Urban Development:
Renaissance or Ruin?

What Was Said on the Night

An edited transcript of the forum. It has been lightly edited for readability — repetitions, crosstalk and audio dropouts removed, and obvious mis-transcriptions corrected. Nothing has been added. The red timestamps jump straight to that moment in the video above.

Welcome — Jimmy Thomson

▶ 0:00

Our MC for the night was Jimmy Thomson, writer of the Flat Chat strata column and website and a regular on ABC Radio.

Jimmy opened by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we met, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, their elders past and present, and the traditional owners of the lands from which everyone travelled.

After a story about finding a hairdresser who listens to the ABC ("I thought I recognised your voice"), Jimmy ran through the housekeeping: the event was organised by Politics in the Pub — a non-partisan, not-for-profit community group — to raise funds for the Wayside Chapel, Paul was running a raffle, food could be ordered at the bar, and Mark Skelsey would be selling and signing copies of his book afterwards. The night was live-streamed — which is the recording you can watch above.

A poem — Martin Clark

▶ 1:07

Our first speaker was Martin Tuck, a resident of the Crescent. Martin is a veteran who works at the Office for Veterans Affairs at the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park. He reached retirement age last month — 67 — but told us he can't retire yet, because of the uncertainty hanging over his home.

Martin read a poem he wrote about what his future looks like: developers arriving with "polished shoes" and rehearsed promises, a modest life measured out in square metres, and a retirement spent counting what he cannot keep. Hear Martin read it in full at ▶ 1:44 — it set the tone for the whole night.

Mark Skelsey — how the Cross changed Sydney's planning

▶ 4:09

Mark Skelsey wrote about planning at the Daily Telegraph for 20 years, spent eight years as media manager at the NSW Department of Planning, has worked in a variety of government and council roles, holds a Masters of Environmental Law, and is the author of Views To Die For — the story of the flawed NSW Government scheme to redevelop Woolloomooloo and Potts Point, and how it helped shape the planning reforms we live with today. He also runs the Changing Sydney Instagram account.

Mark told the story of the 1969 NSW Government plan to comprehensively redevelop Woolloomooloo, along with parts of Potts Point — the western side of Victoria Street, the Kings Cross station site and the land above the Kings Cross tunnel — into "the next Manhattan of Sydney": an extension of the CBD with no height limits and huge incentives for developers to consolidate large blocks.

It was a rushed intervention, pushed through while unelected city commissioners were in place and before the 1969 elections. There was no consultation with the community — and, crucially, no consultation within government, which meant no real transport plan for the area. The scheme had to be abandoned, but not before it created an extreme environment of conflict between developers, unionists, anarchist-style activists and resident activists such as publisher Juanita Nielsen, who lived in Victoria Street — and a criminal element associated with one particular developer, which sadly cost Juanita her life.

Mark said he wanted to look at Juanita from a new perspective: not just as a victim of crime, but as someone passionate about people participating in planning — someone who supported growth, worried about depopulation, and backed affordable housing and heritage. His argument is that what happened here was a turning point for Sydney: it showed we needed a better way to plan and to resolve disputes, and it ushered in reforms — far improved public participation, heritage protection, affordable housing, and a crackdown on police corruption — that culminated in the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 and the Heritage Act. Interestingly, developers of the day supported those reforms: they wanted rid of green bans, and they were deeply embarrassed by the crime and violence the conflict had produced.

"This area was at the centre of the modern planning system as we've known it for the last 50 years," Mark said. He never expected that system to become so contentious, or to find himself asked to campaign for it — but his view is that we need to learn from the past so that urban development is "more renaissance and less ruin." His prescriptions:

We need more housing supply — but we can get it by involving communities in planning for their areas, and not just the squeaky wheels. Big state interventions that bypass local government have a much better chance of producing poor outcomes than all three levels of government working together — and Woolloomooloo, as it finally happened, was an example of three levels of government coming together to deliver affordable housing (Pyrmont is another). We need robust, transparent conversations within government to deliver the schools, transport and hospitals that growth demands. We should preserve the best of our neighbourhoods with more human-scale development — Macleay Street is a beautifully human-scaled street; nobody says "I'll meet you in William Street." Councils should have the right to stop development that causes a net loss of existing affordable housing. And we should get serious about the many ways to deliver affordability beyond raw supply: taxation reform, linking supply with demand, and better use of existing housing — filling empty bedrooms and reducing unnecessary demolitions.

