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As if resigned to what was about to take place under his watch, Liverpool City Council chief executive Jason Breton stuck his hand in his personal lolly bowl and sat back as councillor Peter Ristevski launched a verbal attack on the mayor.
“Mate, no wonder people call you a dirty individual. You are very dirty,” Ristevski, a former accountant who lost his registration over serious misconduct and new member of Lyle Shelton’s conservative Family First party, sneered at Liberal Mayor Ned Mannoun. “You are a very dirty individual. You are a despicable human being.”
Then he called the mayor a criminal, raising unsubstantiated (and denied) allegations from 11 years ago that the mayor had been fired from a job at the Mounties club for stealing gym vouchers.
This was an extraordinary council meeting, by name and by nature.
It was, in the administrative sense, an extraordinary meeting: the regular monthly meeting, when councillors were set to vote on who would be deputy mayor for the next year, had to be rescheduled because Mannoun and Breton will be on a council-funded trip to London for a conference about British-Australian infrastructure.
Joyfully for Breton, who so enjoys soccer that he is writing a book called The Football of Business, the conference includes an early morning tour of Everton Stadium.
But even by Liverpool Council’s low standards, the meeting was extraordinary in the ordinary sense of the word too. There were mass walkouts, accusations of criminal behaviour and last-minute redactions of reams of pages of the council agenda.
If the look was bad, the timing is worse. It’s a few weeks until the opening of what promises to be the most transformative piece of infrastructure the area will ever get, the new Western Sydney Airport, and the council is waiting for the findings of a public inquiry which is set to recommend Mannoun and Ristevski undergo mediation – yet here were community leaders so engulfed by infighting they could not elect a deputy leader.
The chaos began about two hours in, when Ristevski attempted to raise allegations about a former Liberal councillor who he claimed had been employed as a planner and is now taking the council to the Land and Environment Court.
Despite the motion being published in public meeting minutes, Mannoun explained that he thought airing the allegations was “unlawful in the most heinous terms”. So he had emailed his chief executive, who, after investigating, also decided it was against council rules. It resulted in pages of blacked-out words.
Mannoun’s colleague, Liberal Richard Ammoun, then raised an urgent motion to discuss findings handed down last month from the Tax Practitioners Board about Ristevski: that he had provided and advertised his tax agent services without registration, and that he had been acting as a “shadow director” for his daughter’s accounting firm.
It took exactly 30 seconds for Ristevski to interrupt the motion with claims that this, too, was “illegal”. As before, it was less a matter of legality than strategy. It didn’t matter if the motion didn’t get up: the Liberals knew the mere mention of the allegations would rile up the man who, whenever he’s found out, goes on the attack.
As councillors sipped on full-strength Coca-Colas and Solos, Ristevski unloaded with insults offensive enough to have him expelled from the chamber and barred from putting up his hand to be deputy mayor.
That changed the numbers. Incumbent independent Deputy Mayor Peter Harle – who has a principle of only accepting nominations if votes are unanimous – was due for re-election. Ammoun walked to the chief executive’s table and dropped his nomination form for the position, abandoning a deal made beforehand.
The act of alleged political treachery triggered a walkout: Harle, along with all Labor councillors, picked up their belongings and left, leaving the meeting without enough councillors to meet quorum.
“Oh!” Breton said as he looked up from his prepared script for the running of the votes to see an almost empty chamber. Where did everyone go? And, er, who becomes deputy mayor? It was 9.45pm by this point. Rubbing his eyes and letting out a deep sigh, Mannoun called for a break. The meeting returned only to be ended. After all the fuss, nothing, not even the position of deputy mayor, had changed.
Who is to blame for the chaos engulfing the council? At all levels, there is almost no accountability. The very thing which was meant to bring real accountability – a months-long Office of Local Government public inquiry into the council – looks set to only recommend that Ristevski and Mannoun go to mediation over their differences.
After Monday’s horror show, one thing is clear: mediation isn’t going to fix much.
Anthony Segaert is the Parramatta bureau chief at The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously an urban affairs reporter.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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