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The Sydney Morning Herald

Here's a man who can wear the chains

Matt Laffan has just the can-do attitude to head Sydney's super council.

AT THE Premier's Christmas party last year in the courtyard of Governor Macquarie Tower, the former lord mayor Frank Sartor kept a straight face as he assured two journalists there was no way the Government could change the Sydney City Council boundaries before the March election.

When the conversation was repeated a few days later to the merchant banker Malcolm Turnbull at the Prime Minister's Christmas party at Kirribilli House, he snorted with derision. The fix was in and the Labor Party was plotting to take over Town Hall, said Malcolm, speaking on behalf of his wife, the lord mayor, who was stuck in a residents' meeting. And in that case, ``Lucy won't run".

Sure enough, the fix was in and Lucy Turnbull pulled out of the race last month. She is now seeing out her mayoral days as an ``administrator" of the new super council formed by last Friday's forced amalgamation of cashed-up Sydney City and down-at-heel South Sydney council, with its vast numbers of Labor-voting residents, a union one wag likens to a ``shotgun marriage" between Manhattan and New Jersey.

In a way, it seemed to be the perfect out for a dignified woman who was never quite comfortable with the crucial public speaking aspect of the role, and whose Liberal high-flyer husband would always be a headache for Macquarie Street.

But, like everything else connected with the battle for Town Hall, even Turnbull's exit wound up being not quite as it seemed. Rumours swept through Sydney last weekend that she was thinking of running again. But by yesterday her spokesman declared she was out of the race, just as the independent NSW MP Clover Moore, the diva of the Oxford Street set, was talking up her possible candidacy, capitalising on a backlash against ALP interference.

``I don't think that the City and the City communities should be the cash cow or the plaything of Macquarie Street," she told ABC radio's Sally Loane yesterday.

The former federal communications minister, Michael Lee, 47, now Labor's candidate and said by everyone except himself to be a shoo-in as lord mayor, has plans for milking the City's $200 million cash reserves. A water recycling project that will be the envy of the world, for starters, and special classes for four-year-olds.

``A Labor City Council can fund innovative social programs that make it a leader for the rest of the country," the Cronulla-born Woolloomooloo resident said yesterday before doorknocking in Ultimo.

As the scramble for Town Hall's pots of gold becomes more like the mad hatter's tea party every day, there is one pure soul whose campaign seems to rise above sordid politics. Matt Laffan, a wheelchair-bound Crown prosecutor, is regarded increasingly as the dark horse candidate in a field of six or seven, with powerful backers, such as Macquarie Bank's Bill Moss, and a large network of friends across the city.

Over a latte yesterday at the Downing Centre courts, across the road from his office and a few blocks from his Castlereagh Street apartment, he spoke of his ``David versus Goliath" battle with the confidence and optimism that have steered him through a difficult life. Born with diastrophic dysplasia, a type of dwarfism carried in recessive genes of both his parents, he was expected to die within a week and became a paraplegic at 10.

The only child of the former NSW rugby union coach Dick Laffan, he developed a passion for the game he could never play, and is now a member of the NSW rugby judiciary. He has the handsome face and upfront manliness of the rugby world. He once wrote a Heckler for the Herald about the plight of the thirtysomething single heterosexual man in Sydney but friends say he is always surrounded by beautiful women and is an incurable flirt. He has a girlfriend of a few months, a chemical engineer who might be ``lady mayoress", he jokes. He has a charm and gravity that inspire taxi drivers who drive him home to often come upstairs and help him into bed, say friends. It is impossible to not be impressed with him.

As for the difficulty it must take to do the basic things most people take for granted, like get out of bed and get dressed, he says: ``I'm not aware of any extra effort. It's just the way it is."

While other candidates have talked big and done little, Laffan has for months been going to community meetings at nights and weekends, from Zetland to Millers Point, compiling a list of residents' concerns, from ``rev-heads in their flash cars along Hickson Road" to the business downturn in Glebe Point Road.

As an independent of integrity he says he is best placed to guard residents against the demands of rapacious developers. He says that Labor, through lord mayor Michael Lee, stands to make several hundred million dollars in stamp duty from developments across the city, from the wharves to the CUB brewery site on Broadway. His policies published on his website, www.mattlaffan.com seem aimed at continuing the sound management of the city, without gimmicks, and with wheelchair access a ``byproduct" of his tenure, not its driving force.

What made Sartor such an effective lord mayor was his enormous capacity for work and attention to detail. A job many predecessors treated as a part-time lurk, can-do Sartor made it a 24/7 vocation. Laffan has the same drive, working from 8am to 11pm. If he wins, ratepayers will get their money's worth from someone who takes can-do to a new level.

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