Dr Michael Tan — a Crescent strata story

▶ 12:51

Michael Tan, from the Crescent on Bayswater, told the night's most jaw-dropping story — "less a political story and more of a strata story."

It began when someone drilled through the concrete above his car space and installed a refrigerator compressor — later ripped out, leaving leaking pipes and electrical cables dangling over his car. No permission, no notice. That pattern, he said, was common: commercial owners enclosing common property, nightclubs renovating unchecked, a building manager who shrugged at a tree growing out of the roof and painted over mould in the corridors.

When Michael started asking why the strata committee had employed and protected this person for so many years, he was bounced between the strata manager and the building manager for basic documents, wrongly told he couldn't have the owners' contact list, then charged a fee to trawl a database of ten thousand poorly sorted scanned documents. What he found revealed catastrophic disorganisation, suspicious invoices, finances that didn't add up, and a rabbit warren of shelf companies and trusts connecting back to the building manager.

When he emailed owners proposing a new building manager, the committee's response was swift: denials to all owners, superficial fixes, and an AGM to renew the building manager's non-existent contract — backed by proxy harvesting, with proxy forms reused, dates changed and signatures photocopied, and the meeting minutes conveniently no longer recording who held which proxies.

"That's when we realised this wasn't really a dispute about a building manager or maintenance," Michael said. It was about maintaining control of a development opportunity decades in the pipeline. The building manager was a former employee of a property developer, and a small number of interested parties — commercial investors and developers — had entrenched themselves on the committee. They controlled the meetings, the records, the minutes, communications to owners, and the building's management itself. (Jimmy interjected from the floor: "Can I just say — it's present tense, not past." It's an ongoing saga.)

Michael and fellow owners took matters to the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal. The committee engaged expensive lawyers, threatened him with costs for "vexatious and frivolous" claims, and even brought a separate application against him personally. Last year, developers began appearing at committee meetings with offers to buy the entire building — offers in the vicinity of $100 million. Documents eventually extracted through NCAT showed developers had been invited by the strata manager to put written offers to the committee, without the knowledge or authorisation of owners.

His stake was tiny — a few hundred dollars in application fees and some late nights reading legislation. The committee had spent more than $50,000 of owners' money on lawyers defending itself against the owners. "The expression 'conflict of interest' doesn't really cover it," he said. "This was strategic impunity." The tribunal members were sympathetic — but they rely heavily on the democratic process inside the building, and it's precisely that process which had been captured. "They wrote their own minutes and marked their own tests."

What he'd love to see: a tribunal that's better at recognising how strata democracy can be gamed — lying to owners, proxy harvesting, secret committee meetings, unlawful elections, withholding documents just long enough that decisions can't be challenged — and a much lower threshold for intervention: immediate production of records, independent checks of disputed proxies, pausing controversial expenditure, and standing aside committee members, building managers or strata managers while a dispute is examined. "Because by the time the current threshold is reached, the meeting's happened, the money's been spent and the documents have been shredded."

Jimmy Thomson — how things actually change

▶ 24:03

Jimmy had been asked to provide "something uplifting and inspiring," and offered a strata twist on Donald Rumsfeld: there are things we know, things we know we don't know — and in strata, things we're sure we know but are wrong about.

His first hard truth: there are no strata cops. Nobody is coming to your building to see what's going wrong and cart your committee away. You own the property. You have the vote. And even if the system can be corrupted, it can also be changed — but not alone. Most people in strata just want a quiet life; what gets their attention is when their lifestyle is affected or it's going to cost them money.

His second: the media still works. He proved it with three stories from his own career.

Breakfast Point. A reader told him buyers in the Rose Corporation development were being required to hand over their proxy as a condition of sale — which let the developer's man elect himself sole committee member and write to the government "on behalf of residents" demanding a commercial marina the residents didn't want. Jimmy wrote about it three times in the Sydney Morning Herald; Planning Minister Frank Sartor changed the law. Developers may no longer demand a proxy as a condition of sale — a reform that spread to Victoria, Queensland and around Australia.

Sunset clauses. He walked into Fair Trading Minister Victor Dominello's office and explained how, in a hot market, developers who'd sold off the plan were delaying completion, invoking their sunset clauses to hand back deposits — and relisting the same apartments at 20 per cent more. Dominello said "I'm not having that" and changed the law. That reform also went national.

