G’day everyone, and welcome to 100 Climate Conversations. I’m Benjamin Law. Today is number 15 of what will be 100 conversations happening every Friday here at the Powerhouse museum and online. And they present 100 visionary Australians taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, climate change. We’re so grateful to be here having this conversation today on the unceded lands of the Gadigal. First Nations people on this continent have been sharing knowledge here for tens of thousands of years. Together, they constitute the oldest continuing human civilisation the planet has ever known. First Nations people are the world’s first scientists, engineers, agriculturalists, mathematicians. They mastered how to survive and thrive on the planet’s driest continent, which is a feat we’re struggling with now. So, we’re grateful to Elders, past and present, that we can continue sharing important knowledge here on what is and what will always be Aboriginal land. And I’d like to extend that acknowledgment and my respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people joining us here in person or watching and listening to this digitally.

Our wonderful guest, seated right next to me, is currently serving her extraordinary fifth term as the 82nd Lord Mayor of Sydney. One of the reasons we’re talking to her today is because she’s led the development and the implementation of the city’s internationally renowned long-term plan, Sustainable Sydney 2030. We are so thrilled to have her join us here today. Please join me in welcoming the City of Sydney’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, everyone.

Clover, you’ve been in public office for a remarkable 40 years plus now. When did climate change, looking back, first come onto your radar as a concept and when did it start being taken seriously by government?

Well, it was on my radar in parliament in the 90s and in the 2000s. It wasn’t on the parliamentary agenda, though. In fact, I think it really only went on to the parliamentary agenda in New South Wales with Matt Kean. Bob Carr talked about it from time to time, but there really wasn’t any action. For me, when I became Mayor in 2004, I wanted us to have a long-term plan for the city, and so we embarked on the most comprehensive consultation that the city has ever undertaken. And during that consultation in 2007, people told us resoundingly they wanted us to take action on climate change. We developed Sustainable Sydney 2030, we did the research, we did the masterplans, we made the commitment and then we started doing the work.

Okay, this is a very big question, but what is Sustainable Sydney 2030? Because a lot of people who live in the City of Sydney have probably heard about it. People overseas have even heard about what Sustainable Sydney 2030 is. We like the sounds of it, but what does it actually practically deliver?

It’s about the future of the city, it’s about its long-term future. It’s about the environmental, the economic, the social and the cultural sustainability of the city, so it’s dealing with all of those things. But the overarching and the most important was the environment because we had become really aware about how critical taking action on climate change was. So that’s been a real overriding commitment, but those other areas are also very important.

It seems like such an important and noble thing to do, an important and practical thing to do as well. But when you start developing a plan like Sustainable Sydney 2030 and the goal is to make something sustainable, to make a city green, where do you even begin? What is the starting point?

The starting point is consultation, research and bringing in really good people to work with you too. And when we first developed Sustainable Sydney 2030, we worked with a whole number of architects actually, because the built form of the city is so important. By the time we got to 2019, we did a second round of consultation and talked to our community and what was really very affirming during that consultation was that the things that mattered to people then – and there were a lot of new people in the city by then – the things that really matter to them were action climate change.

They were greening the city, they were a rich cultural life. It was about being inclusive, about being affordable. But again, the overarching, overriding commitment was about the action we were taking on climate change and the people who were involved in those consultations that had been with us on the journey, who had received all those Sydney City News that gave them an update because we set the targets and then we’ve given the feedback. So, we do measure, we do set targets and then we give the feedback and our staff are all tasked to work to those targets and they have to perform and our Green Report is reported every six months. So, we very much keep ourselves on line with what we’re doing.

The other thing back in 2007, that made me aware that this was a really important action, was that consultation with the community but it was also I went to my first C40 conference in New York in 2007. C40 is an organisation that’s been set up, was set up back in about 2005 by people like Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London; Bill Clinton; Mayor Bloomberg, Mayor of New York and it was about bringing cities together from around the world who would make a commitment to work together to address climate change. And that first conference for me was really very exciting. First of all, I met all these other mayors who didn’t have very good state governments or federal governments either, especially the ones in America.

