Inner city mayors in AUS all suck. In Sydney they have some ultra-greenie, and here in Melbourne we have the semi-reasoably but still bad Lord Mayor John So. He's originally of Chinese descent, and has lived in Melbourne for decades, but he still has an extremely pronounced accent. I know people that have been in AUS for 5 years and have less of an accent. Half the time you can't understand him :S
In terms of actually doing the job, he's alright. Perception of crime is down, although non-violent crime is up in the CBD, as is drug-related crime. Services aren't worse, not really better either. There has been a massive residential boom in the area and they seem to be coping though, so I suppose it's all good. But he could do a lot better, imho. Especially if his constituents could understand him
My local mayor is another ultra-greenie. He's one of those leftwing idealists who think they can go into local gov't and actually make a difference. The only thing local councils do, except the CBD ones, is name streets and collect garbage, so what's he done? Introduce fines for non-recyclers and insisted that any new street names be named after prominent aborigines. If people directly elected the mayor, he'd never have gotten in, but the councillors do, and in our ward we only had one candidate, so basically...sigh. Once we didn't even have an candidates in our ward, so some 20 year old started a write-in campaign and won with about 600 votes out of a possible 10,000-because there weren't any candidates, it wasn't compulsory