Jo Cooper's pets case. One owner took her owners corporation's blanket pet ban all the way to the NSW Court of Appeal, which ruled you cannot ban all pets just because they're pets — changing the law across the country.

And most recently: a television documentary about strata management practices led to an industry president's resignation, an investigation — and, just last week, NSW Fair Trading announcing criminal charges against a strata management company and its CEO. (Jimmy didn't name the company, for legal reasons, and neither will we.)

The catch, he said, is that none of this works if you phone a journalist about the terrible things in your building and then refuse to put your name and face to the story. You might briefly be the pariah who "cost us 10 per cent on our apartments" — but once you've got the best-run block in the street, the prices come back. "Sometimes you've got to take a risk. Just don't try to do it on your own — and don't expect somebody else to come along and do it for you."

Dr Peter Sheridan AM — Potts Point Preservation Group

▶ 32:20

Peter Sheridan has lived in the area for 25 years and chairs the Potts Point Preservation Group, formed a few years ago in response to what he described as the City's neglect of Potts Point, Elizabeth Bay and Rushcutters Bay — in recognising, preserving and promoting their special character, history and heritage — and its willingness to allow the demolition of apartment buildings full of studios to make way for luxury three- and four-bedroom apartments. The group is also part of Doing Density Better, a recently launched alliance of Sydney community groups.

The question, Peter argued, is not whether Sydney needs more housing — it obviously does — but whether we should be satisfied with a single metric: the number of dwellings. Is the increase real, in terms of affordability and access? And what is being lost in the rush?

This is a very special community: the densest in Australia for nearly 100 years. In one square kilometre of Potts Point, Elizabeth Bay and Rushcutters Bay, 98 per cent of buildings are apartment blocks and 98 per cent of the 16,000 residents live in apartments — 60 per cent of those apartments studios and one-bedders, 60 per cent of residents single, 60 per cent renters. It is a template for high-density, low-rise living, much of it superb Art Deco from the 30s and 40s and modernist work from the 60s and 70s — and a social history unique in Sydney, from the cosmopolitan Cross of the 20th century to the Green Bans and Juanita Nielsen.

The numbers he presented on current local redevelopments were stark: across the projects on foot, 274 apartments are being reduced to 134 — and of that 134, 80 per cent are three- and four-bedroom. All 227 studios and one-bedders are gone; not one is being replaced. Thirty "affordable" apartments are projected — which, as the recent Four Corners program showed, will be unaffordable in real terms for the people who most need them. And in seven current DAs, the City has taken a monetary contribution from the developer instead of affordable housing being built: residents get kicked out, the council pockets a fee, and nothing is built locally to house them again.

Heritage, he argued, sustains urban memory, architectural diversity, neighbourhood identity and the evidence of how previous generations lived — and it is being devalued by both the state and the City. The next phase is State Significant Developments around Kings Cross station, which risk a flood of super-high-rise with a token proportion of unaffordable small apartments, overwhelming the streetscape and leaving "a uniformity of blandness."

His call to action: support your community groups. "Only one metric will move the city and the state, and that is overwhelming community disapproval. That requires everybody to be involved — and to be vocal."

Stacey Miers — Shelter NSW

▶ 43:00

Stacey Miers is a town planner who has worked for half a dozen councils and state government agencies, and is now Principal Planner at Shelter NSW, working with National Shelter. She's also a local through and through — born and raised in Darlinghurst and Woolloomooloo, the eldest of eight kids who shared one bedroom of a rented terrace after the family moved out of a boarding house — and was involved in the earlier campaigns around Woolloomooloo, the Green Bans and the Eastern Distributor.

Shelter's primary concern right now is the in-fill affordable housing provisions. Shelter's position — which the petition circulating on the night to Alex Greenwich quotes — is that affordable units should be charged at 30 per cent of household income, not "20 per cent below market rent." Market-linked "affordability" in a market like this one isn't affordable at all. Shelter commissioned research from Professor Peter Phibbs (who many will have seen on the Four Corners program) and economist Cameron Murray setting out the problems with the provisions — it's on Shelter's website — and that work fed into the issues Four Corners exposed: massive redevelopment, a huge loss of boarding houses, and their replacement by "new generation" boarding houses that aren't very affordable.

