I started getting phone calls from the garbos’ wives saying, ‘Get the bastards back to work’, and, ‘I’m sick of having him at home.’ I wanted to talk directly to the men myself, but was told by Council officers that the proper way was for our industrial relations people to talk to the union officials. One morning in frustration, I got into the Mayoral limo and was driven out to a southside depot where the men had finished their shift and were sitting about drinking coffee in the autumn sunshine. There was a bit of banter about what a great life it was (from me) and nobody else would want to do this dirty job (from them). I replied by saying that I could gather up a mob of women friends with utes to go around picking up the garbage ‘just like Dunkirk!’. I don’t know if that in itself had any real effect, but over the months ahead things gradually improved.

  I was starting to realise how unusual my role was among mayors. The Lord Mayor of Brisbane was really the Council’s executive chairman, part-chairman of the board, part hands-on manager of a big company – Brisbane City Council (BCC) had 8000 employees when I was elected, and, after restructuring, about 7000 when I left. Mine was a role of great actual power and one of great symbolic strength. For many people, the Lord Mayor is the Council. I realised pretty quickly that I had to beware of my views being taken as commands. One morning in the first few weeks I commented on a pot of geraniums on the reception desk outside my office. ‘I do love geraniums!’ I said. The next morning the corridor was lined with geraniums. When I protested I was told, ‘But Lord Mayor, you said you loved geraniums!’ Well, yes, but only up to a point.

  I also learned pretty quickly that my most important task was making decisions, and that people in a bureaucracy often didn’t like making decisions for fear of getting them wrong. Mayors, like all politicians, get no training for the job. I was a journalist by background, a housewife and mother by experience, thrust into a huge management role. What I did have going for me was six years as an alderman and an enormous passion for Brisbane, the city and its people.

  As an Opposition member, with only my ward secretary as staff, I had had to find my way through the bureaucratic maze that was the BCC and I’d developed lots of good and useful contacts, among them young professionals who were keen for change and progress. Importantly, I knew what I didn’t know and was constantly seeking advice on management and leadership, which are not necessarily the same thing.

  The television comedy Yes Minister could have been written in Council. One of my first public appearances was the opening of Heritage Week. I rang up a Council planner Terry Conway, who had specialised in the area, to get some pointers. About an hour later I had a call from the manager of the department.

  ‘I understand you have contacted a member of my staff? I wonder why you did that, Lord Mayor?’

  ‘Well, I needed some information,’ I said.

  ‘I wonder why you didn’t ask me, Lord Mayor?’ he asked.

  I explained that I knew he wouldn’t have the information I needed, to no avail: the manager was offended. I had ignored protocol. It was the job of the head of the department to pass the request down the line, which could take some days. I’d had some experience of this frustration when I worked for Jim Killen and the answer to a journalist’s question had to be cleared with Canberra regardless of deadlines. Often, if it was a simple question I would just give the journalist the answer.

  Common sense does seem to be a commodity undervalued in organisations. In so many of the decisions I had to make, serious as well as superficial, I found it to be the guiding determinant. I also found that running a house with five children did indeed equip me with useful skills that I could utilise at work. Balancing a budget, delegating tasks, jockeying with competing interests, and adjudicating family disputes all work on the same principles in a domestic situation as in the largest companies in the country.

  That conversation with the planning department manager was my first parting of the ways with a bureaucrat, and a difficult one because I liked and respected him. I had known we were on different wavelengths; during the campaign he had said that if ‘she’ got elected he would have to resign because he couldn’t work for a woman. However, that was not our eventual point of rupture. One of my concerns had been
Council’s plans to build a freeway along the river and under the Harry Seidler–designed and recently built Riverside Centre. It was the first modern building in the Eagle Street precinct and the first to relate to the river. The proposed freeway would have cut off that building, and all others, from the river.

  The manager was head of planning and an engineer. We had many discussions about the freeway and its purpose and I was not convinced. Finally, he said, ‘If that freeway doesn’t go ahead I would have to resign.’

  I said, ‘Well, obviously one of us has to go, and I’ve just been elected.’ This happened on a Friday afternoon and the manager went into his office and locked the door.

