Greens councillor Kym Chapple, whose posters were destroyed, was told about the incident by her husband who noticed them lying across the street on his way to work.
“He said, ‘Warning, you should probably get here and clean these up if you can,’” she recalled. It was “quite confronting to see your own face slashed”.
Chapple, who has been on the council since 2021, said she had not seen such confronting behaviour in previous election campaigns.
“I’ve not seen this before, at this level. It feels particularly aggressive and divisive, and it’s really meant to put you off. It’s intended to intimidate, really.”
Rosenfeld, a current councillor, said he was not aware of the incident and had also experienced some posters of his own being removed near Maroubra Beach.
“I certainly don’t support any [removal of posters].”
Website redirection
The mayor of the City of Willoughby, Tanya Taylor, said she knows nothing about a website domain eerily similar to that of her competitors that is redirecting traffic to her own website.
The Willoughby Community Independents ticket, a group of environmentally minded candidates on the north shore, have been using the website willoughbycommunityindependents.com.au. But if a council watcher dropped the “.au” from the domain, they’d get a surprise: instead of ending up on that group’s website, they’d be redirected to the webpage of Taylor.
Web domain records show willoughbycommunityindependents.com – no “.au” – was registered less than three weeks ago, but the owner of the domain has been hidden.
That prompted outrage from John Moratelli, a Willoughby Community Independents councillor, who said he was “disappointed to find out that people would go to these sorts of lengths to spend the money to register a name, hide their identity and mislead voters”.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Taylor said. “I don’t know how that works, but I can certainly attest to [the fact that] I haven’t done anything.”
“They might be espousing that they are community independents, [I am too] … I’m running my own my campaign, doing what I can to get re-elected.”
Two hours after the Herald first made inquiries about the issue, the URL that was redirecting traffic to the mayor’s website sent users back to the original community independents page.
The preferences saga
Plans have also been hatched in local party rooms across the city to make sure preferences flow against some former friends or common enemies.
In the Sutherland Shire, current mayor Carmelo Pesce – once touted to be a successor to Scott Morrison in the federal seat of Cook, only to lose his preselection, quit the party and then run for council as an independent – is encouraging voters to put their second preferences to Labor.
The ex-Liberal is encouraging voters to not put any number on the Liberals’ box.
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At the City of Sydney, the Liberal and Labor tickets have found an unlikely alliance in attempting to dislodge long-serving Lord Mayor Clover Moore from office. They will both preference each other over Moore, who is leading her team of Clover Moore’s Independents.
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