Tom Forrest — Urban Taskforce

▶ 46:14

Into the lion's den — cheerfully — came Tom Forrest, CEO of the Urban Taskforce. Tom's background spans the trade union movement (seven years at the Labor Council of NSW), the Sydney Olympics (adviser to the Olympic Roads and Transport Authority), the railways, and chief of staff roles to Frank Sartor and to Morris Iemma as Health Minister and then Premier. The Urban Taskforce, he explained, is capped at 125 members and aims to represent the better end of the development community — he was blunt about the other end, and about the operators who drag down the industry's reputation.

His core argument: there are competing virtuous imperatives. On one hand, preserving the local character of a suburb you love; on the other, the push for supply, density and affordability. Government's job is to work through them — and you'll never satisfy everyone. The Housing Accord target is 1.2 million homes; on current trajectory about 850,000 will be delivered. And the Kings Cross and Potts Point precinct has a role to play: it is well serviced by transport, amenity, employment, harbour and beaches in a way most of Sydney is not.

If government needs to step in and build more social housing, he's all for it. If it needs to incentivise developers to deliver properly affordable housing — "not the sort of stuff that's just a bit of a discount on what's already unaffordable" — he's for that too. But simply demanding developers fund it without incentives, he argued, makes projects unviable: developers will walk and invest elsewhere, and the result is less supply, higher rents, and young people and the poor pushed out. "Let's work together, let's scream and shout — but you can't just say no to everything. By having that position, you're forcing people into poverty."

That drew spirited responses from the floor — "we are not forcing people into poverty by objecting to 43 storeys on top of the Holiday Inn" — and a lively exchange about overshadowing, affordability percentages and government subsidy, which you can watch from about ▶ 52:51. Tom, to his credit, stayed on for questions all night.

Councillor Jess Miller — Deputy Lord Mayor

▶ 53:53

Released from the locked room to join us: Jess Miller, Deputy Lord Mayor of the City of Sydney.

Jess began as "a younger person whose friends have left and who would love to live in the Cross but never will be able to." Some things need interrogating, she said — starting with definitions. The City's definition of affordable housing has always been: 30 per cent of household income, operated by a not-for-profit tier-one community housing provider, in perpetuity. The way the City has delivered on that — including at the Coronation development in Erskineville — is by sitting down with developers and negotiating voluntary planning agreements. "The City of Sydney is not anti-development and it is certainly not anti-density. Potts Point is second only to Green Square as the most densely populated place in the country — because it's fabulous, and everybody wants to live here. People deserve the right to live where they want to live, not only where they can afford to live."

Her real concern is that the City's ability to negotiate those outcomes is being eroded — by the Housing Delivery Authority and the State Significant Development pathway, which she said have yet to deliver much housing but do provide developers a shortcut to much more yield while cutting the council, and therefore the community, out of the negotiation.

She also challenged the idea that supply alone is the answer, pointing at the homes we already have: thousands of dwellings across the City effectively rezoned by stealth into short-term accommodation. Whole streets in Millers Point where nobody lives; investors with 30, 50, 100 listings running an accommodation business. Her view: if it's your primary residence, let it out as much as you like. But if it's the second, third, investment property — while people can't find a place to rent — the homes we've already built should be used as homes. "If you want to open a hotel, do it — but play by the rules. Even one or two hundred extra listings on realestate.com next week would be life-changing for renters."

On density done well, she pointed to Green Square: incredibly dense, but delivered over 20 years with the library, the aquatic centre, open space and childcare negotiated alongside the towers — not thrust on people all at once. "When council can negotiate, we get the density and the beautiful library. What I don't agree with is planning processes that bypass the council and the community to chase manufactured numbers that sound good coming out of the Premier's mouth."

And on the crisis itself: "Anyone who says there's a quick fix is full of it, frankly." It's supply and perverse taxation settings and workforce and the economy. Her interest is in the small things that take pressure off now — short-term rental regulation first — plus protecting the community's ability to participate, and creative, fair solutions that respect both the people who've sunk their lives into where they live and the generations of Sydneysiders to come. "I don't want to live in a city that's just full of rich people with heaps of assets."

Questions from the floor

▶ 1:04:01

What powers does council have under the State Significant process? "The short answer is: none," Jess said. "We're out of it."

