source : the age
In the office of a mate last month, Liverpool mayor Ned Mannoun sat in front of a $130 corkboard covered with the faces of his political rivals, all connected by a web of arrows and string. With a half-empty mug of herbal tea, Mannoun wedged his elbows between two piles of folders that contained evidence he claimed would reveal “the cold, hard truth” about the council he ran.
In an incendiary, professionally produced video he posted to Facebook in the days before a crucial ward byelection, the first and only Liberal mayor of Liverpool City Council told voters about “the noise” coming from a litany of opponents: fellow councillors, two state MPs and a union official (who has begun the first steps of defamation proceedings).
He had promised to upload more videos. They never arrived. The corkboard, though, revealed enough: at Liverpool City Council, conspiracies abound.
In a level of government no stranger to chaos, Liverpool stands apart. Having gone through an unprecedented Office of Local Government public inquiry last year, it is teetering on the brink of administration, pending the agency’s recommendations. In January, the council’s deputy mayor Betty Green abruptly resigned.
Now she has revealed she left because of the “psychological mess” she was left in by the council’s “brutal, crass politics”.
Can Liverpool City Council survive its own leaders?
The home address that wasn’t
About three seconds of Mannoun’s video contained a screenshot of a NSW Electoral Commission donation disclosure that included an address linked to councillor-turned-state Labor MP Charishma Kaliyanda. The next day, Kaliyanda accused the mayor of doxxing her. Mannoun had “publicised my home address”, she said in a social media post, garnering thousands of reactions.
But that address was not, in fact, her home. Kaliyanda sold the property in 2021 and it is currently being rented, according to property records.
When asked about the discrepancy, Kaliyanda confirmed she no longer lived there. She said: “Given the level of attention this matter has attracted, and following discussions with NSW Police and Parliamentary Security, I won’t be engaging in further commentary on my personal details.
“What should not be lost here is the central issue. The mayor knowingly published private information relating to three female political opponents to tens of thousands of people in a highly charged environment.
“That decision was reckless.”
‘It got nasty’
The clearest example of that environment is the feud between Mannoun and conservative independent councillor Peter Ristevski – former business associates turned enemies.
Before entering politics, Mannoun ran a registered training organisation for hospitality and business traineeships around Liverpool, and Ristevski – who describes himself as “the 1 per cent accountant” – was contracted to do its numbers.
The pair’s relationship was “fine”, Mannoun told last year’s inquiry, when the pair were Liberal councillors in 2012. Then came Porkgate.
Under Mannoun’s mayoralty, the council had organised a series of interfaith events for its residents. Ristevski led the charge against them when his Orthodox Macedonian community became offended because pork, which Muslims and Jews cannot eat, was not included on the menu.
“I kid you not, that then caused a lot of problems,” said Peter Harle, the current deputy mayor and veteran of the council. “That’s the reason that the council started to fall apart halfway through, because of that interfaith dinner … Oh, it got nasty, and it’s been going on ever since.”
A defamation case pursued by Mannoun after Ristevski called him a “crim” failed in 2024 after the NSW District Court found the mayor couldn’t satisfy the requirement to prove Ristevski’s comment had caused serious harm to his reputation.
AI content goes viral
The duo’s heated rivalry deepened when Ristevski began using AI to target Mannoun on social media. In addition to posting photos of unmown lawns, traffic jams and filthy toilets managed by the council, Ristevski regularly posts Islamophobic content on Facebook targeting Mannoun’s Muslim faith. He refers to the mayor by his birth name, Nader.
“In the future, this mayor, will forever be known as JETSET SHEIKH NADER!” he wrote in a post about a recent visit Mannoun took to Saudi Arabia, accompanied by an AI-generated image of a pimple-faced mayor in a thawb, the long, white garment worn by men in that country.
Last month, Ristevski posted an AI-generated image showing Muslim men praying in the car park of a community centre in Chipping Norton, claiming without evidence that community centres were being used as prayer halls. He also “liked” several comments that suggested violence. Among the more than 600 comments left under the post, Ristevski liked comments that read: “nothing a Super Soaker full of petrol wouldn’t fix”; “so the plan is to rock up with super soakers and disruption [sic] the bs”; and “tear gas them”. To the last comment, he replied: “something must be done”.
Ristevski said he didn’t know it was a fake image when he was sent it but he “took it as kosher”. “I know it does happen,” he said. On liking comments about the remarks, he said: “Liking doesn’t mean liking. Liking means you’ve acknowledged the comments.”
Mannoun said of the online attacks: “As much as I try to live my life not thinking about him, every single day someone raises it with me … I’m sure if the recipient was someone else from another political party, they’d be raging.”
‘Brutal, crass politics’
The brutality of the feud has left Harle, the long-time councillor, pleading for the Office of Local Government to provide staff to oversee each council meeting. Harle replaced Betty Green, who resigned from the position in January after quitting Labor in October. When she left the council, she cited health reasons. But there was more to the story.
“My doctor said to me, ‘You have to make some decisions about your quality of life. You can’t go on like this.’ Did I want to resign? No, I didn’t, but I had no choice,” Green said.
She is speaking publicly for the first time to reveal the circumstances that led to her resignation.
“I spent 17 years in a feminist collective. I thought, ‘I can do politics’. But this kind of brutal, crass politics that is about destroying the other person, it just blows my mind,” she told the Herald. “I’m a pretty strong cookie, but if someone had said to me beforehand, ‘you’re going to end up in a psychological mess’, I would have laughed at them.”
Green, a veteran community services and domestic violence advocate in the south-west, broke party lines to vote against some of Ristevski’s motions, which Harle said were often either “illegal, illogical or just can’t be done”. The breaking point came in September, when Green broke caucus rules by accepting a nomination from the Liberals to install her as deputy mayor. The next day, the office of Premier Chris Minns and the party’s leadership were fielding calls from the United Services Union to expel her from the party.
Then the truck started appearing around Liverpool. Huge LED screens adorned the sides of the vehicle, authorised by the union, demanding her resignation.
“Betty Green was elected to uphold Labor values! You failed to uphold these values. Betty, good riddance,” one of the first trucks heralded, alongside a photo of her. Another called for her resignation from the council “so the people of Liverpool City can choose a candidate who is committed, not confused”.
“When the truck was going around, I ended up doing my shopping in another LGA,” Green said. “People look at you. I thought, ‘oh God, Betty, you’re losing your mind’. But public humiliation on the stress scale is equal to the loss of a spouse … I don’t think anyone who steps up to work for the community should be subjected to that.”
Kaliyanda, who served on council with Green before being elected to state parliament in 2023, said the saga was “one of those situations where at every point de-escalation could have been possible [but] it escalated”.
“I don’t think the union’s response necessarily helped de-escalate the situation,” she said, emphasising the personal toll on Green. “The tactics of the union are theirs … what made them think it was an appropriate way of prosecuting things, I can’t think what their process was.”
Steve Donley, the United Services Union manager who led the campaign against Green, declined to discuss the matter, citing future litigation. “The truth will come out eventually,” he said.
Green is devoting her post-council life to academic research about bullying in local government. Forty-two per cent of NSW female councillors wouldn’t recommend running for council because of the bullying and harassment they experienced, data shows.
She laments that over the past decade, the region she was elected to lead has stagnated, comparing it to Sydney Harbour’s tiny island, Fort Denison. “There’s a whole lot of activity around it but there’s nothing happening inside it.”
The Sydney Morning Herald has a bureau in the heart of Parramatta. Email parramatta@smh.com.au with news tips.