Why this is such an important organisation is that the mayors realised that we had to take action, that 70 or 80 per cent of emissions are in cities and now in the 21st century the majority of people in the world are living in cities. So that even if national and state governments weren’t taking the action they should be taking at a time of accelerating global warming, the city leaders could, and it could make a really big difference. And so that was the other real incentive. And it’s also another way of helping us do the work, because we go to those conferences every two years, all the mayors meet again every two years and report on what they’re doing, share their ideas and are re-inspired. Also, it’s a great morale lifter, if you’ve got a terrible government, the state governments are not doing anything, your federal governments are not doing anything but you’re meeting these other mayors who are doing something. And during the two-year period when, between those sessions, the mayors go to, our staff work with the staff of the city.

And that first conference I went to in 2007, Los Angeles – that’s an unlikely city to think of in terms of action on climate change – Los Angeles, was the first city in America to introduce LED lighting in its streets and parks and they talked about it and it seemed really inspiring so we came back to Sydney and said, We’ll trial it. And we own about half the lights in the streets of the city and Ausgrid own the other half. We asked Ausgrid to join us in a trial and no they weren’t interested. So, we went ahead with the trial and I remember, we trialed it in Martin Place in George Street, I remember going out and looking at the lights and that trial was very successful. And so, we introduced it right through the city and we’re really pleased we did because it has contributed to getting our emissions down. It’s also saving us $800,000 a year. And of course, there are lots of other learnings, what we have done that other cities haven’t done, we share too.

I would love to hear more about that. So, from that initial C40 meeting in the 2000s you say you’ve met up every two years, information, ideas are exchanged in what must feel like an exchange of not just knowledge, but probably commiserations for certain situations that you find yourself in too. What are some other practical ideas that maybe people who live and work in the City of Sydney take for granted now, but do stem from those conversations that happened at C40? And what have other mayors learnt from the City of Sydney?

They’ve been really interested in hearing from me, because I’ve got to say, the reputation of our federal government over the years is out there and how bad we are. And people out there know about the degradation of the Barrier Reef. The people out there know about the appalling bushfires we’re having, and this is years ago. And so, they were very interested that there was a city like Sydney that was actually taking this action. One of the things that we did – emissions are generated in our cities and the main areas where they are generated are in the buildings, the commercial buildings and how they operate, in the lighting, in the transport, they are the three big areas.

So in about 2008, I invited the CEOs of all the major property owners of Sydney to dinner, and we presented to them the work we’d done, the work we’d developed for Sustainability Sydney 2030, the targets we had set, and what it meant and why we had to do it and how important it was. And, you know, they’re not like governments. They’re not there for three or four-year period, they’re there for the long haul. This is GPT and its Mirvac and it’s Dexus and it’s Lendlease, and those big owners of those big companies. And I asked them, will you join up with us, will you become a partnership with us? Will you make the commitment to get your emissions down in all of your buildings and properties by 70 per cent by 2030? And they said, Yes. And it was really interesting, they had never worked together, they are real competitors and bringing this group together was really, really powerful because they’re good and they’ve been very effective.

It’s called the Better Buildings Partnership and each of those major corporations have set up areas and programs and staff who do this work. They meet regularly, they work with our staff. They report to me once a year, that’s a very exciting session, I’ve got to tell you. And they have now got the emissions down in all their operations by 63 per cent, the goal of 70 per cent by 2030. Here we are it is already down by 63 per cent, they are on track to get them down by 88 per cent by 2030. As well, we set up another partnership which was called the Sustainable Destination Partnership, and that was in 2018 and that’s with the entertainment and hospitality industries. Just envisage the amount of energy that a 24-hour operation hotel, the emissions there, and the emissions in theaters and performance, the lighting, so that’s also very important. And they’re on track to, they’ve got much further to go because they started later but they’re working with us too.

Another group that we’ve been working with, and that’s been quite early, and it’s CitySwitch and it started in Sydney and it has gone to all the other capital cities now and the city works directly with tenancies and they make commitments on how they bring down the usage in their buildings and that’s been very, very effective too. And that’s also, as I said, happening in other cities. So, they’re the sorts of things that we have done and hearing about the Better Building Partnership and that all those big corporations joined up to work with us was something that they’ve been interested in, in those overseas conferences. So, it was good, I had something that I could say we were doing that was something we’d initiated, and it was a real example to government, government failing to do anything but these big corporations that have a future, they were doing something.