"If there isn't a crisis in luxury housing, why do developers need incentives?" A question Jess admitted she'd never been asked, and passed to Tom, whose one-minute answer: right now, the cost of construction for most buildings is higher than the sale price of the apartments — interest rates, construction costs, developer contributions — and builders are going bankrupt everywhere. A viable construction sector, he argued, is also the precondition for building social housing.

Jess added the question she keeps asking the state: land cost is the killer, and the City got a fully affordable tower on Gibbons Street near Redfern by consolidating its depots and providing the land to Lendlease at zero cost. The state owns and controls enormous landholdings — transport, maritime and more. "Why is the state not willing to do similar deals to unlock state land — our land — and incentivise the kinds of development we actually need? Governments are people. Council's land is your land — $17.5 billion of assets held in custodianship for the community. I wonder sometimes why the state government appears to be working more as a real estate agent and less as a custodian."

Peter Sheridan on the economics of "luxury": a real-estate friend reports the glut of three- and four-bedders without views is already proving hard to sell. Where the money really is, is views: at the Chimes, he estimated the top three penthouse-style apartments alone could fetch around $20 million each — $60 million against a total build cost of roughly $80 million — while the 15-year "affordable" studios cost the developer perhaps $4–5 million in forgone rent before they get to sell them. "If you can get your extra floors and you can get views, the profits are incredible."

Poor doors. An audience member described a Melbourne report of an affordable-housing resident barred from her building's pool and roof garden because she "doesn't pay the levies." Does that happen here? It can, Jess said — which is why the City and tier-one providers prefer dedicated affordable buildings run by a single not-for-profit provider, rather than a scattering of affordable units inside a full-fee building with all the strata pain that brings. Mark Skelsey added that he'd seen a proposed development in Mosman with a separate "poor door," and a recently approved North Sydney development where affordable-housing residents won't be able to access the communal facilities other residents enjoy. "I think it's a significant concern for our society and it needs attention from government."

Who audits affordable housing eligibility? A questioner cited a Bondi Junction "affordable" listing at $950 a week requiring an income around $86,000 — take-home roughly $1,100. Who checks the criteria, the cronyism risk, ongoing eligibility, and developer–tenant relationships? Jess explained the City's definition requires tier-one not-for-profit providers with boards, transparent processes and bonds held with the Rental Bond Board — but said that when the Auditor briefed council she asked exactly what mechanisms police the state's definition, including developer-controlled special purpose vehicles, "and I didn't get much clarity." Her worry, only half tongue-in-cheek: a yield-maximising developer could set up its own vehicle and quietly put "affordable" apartments on Airbnb at three times the rent. "It would be simpler if there was one definition, one set of rules, full transparency. The real tragedy of that Bondi example is that at '25 per cent below market,' nobody on the affordable housing register can actually afford it — so to the best of my knowledge, a lot of those apartments sit empty. Is this a housing crisis that will be solved by supply, or one that requires a more equitable distribution of floor space?" Tom later added that community housing providers are audited by the Registrar of Community Housing, who checks tier-one, -two and -three providers against their mandates — a relatively recent but welcome development.

On language. Patrick, a long-term Potts Point resident, objected to the terms creeping into the debate: "poor door," and especially "in-fill" — which he felt reduces people eligible for affordable housing to the leftover portion of a luxury building. Stacey clarified the planning meaning — in-fill simply describes development within existing urban form, not the cheap floors of a tower — but acknowledged the deeper point: developers typically hand over one- and two-bedroom units whose rent-to-income criteria almost nobody can match, when the desperate shortage in affordable housing is actually three- and four-bedders for families.

"Detracting" heritage classifications. An audience member described discovering that ordinary Art Deco blocks across Elizabeth Bay, Potts Point and Kings Cross are classed by the City as "detracting" from heritage — and asked whether that hands developers a demolition excuse. Jess undertook to follow up with Greens councillor Sylvie Ellsmore and come back with facts. Peter Sheridan added context: it's the post-war buildings that were blanket-classified as detracting; the Preservation Group raised it with Clover Moore about three years ago and was promised it would be rectified — "three years later, nothing has happened. And the first line of the development application for the Chimes was that the City of Sydney classes this building as detracting — and therefore we're doing you a favour by pulling it down."