  On the Monday morning he came into my office all smiles and told me that his wife had said, ‘Thank goodness, and sixty-two is a very good age to retire.’ I was able to give him a six-month task of evaluating major Council projects, a job that would allow him to retire with dignity. He was concerned about keeping the large car that came with his manager’s role so that his neighbours wouldn’t think he had been disgraced. I understood that men, in particular, measured status by externals such as car and office size, and I agreed that he could keep the car. This provided another insight into management-think, for management protested that if this man kept his big car and was no longer a manager, everyone else at his new level would be entitled to a big car. I dismissed this, of course, as nonsense.

  One of the great traditions in our democracy is the Westminster system, whereby public servants have no overt political allegiances and can work on either side of the political divide. Sadly, this is a tradition that seems to have disappeared in Australia in the past 40 years. But there are other differences, not to do with policies but more with practices. Many of the Council managers and directors were men who had been with the Council for many years, they were accustomed to doing things in certain ways and had difficulty accepting change.

  Early in my Mayoral career I had a taste of dealing with intransigent men, but from another sphere of government. Russ Hinze as Minister for Main Roads was chair of a policy committee for planning transport in the Brisbane region. Minister for Transport Don Lane, myself and a number of bureaucrats, who were all male and mostly middle-aged, would also attend. At one meeting, when I was protesting some plan or other, Russ ordered the microphone to be turned off: ‘You can complain all you bloody-well like, but it’s going to happen,’ he said, and then the microphone was turned back on. Another time when we were discussing a planned main road through some houses on the north side, I suggested we should go out and consult with the residents. The ministers both looked at me in amazement: ‘What, go out and ask people what we should do? That’s what we were elected for, to make decisions.’

  I understood Russ for what he was, an old-fashioned country gentleman. So when he called me ‘girlie’ or ‘pet’, I didn’t protest. I knew there were bigger issues at hand. And I saw the value of ‘rising above it’ as witnessed in his dealings with Maha Sinnathamby an entrepreneurial Sri Lankan who had come to Brisbane in the early 1980s. Sinnathamby came with me to meet the minister with a big idea for extending the Queen Street mall underground. In those days, Maha, later the developer of Springfield, a master-planned city on the outskirts of Brisbane, was called Ted. In meetings Russ would say, ‘Let’s hear from Mr Sin’ or ‘What have you got to say Black Ted?’ Maha wouldn’t blink an eyelid. Now he is one of Australia’s richest men and Springfield, with a population of 32,000, is the fastest emerging city in Australia.

  But Russ Hinze and I did form a good working relationship. I could always depend on him for a quick decision. In Opposition, I had fought against a proposed sewage treatment plant at Moggill in my electorate. Now as Lord Mayor, I had to find a site for it somewhere. Council officers had found a suitable one at Wacol, but some government departments – Primary Industries had a research centre nearby and Corrective Services had the Wacol prison – were objecting. I appealed to Russ as the minister and we had an on-site meeting. Russ arrived in his car and lumbered out on walking sticks. He asked the men from each department what their concerns were. The man from Primary Industries said the research centre would be affected by the smell and the man from Corrective Services said the inmates wouldn’t like it. Russ nearly exploded and uttered some choice expletives. ‘Listen, fellas, this little girl needs a sewage treatment plant and we’re bloody-well going to give it to her,’ he said, before lumbering back to his car.

  Trying not to smirk I said, ‘Well, gentlemen, you heard what the minister said.’

  I had known before the election that I would have to tackle bureaucracy but once in office I realised the Council administration needed serious attention. After 24 years of Labor in power there was a certain complacency about how things were done. One of the most obvious and pressing needs was setting up what amounted to a register of Council assets. No one could tell me how many parks the Council owned or where they were. Despite our increasing number of libraries there was no City Librarian. I had chaired an international library conference in Brisbane the year before I came to office, and this was a need I had discovered and a promise I had made. I was told there was no proper map of the sewerage system of Brisbane, the information was all in the head of one man.

  The advantages of having already been in Council for six years were that I understood its structure and I had built a network of bright young men (and they were all men) who had ideas and were keen to make changes. I wanted to restructure, but I didn’t want to get in consultants from a large and equally unwieldy organisation, so I chose a company headed by John White, a former army officer who I had known at school. John was someone I could talk to easily, and he understood organisational problems and my concerns. We chose a group of second-tier managers and with John and a couple of his colleagues they formed a small team. There was resistance from people who thought I should have involved the managers of the departments, but if they had thought change was needed they would have already made it, and they would more likely be defensive. I wanted people who were young and had a vested interest in and commitment to the future of the organisation.