I want to talk more about the kind of political impediments that might be in your way in all of this. But first, I want to recite some more achievements. City of Sydney is on track to a 70 per cent emissions reduction by 2030. It’s upgraded its fleet to hybrids, it’s planted 10,000 trees, provided 600 on-street car share spaces – I’m one of those users actually – installed Sydney’s largest building based solar photovoltaics systems. I’ve probably pronounced that wrong, but –

We put solar panels on all our buildings.

And installed water harvesting in 11 major parks and there’s much more of an abundance of bike lanes which you can see throughout the city. And yet my question is, at the same time, you’ll have shock jocks who will be against a lot of these initiatives. I think one of them called bike lanes, ‘A jihad on motorists’, and I do wonder, when you face that kind of opposition in sentiment or maybe not even opposition, but maybe mild skepticism or cynicism even, what is necessary in persuading people and the community to bring them along with the vision of what you want to do?

I’ve got to tell you, it was really hard. When I started out, we had one per cent cycling and I was visiting cities like Copenhagen and I was talking to Jan Gehl and 30 years ago he said, ‘That’s what it was like here’. And he said, ‘It’s one car park at a time, one car park at a time’, and he had 30 years to do it, I didn’t have 30 years. We did a plan for a bike network and it was really, really new to Sydney. And we were starting in Bourke Street, and many of you would know Bourke Street, Redfern, Surry Hills, it’s the most beautiful street now. Previously it had been a street of one-way, thundering industrial traffic.

But a lot of people in Bourke Street didn’t want it and I had all these series of meetings, they wanted to be able to keep parking their car directly outside the front window of their terrace house and the sky was going to fall in. And at each of those meetings, I’d then talked to them about accelerating global warming and I’d talk about how this is something we can do. If we put a bike path in, it’s a way of reducing the amount of emissions generated by cars. And it was really interesting in those meetings, this was back in 2005, 2006, I’d bring most of the room round in Surry Hills when I did this. But I have to tell you, the first part of that bike path we opened in Bourke Road further down in the industrial area, we thought we could start there it would be easier but quite a lot of those businesses in that area weren’t happy either.

So, I had organised a media conference to talk to the media with two members of the federal parliament to be there with me. And so, I introduced telling them why we were doing it and playing our part in taking action on climate change and there were really angry business people there. And I gave my little speech and I turned around to these two MPs to invite them to speak and I couldn’t see them for dust, they’d both disappeared. I won’t tell you who they are, they’re quite significant people in our community now. And so that’s what it was like. And I had Alan Jones, I had Alan Jones every day and I had The Daily Telegraph every day. And when I actually opened the Bourke Street bike path officially, it was as though I was opening a nuclear reactor. I had Channel Seven there and you know, and it was revolutionary, it was terrible, it was the end of the world and that’s where you’ve got to start and you’ve got to do it and you’ve got to really put up with all of that and it was really awful.

But when we had COVID, the state government, different people in the state government by this stage, wanted to partner with us to put in more cycle paths as a matter of urgency to link up various paths we hadn’t yet got to because they wanted to provide that opportunity to keep people off public transport because of COVID. And now both the federal and state government are contributing to the funding of one of our most difficult bike paths, and that’s for Oxford Street. And so, you’ll be able to travel all the way from the Eastern Suburbs right in through our suburbs, into the city. And a state minister even had our College Street cycleway removed – it had cost us 4 million to put in – and that’s how vindictive he was. The irony there was he was a National Party person and his pied-à-terre was in Redfern in George Street and I didn’t actually realise where he lived and we inadvertently put not only a bike lane but also a car share space outside his building and he was furious and it was not intentional, but it was really lovely.

I wonder to what extent is the impediments between working with three levels of government to do with hostility, a vibe there? To what extent is it the structure of the bureaucracy you’re working with and to what extent is it something else entirely?

