20°C | Wednesday September 11, 2024 
4 September 2024
By Grahame Lynch
Cr James Spenceley is proud of an independent voting record in the last North Sydney Council term, which he said showed he is beholden to no other party or councillor.
Talking to the Sun at the end of a nearly three-year term, Spenceley observed that, on contestable votes, he voted with the majority bloc around 52% of the time. By contrast, the Real Independents and Labor, who formed this dominant grouping, voted the same on 98% of contestable votes.
“I’m not aligned, and I’m not in a voting bloc, and I haven’t done any favours or asked for favours from any councillors. So I can, on every single issue, vote completely independently and interrogate it.”
Spenceley said he hoped he has proven to be a “true independent, a fierce independent.”
“I’ve sometimes voted against what my own personal view is but voted with what I can see that the community and the locals in the area wanted.”
Asked to nominate an example, he mentioned the cycleway in West Street. “I don’t know that cycleways get enough use to justify them in a lot of these areas, but there’s a huge community groundswell to link up West Street.”
“I think we need a council that is actually truly independent, where when you get up and speak in a council meeting, you can change the other councillors’ minds, or when someone else is speaking, they’ll change your mind. I think that’s been wholly lacking from the last term of council. So if I’m elected and we can actually get the right balance and some true independents on council, we should be making great decisions, focusing on the areas that are important. “
“I think that’s what, in a lot of cases, has been missing. We focus on what a dominant group of councillors want to focus on.”
Asked to expand on why he thinks the dominant alignment between Labor and the Real Independents is a problem, Spenceley clarified his case.
“(Mayor) Zoe Baker has actually been a really good chair of the meetings. She’s done a lot of really good things. But at the end of the day, she has a 98% alignment with Labor. And Labor right now is effectively putting up probably the greatest impact to our area in North Sydney LGA’s history in terms of rezoning housing, where most streets will get four to six-storey apartments where the only permitted use right now is two-level houses.”
“I think the surprising thing is, at a time when you’ve got the biggest impact on the liveability and character of our entire LGA by Labor, you’ve got somebody who’s self-branding as independent aligning 98% of the time with Labor councillors,” Spenceley added.
Spenceley also lamented that a focus on state policy issues has been at the expense of the pursuit of core ‘roads, rates, and rubbish’ priorities.
He cited, as an example, what he viewed as the botched introduction of new parking meters, which necessitate download of a mobile phone app requiring personal details to the level of a credit application. “There aren’t enough meters around. The complexity in using them is far too high for what people want,” he observed.
“Because we spent a lot of time focused on much higher-grade issues, something like this, which I think is really important to the community, just got missed.” The lengthening delay to the Olympic Pool renovation, now nearly three years overdue and potentially $40 million over budget, is another example. “The most discussion we’ve had about the pool has been about who’s to blame for the pool. It hasn’t been about fixing the pool. There’s no way that we put enough emphasis into managing this as a major infrastructure project. There was no interest in doing that from quite a dominant group of councillors. This should have been the number one thing that was reported on by the mayor, to the councillors, on a weekly basis, and we should have identified many of these issues much earlier, and we should have fixed them earlier.”
Spenceley says he happily stands on his achievements on council. He is particularly proud of saving heritage sites like the cottages on Parraween Street through urgent interim heritage orders and preserving houses on Holt Street. He emphasised the balance between preserving important areas and approving developments in high-traffic corridors.
In between his council activities and his corporate governance commitments to the boards of companies such as Swoop, the former telecom industry entrepreneur (he founded Vocus) also participated in humanitarian efforts in Ukraine by facilitating fundraising for medical vehicles and supplies.
“We delivered more than 50 vehicles… stretchers, medical supplies, all of the defibrillators, everything. And we went to the front lines to meet the guys who would use them and ask them what they wanted, which allowed us to deliver what they needed.”
For the next council, he sees the two biggest issues as “running council well, but also fighting this statewide Labor overdevelopment plan.”
“And it’s an overdevelopment plan which solves nothing for affordability. Labor’s plan to solve affordability mandates a 2% requirement for affordable housing, and that’s only in the bigger developments.”