  I brought in an internationally recognised firm to advise on the financial management of Council. One of the great holes in the structure was the lack of a personnel department, an extraordinary gap in an organisation of that size. We set one up and appointed a manager. We also appointed a City Librarian, an obvious position as we had one of the most extensive library systems in Australia.

  A year after I was elected I had to deal with my first public sacking, that of the Town Clerk, the title then of the Chief Executive Officer of the Council and someone I liked and respected. It was to be both public and painful.

  The actual break was complicated by unfortunate circumstances. Paranoia was rampant, and people were telling me my office was bugged. I wasn’t terribly concerned as I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to listen to my conversations. I didn’t really have any secrets and I’m not a secretive person. When I mentioned this in passing to Premier Bjelke-Petersen he said, ‘Get Terry to send down some of his boys who specialise in that sort of thing.’ Police Commissioner Terry Lewis, later to be famous for all the wrong reasons, sent two tall young policemen to my office. What was most memorable about this was that to my embarrassment I blurted out to one of them, ‘Oh, you’re far too good-looking to be a policeman.’ This was to be significant later.

  The police didn’t find any listening devices, but this didn’t satisfy the worriers. Digby McLeay, my executive assistant, called in a specialist de-bugger without actually telling me, under the authority of the vice-mayor Denver Beanland. I was in Sydney at the time, dealing with the awful circumstance of one of my sister’s baby’s cot death. When I returned I was told that a bug had indeed been found and that, surprise, surprise, the man who had found it was the very man who could protect me against further such intrusions and for serious money. I didn’t take any of this very seriously and dismissed any such suggestion.


  When I was to state later that the police had looked for bugs and couldn’t find any, the police immediately denied ever having been there. But I knew I wasn’t mistaken, because of my remark about the good-looking policeman. I was mystified by their denial but could only assume the unit from which they had come was a ‘Commissioner’s Own’ and wasn’t supposed to exist.

  These events unfortunately coincided with discussions among senior aldermen, the Civic Cabinet, about our working relationship with the Town Clerk. There was absolutely no connection between the two events, but two days after we spoke with him, asking for his resignation, a story appeared in the Sunday Mail about the bugging of the Lord Mayor’s office which looked as if there might be.

  So a process that was never going to be easy became extremely difficult. The Town Clerk didn’t want to resign, so was then dismissed at a meeting of the full Council after loud opposition from the Labor Opposition. There were unhappy months ahead with appeals to a tribunal, public controversy, and a final vote in Council to confirm the dismissal. At the heart of it all was an elemental aspect of government – the elected and bureaucratic arms, represented by their respective leaders, must be able to get along.

  The role of the Lord Mayor, of any mayor, is to plan and direct the future of the city. The word ‘planning’ usually meant town planning, and in the narrow context of zoning and development control. To me it meant more than that: it meant deciding what kind of a place we wanted Brisbane to be, and then working out how we would get there.

  We set up a series of studies and reports on important aspects of municipal life. In 1987 we launched the Brisbane Traffic study. The planned freeway in front of the Riverside Centre had shown me that there was no overall traffic plan for the whole city, a sort of helicopter view of where traffic was coming from and where it was going. This was important to Council in its dual role as public transport operator and major planning authority. Such was the importance and detail of the study that it would take two years to complete. There were several committees, two of technical experts from the Council, the state government and the planning profession. My steering committee, which took the overarching view, was more community-based. It included Gail Chiconi, the alderman for Holland Park, Len Ward from the Transport Workers’ Union, Phil Heywood my socialist planning mate from QIT and Alan Goodridge, executive director of the Taxi Council. I had actually wanted a taxi driver because they seemed to know exactly what was wrong with the traffic, but that proved too difficult. The committee handed down its recommendations in 1989 and an immediate furore ensued because it included a recommendation for a couple of bridges across the river, which put local residents offside. I have always taken the view that recommendations following a study are just that: recommendations, albeit very considered ones. The receiving authority is not bound to accept them, but should use them to make plans.