I think it is. I think it’s politics. I think it’s partly politics. If I had been a Labor Mayor or a Liberal Mayor, it would’ve been different. The thing about the City of Sydney, it’s always been seen as a trophy for government. For decades governments, Labor or Liberal have either amalgamated or de-amalgamated the city to try and get the numbers because they like the city, it’s status, entertainment opportunities and opportunities with developers. When I first got elected and I started getting those phone calls from developers, I said, ‘If you want to talk to me, you’ll have to come and talk to the Central Sydney Planning Committee.’ So, I stopped getting those phone calls, but Bob Carr’s government didn’t really, he wasn’t antagonistic, but he didn’t see much purpose in working with us, I don’t think. Barry O’Farrell was very antagonistic to the point where he passed legislation to say I couldn’t be a Mayor and Local Member at the same time. Mike Baird, he was the worst, I’ve got to say, he sort of pretended local government didn’t exist. But Gladys realised it could be very effective and when I was in parliament and she was a minister, I’d work very, very well with her. So, it took the women.

I mean, when you say it took the women, it also strikes me that you are in some ways a little bit before your time in being a leader, an Independent leader, that your jurisdiction has really, really firmed up behind. Now we’re seeing on a federal level the rise of Independents, not just Independents, but Independents who are predominantly women and Independents who are predominantly women who have won their seats in the federal parliament on the policy and the issue of climate change. And I wonder when you look at this new federal parliament that has just been forged, do you see some hope and optimism there for the role that they’re going to play coming in, considering that you have come in as an Independent woman yourself?

I was so encouraged, I have to say. And it was unexpected, particularly [with] the previous federal election result. I think the world for us here has really changed on our most important issue. And so, I think that’s so encouraging for all of us. I think we were hopeful but it was unexpected. What I found in all the work that we’ve done that’s been new, you take people on the journey, they come with you, and then they see the difference. But we haven’t had anyone in the federal government taking us on the journey of climate change or taking us on the journey of how we have to change how we live and what we do and government has to change. And it’s really big change, when you think of transition for those people working in fossil fuel industries, it’s really big change.

We declared a climate emergency in 2019, and we did it because of accelerating global warming and the City of Sydney being at risk and around the world. But we did it also at a time when we’d already been taking very strong, effective action for over a decade. But we wanted to alert the federal government and other cities and also our young community, our students, they’re on the march and why wouldn’t they have been? Because they’re all being educated about the future and they know what’s happening.

And so, we declared the climate emergency and so after that I wrote to the Federal Minister for the Environment, Sussan Ley, and I said we’d declared a climate emergency, talked about the work we’ve done and asked that she take action to respond to the Paris commitment and to introduce carbon pricing and to set up a Just Transition organisation for all those people working in fossil fuel industries. And I got no response from her. And then on a Sunday night, I got this, we got this phone call from The Daily Telegraph letting me have a say on their front-page article, which was about the Federal Energy Minister, Angus Taylor. It’s a letter to me which I hadn’t received, but The Daily Telegraph had, which told me that if we wanted to do something about climate change, councils could do things, we could reduce our flying and why was our domestic bill for flying, $14 million.

So now you find yourself in a culture war.

And I mean even the journalists at The Daily Telegraph would have realised that this could not be true, because if we’d spent 14 million on domestic travel, our staff would all have been in the air all year. It was so dodgy, the whole thing was so dodgy. And we told The Daily Telegraph that this is simply untrue and so they moved it from the front page to the third page, ‘Clover spending all this money on air travel’. And my final letter from him, is one where he, where Angus Taylor apologises unreservedly for making such a mistake and making the comments he had made. Clearly that he was worried about being sued. Is he the Opposition Treasurer now? Because I don’t think he’s very good with numbers.

It is a story that illustrates, though, how incredibly touchy this issue can be and how it can quickly swell up into personal animosity and hostility.

Well, it was just really attacking and we were doing stuff and there’s a climate emergency, calling on them to do stuff. Michael Mann calls it deflection, you don’t deny anymore, you deflect. And so, he attacks me and deflects the media off them onto us, I mean, it was all a game, you know, well it wasn’t a game, it’s really, really shocking what they’ve failed to do.