So what do we do? Challenged that the night had been long on problems and short on a plan, Jess pointed to the City's recent housing discussion paper — a proactive attempt to anticipate the growth numbers coming and spread them equitably so no single community bears the brunt. One idea she highlighted: allowing two Torrens titles on one slim block in low-density heritage conservation areas (Surry Hills, Glebe, Alexandria) with rear-lane access — doubling density without touching heritage character. "If you haven't engaged with that paper, please do — and if you've got ideas, put them forward." From the floor: "If we consider housing a right, we have to stop talking about it as a market product."

Cooperative housing. Mark Skelsey reminded the room that the Victoria Street squatters of the 1970s — Wendy Bacon and assorted anarchist activists among them — ran the street as a commune for six months and championed cooperative housing: government-supported, tenant-managed and tenant-organised. It remains a sadly tiny share of our housing stock. "If we want to invest more into housing, we can develop alternative models. We don't need to be stuck with the existing paradigm."

Empty CBD offices. With so many people working from home, why isn't empty office space helping the housing crisis? A worthy option to explore, Jess said, though the conversions are technically hard — deep floor plates, no light to the middle. She recalled the A New Normal Sydney project, which invited developers, architects and designers to reimagine the city — including architect Dave Neustein's lovely idea that the CBD's offices might be to this generation what warehouses were to the last. But alongside the technical fix, "we really need to sort out the financing and the ownership — otherwise we risk perpetuating a system where a small group of people have a lot and a large group are locked out."

Woolloomooloo. Who will stand up for the social housing down the hill, with the tri-level agreement over the estate now at its end? Will it go the way of Millers Point — preserved, pretty, and turned into Airbnbs? The answer from the panel: independent MP Alex Greenwich is working hard and in constant dialogue with Housing Minister Rose Jackson to secure a good outcome, and whatever the City can do to support that, it will.

Corruption. An audience member — after establishing her long history on Victoria Street, and offering the night's best aside — asked the forward question: with so many vested interests and fingers in pies across development, strata management and government, what can we do about corruption-busting at every level? Jimmy's answer: "Keep an eye on the Supreme Court next month — 24 August. The previously mentioned strata company is facing criminal charges. Changes are happening. They're just happening very slowly."

The resolution

▶ 1:29:20

Jo Holder, speaking on behalf of the 2011 Residents' Association, proposed that the meeting pass a resolution: support for more genuinely social housing from all three levels of government, and — following the ABC Four Corners program — a strong recommendation to the federal and state housing ministers for an urgent review of "affordable housing" provisions, whose loopholes have made the term almost meaningless. Affordable should mean in perpetuity and linked to income, not market — because the current settings are driving demolitions, evictions and, remarkably for one of the densest places in Australia, a falling population. "We are losing our friends and our neighbours, and it's got to stop."

Jess offered to turn the meeting's resolution into a notice of motion for the August council meeting. Jimmy then put the resolution to the room:

This meeting supports the principle that there be an urgent review of federal and state guidelines to ensure no net loss of affordable housing; that new affordable units remain discounted in perpetuity and tied to income, not market; and that there be no sidestepping of these requirements through declarations of state significance.

Carried — unanimously.

A final questioner asked how to get the resolution to Planning Minister Paul Scully. Jess was frank about the politics: petitions from an independent-held inner-city electorate don't move a minister in another seat. The more effective play is to build alliances with communities in government-held electorates — because these problems aren't unique to the Cross — and make it an issue in their seats. "The council will put the resolution through; Clover will send a letter, Alex will send a letter, and we'll get a letter back. I'm not fully confident much will happen — but strata reform in particular is ripe, it's hurting everyone, and people in Paul Scully's electorate are just as concerned as you are. In 10 or 20 years everyone is going to be a bit like the City of Sydney — 80 per cent of us already live in apartments. It's incumbent on us to exemplify what good apartment living looks like. If we can figure out the strata problem here, we can help a lot of other communities too."

And with the sticky-note questions held over for next time — "send them in print so we can read them" — Jimmy wrapped a remarkable night.

With thanks to all our speakers — Jimmy Thomson, Martin Tuck, Mark Skelsey, Dr Michael Tan, Dr Peter Sheridan AM, Stacey Miers, Tom Forrest and Deputy Lord Mayor Jess Miller — to Paul on the raffle, to everyone who donated to the Wayside Chapel, and to the room that stayed, argued and voted.