2 weeks Ago By Donna Page
LABOR'S outgoing lord mayor Nuatali Nelmes says she was defeated by the "dirtiest campaign" she's witnessed in Newcastle. Login or signup to continue reading Ms Nelmes conceded defeat to Independent Dr Ross Kerridge on Tuesday night and has taken aim at what she describes as "dirty politics". "Kerridge ran the dirtiest campaign I've witnessed in Newcastle's history," Ms Nelmes said.
"The personal attacks were unfounded, baseless and just dirty politics." After Jeff McCloy resigned during a corruption investigation, Ms Nelmes was elected to the top job at a 2014 by-election and previously served as a councillor. "Spending $50,000 to smear your opponent isn't a pathway to victory that I would want," she said.
"I'm proud of our positive vision and campaign that articulated our vision and unprecedented delivery." In response, Dr Kerridge's campaign manager John Beach said Our Newcastle ran a "strong community-based grassroots campaign, funded by many small donations from hundreds of donors". "The impetus for this groundswell of support was the performance of the previous lord mayor and council," he said.
"Contrast Labor's expensive professionally-made commercials with our homemade ads, filmed by our team using just their mobile phones. Every post we made was backed up by a source." Mr Beach said that Ms Nelmes "bizarrely" compared Dr Kerridge to Donald Trump, portraying him as out of touch, and her was also incorrectly accused of being a climate change denier.
He urged Ms Nelmes to reflect on "why the public voted her out, rather than focusing on our campaign". "At no time did our campaign rely on name-calling or personal insults. We relied on analysis of policy and decisions taken over the last council term," he said.
The "whole tone" of the election was not appreciated, by Greens councillor Charlotte McCabe, who ran in the lord mayoral ballot. Cr McCabe said there were elements of the Labor, Liberal and Our Newcastle campaigns that she believed were "really personal and negative". "I really worked hard to focus just on what we were proposing to follow through with our solutions for the next term of council," she said.
"I actually don't think it's helpful for a democracy when people just attack. It makes people think that democracy is about people fighting and they give up on believing in the system." Ms McCabe said she did not agree with the use of the term "glamour" projects by the Kerridge team and others when referring to the art gallery redevelopment or the Newcastle beach skatepark, which she supported and viewed as important projects.
More focus on policy instead of personalities is what Liberal lord mayoral candidate Callum Pull said he would have liked to see. Instead, Cr Pull said the election was overshadowed by Labor party infighting. "This election there was quite clearly an overarching narrative, which was more about the internal factional goals within the Labor party, which continued to play out when Kerridge and his colleagues left the party," he said.
"Speaking from the Liberal party's point of view, it did make it difficult for us to break through and actually talk about the policies we wanted to take forward." Civic election analyst and former Greens councillor John Sutton said Dr Kerridge's campaign did not strike him as particularly dirty. Mr Sutton said critiquing an opponent, as long as it was based on facts, was an important part of the election process, and said he saw negative information distributed by both Our Newcastle and Labor.
There is a big difference between legitimate negative political discourse and dirty tactics, he said. "It's just the cut and thrust of most elections," he said. "I don't think it's out of the ordinary.
Dirty tactics is when people lie, tell mistruths and take things completely out of context." Mr Sutton recalled the dirtiest political campaign he had seen in Newcastle as the deliberate smear campaign run against former Newcastle MP Jodi McKay when she unsuccessfully ran for re-election in 2011. Details of the campaign, led by disgraced former ports minister Joe Tripodi against his own Labor colleague, were revealed at an ICAC hearing in 2014.
It involved false leaflets being distributed to homes across Newcastle criticising Ms McKay's support for a $600million container terminal at Mayfield, which rivalled Nathan Tinkler's T4 coal-loader plan, and warned of exaggerated truck movements from the proposed project. It was claimed Mr Tripodi devised the plan and Mr Tinkler's building company Buildev paid for the leaflets. DAILY Today's top stories curated by our news team.
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