It’s a game with high stakes, isn’t it? If it is a game?

Huge stakes, stakes for the future of the world, couldn’t be higher.

Well, let’s go to those stakes, because you mentioned the City of Sydney has declared a climate emergency and all over the world we see cities, states, in some cases even countries officially declare that there is a climate emergency happening. What is the significance of that and how much of it is symbolic making that declaration and how much of it has practical implications?

Well, I think it’s both. I mean, there is really serious action we should all be taking. Every time it’s talked about here up till now anyway, they immediately put up, we’ll increased power bills, just making it really, really hard for everyone. And sometimes when you have to change what you do, it is hard, but you’ve got to try and help people do it rather than just talking about all the things that are so hard about it. And this is what I think national governments have done. And then we went through the period of Trump too, and where it just descended into anarchy, really.

The world’s burning, the world’s flooding, and we have leaders making it worse by what they’re doing. I really understood where all those young people who all marched and gathered around St Andrew’s Square in front of the Town Hall, many with their parents, and a lot with their banners and then by government saying, condemning them for taking a day off school. Well, they’ve learned all about climate change, taking one day of school about the future of the planet, I think it’s okay.

I imagine there’ll be people watching this via video or listening to it via podcast and thinking well that’s really great for the City of Sydney, you know, declaring a climate emergency, enacting a lot of practical initiatives to save on carbon emissions. But I don’t live or work in the City of Sydney, I live in regional New South Wales, I live in a coal mining town. There is also a more direct relationship between what the City of Sydney does here and what happens in other parts of New South Wales. So, for instance, the City of Sydney’s operations are now powered using 100 per cent renewable energy. So where does that energy come from and how does that affect or advantage regional communities?

It’s a sixty million, 10-year agreement with Flow Power to provide us with a renewable electricity that will, that’s powering all of our operations and it’s coming from regional areas, from solar farms in Shoalhaven and Wagga Wagga and a wind farm in Glen Innes. And it’s providing 600 jobs in those regional areas, in the construction but also in the management of those farms and it’s also saving our ratepayers half a million dollars every year for 10 years. So, it’s such a good news story. And so all of our operations now are run on 100 per cent renewable electricity.

I mean this goes back to City of Sydney being carbon neutral as well, which I think was something that was declared in 2007. City of Sydney was the first government in this entire country to be certified carbon neutral. What does that actually mean and how was that achieved?

Well, that was at the outset of this work, and we wanted to get going straight away. So, our first thing we did was we bought green power. And whilst we were doing that, we did all our masterplans and worked out what we were going to do to start reducing emissions, not by buying green power but by changing what we do ourselves. And that’s when we introduced the LED lights, it’s when we introduced car share, built the bike network, started putting solar panels on every building, energy efficiency in every building, the sorts of things that then the Better Buildings Partnership did there too. But we were carbon neutral right from the beginning initially because of that purchase, then because of all the actions we are taking.

In 2008, you committed to a 70 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions for the City of Sydney by 2030, based on 2006 levels. You actually achieved this ahead of schedule.

Nine years, nine years early in 2021.

In 2021. And so now the focus moves to being a net zero emission city by 2035. In all of this, in that goal, is there a sector that’s most tricky and problematic?

70 per cent of our people now live in apartments in the City of Sydney and it’s much harder to get people living in apartments to do the work than if you live in a suburban house where you’d put your solar panels on and you’d have your recycled water. And so, we have another partnership which is called the Green Apartments Partnership and that’s going quite well. But we have a long way to go on that. And we want to have all of those apartment blocks you see in the City of Sydney all on reduced emissions by 2035. The simplest thing we’re saying to both business and residents is go to green power, buy green power. And if we all bought green power, it would bring the prices down too. And that would make a tremendous difference and then change the way we live in terms of reducing our waste. It’s so good that single use plastics are now banned, last state in Australia to do it but it’s a start.

Better late than never, right?

