Strange happenings at Campbelltown Council.
After appearing to be a very well run council over recent years, I am beginning to wonder what is going on at Campbelltown City Council.
The position of mayor has traditionally been handed to an experienced team leader who has a strong support base in Council. That is until 2012-13, when Cr. Sue Dobson was elected. Dobson is the leader of a team of just one and was the third last councillor elected in 2012. She turned out to be possibly the worst mayor in my memory.
For 2013-14, Dobson was thankfully dispensed with and Cr. Clinton Mead (the second last elected out of fifteen councillors) was elected in her place. No sooner had this occurred than I began reading reports of the mayor proposing this that and the other and getting soundly defeated by his more experienced colleagues.
Cr. Mead is also a team leader of just one and clearly other councillors object to his policies. Whilst it seems that he has stuck to his principles and posesses considerably more substance than Cr. Dobson, he was elected as a Liberal Democrat - a minority party with very little community support - which garnishes many of its votes by stealing the word "Liberal" as part of its name. He is the only Lib-Dem on Council.
It is difficult to understand why the majority of councillors voted in an inexperienced, first time councillor as mayor after the Dobson Experiment failed. They handed him the mayoral chain without giving him any power.
The council now consists of ALP (5), Liberal Party (4) and an assortment of six independents/minority parties including one Liberal Democrat. It has some highly experienced and well respected community leaders such as Paul Lake, Anoulack Chanthivong, Paul Hawker, Fred Borg and Meg Oates, yet they threw in a man with no support base and no experience, whose policies they knew they would resoundingly reject.
They seem to be humiliating him and it's not nice to see,
It's not good for the community either and as the Editor of the Macarthur Advertiser says, for the second year in a row the Councillors are treating the mayoral position with disrespect.