If you thought Clover Moore’s bike lanes were controversial, wait until the Lord Mayor gets moving on her next project: revolutionising power and water supply to inner Sydney.
Under her plan, city roads will be ripped up and pipes laid to move clean electricity and recycled water around the CBD.
The goal is to take most of the city centre off the coal-fuelled power grid within 20 years. “We need to do the hard things. The majority of people, hopefully, understand that,” Ms Moore said.
“We have to put new piping under the city. It’s about the future, it’s about providing energy, it’s about what we do with our waste.
“These are things we have to do. We have to allocate the funds, do the consultation and manage it as best we can.
“The challenges are hard, the biggest challenge we have is to change the way we do things.”
Forget the war on cars, this a war on non-renewable energy sources. Tri-generation technology, which simultaneously creates power, heating and cooling, is at the heart of Ms Moore’s green infrastructure plan.
But in a rare and candid interview, she admitted the brutal criticism of cycleways by radio hosts Alan Jones and Kyle Sandilands was having an effect.
“I know I’m copping a lot of flak over cycleways, but that’s a transport option. The majority strongly endorsed that.
“Now that the transport network is finished, people are using it - they will forget the pain. Already, people are embracing bikes.
“But I’m in a hard place now. I don’t know what the agenda is.
“I really don’t like this, I think it’s more of what I experienced when I was younger.”
This is the little girl from Gordon who saved her pocket money to buy soil to plant gardens around her home.
And the young mum in the 1980s who simply wanted grass instead of bitumen, broken fences and a solitary swing set in her local park.
She wanted green parks like she had enjoyed in London, but was told grass could not be planted in parks. How would council workers sweep up broken bottles?
She petitioned and was ignored. She picketed and was ignored. So she ran for council and won - but other aldermen ostracised her.
Ms Moore was a rare creature at the Town Hall: an elected woman at a time when there were no female toilets and the ladies’ room was a partitioned-off section of the men’s.
“When I first got involved here - in the Dark Ages - women were a standout. I found myself in a hostile male environment,” she said.
This year, the hostility has come from powerful radio hosts.
Jones called Ms Moore’s bike paths “the most disgraceful project in history”; Sandilands ordered her “to the retirement village, you old clown”.
“Now the harassment comes from vested interests: people on the radio who own clubs in Kings Cross, or others who have a political barrow,” she said.
“I’m a burr in the saddle, an independent. They’d like to get rid of me.
“But it’s not so much grass, it’s responsible energy and transport. It’s not radical - it’s what cities around the world are doing.”
In her 30 years on the council, Ms Moore’s views on everything from gay rights to drug addicts and the homeless have led to personal harassment.
She has had excrement smeared on her car, she has been punched, her dog has been attacked. She was even stalked by a convicted wife-killer.
Now transport, or the lack of it, is her biggest fear for Sydney.
“It’s in gridlock; it’s a conga line of buses,” Ms Moore said.
“It’s really serious for us not to be addressing transport in Australia’s biggest city.
“I know there’s a preoccupation with the surplus, but you have to invest in cities.
“If we don’t sort out how to do it sustainably, we don’t have a future.”