It’s a start. But the waste issue is a huge one for councils generally because we no longer export our waste. Well, I thought it was an absolutely shameful thing that we exported our waste. That we generated so much waste that in a country like Australia with huge expanses of land, we exported our waste, but we’ve got to reduce our landfill, we’ve got to work out ways of dealing with waste. That’s one of our big challenges. Reaching every residence and every business is another challenge but we’re up for it.

We’ve been talking a lot about ways to reduce carbon emissions. But there’s also a part of the conversation which is about how to plan better cities and build better cities that are resilient against the effects of the climate crisis as well. So how are you, for instance, tackling the problem of the urban heat island effect?

Well, for Australian cities, our biggest challenge in terms of global warming and survival is the heat island effect. And if you think of Sydney and you think of suburbs that are being created as we speak with large gray roofs, every tree cut down, large sites, big houses, small sites, big houses, no trees, and it can reach 45 degrees out there, it’s absolutely shameful that’s continuing. We’re very aware that this is a significant issue and we’ve been increasing our canopy, in fact, we’re the only city to increase canopy. Canopy is one of the best things we can do in terms of the heat island effect, one tree equals ten air conditioners. We have been planting, planting, planting, creating parks, we’ve created new parks, we’ve upgraded all of our existing parks, we’ve planted trees and we’re going to continue doing that.

We’ve spent about 350 million on doing that since 2005. We’ve allocated another 370 million to keep doing it until 2030. We want to increase our canopy by 2030 by 50 per cent, we want to increase our canopy by 75 per cent by 2050 because we’ve planted out most of our streets, we’re now moving into our medians and we’re moving on into greening our walls, greening our roofs and introducing a planning rule that defines how much greenery should come with each development. So, we’re doing all of that, and that is what all councils should be doing. And what we’re doing in terms of the metropolitan areas, we joined the Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities and by doing that I had to make a commitment that I would work with all of those metropolitan councils to work with them on the work that we’re doing in the City of Sydney and that’s happening. So that resilience work, all the work we do, we now share. It’s a bit like a mini C40 if you like, and that’s working really well.

I do love having conversations like this because it feels a little bit like time travel, this is what we can expect. And as we’ve been talking about Sustainable Sydney 2030, we’re having this conversation right now in 2022, take us into a time machine, eight years from now, what can we expect typical Sydney life to look like? What will we be experiencing by that year?

So a greener city. The canopy increased by 50 per cent. We would have completed the bike network, connected up with the surrounding areas. Active transport would be part of life, the metros would be completed or electric buses. There would be good transport including at night, so young people can go out at night and get home safely.

A night-time economy, Clover Moore what are talking about?

I know it’s revolutionary isn’t it? Rather than just staying home all the time. I think flexibility in the way people work, I think that’s another result of COVID. That’s good in terms of family life, in terms of getting work done, but also in terms of reducing emissions, you know, less travel time. So there’ll be more probably outdoor activities happening and that would be increased street life, more affordable workspace, our buildings would all be sustainable both in their construction phase and their usage stage, both are very important. We would have reduced waste, solve those problems, the majority would be using green power, all those households and businesses would be using green power. The density would continue to increase, but it would be sustainable and beautifully designed. One of the first things I did when I became Mayor was set up a design excellence panel with eminent practitioners and we also have a design excellence policy at the city that when you’re doing a development over a certain amount, you have to go through a competition process.

We would have completed all that recycling work that we have started now. All homes would have dual plumbing. We wouldn’t, the driest continent on Earth, be putting drinking water down the loo as we do now, we’re working on that now with Sydney Water, we have a partnership with them. We would have a rich cultural life, we have set aside an area in Alexandria, an industrial area where we can develop a really interesting precinct, not near residents, where you can make a lot of noise long into the night. And because we’d have good transport and people could travel home, we’d have rich cultural activities happening right through the city. And we’d have lots of affordable housing and we’d have an increase in social housing. Now, I have hope with the new federal government that they’re going to be really interested in working with state and local government on that. So, they’re the sorts of things we could look forward to, I think.

Well, thank you so much for the work that you’ve been doing for so long. Could you please all join me in thanking the Lord Mayor of City of Sydney, Clover Moore.

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