Time to reflect on 21 years’ service
RETIRING Sutherland Shire councillor Ken McDonell joined the Sydney Water Board half a century ago, aged 14, as junior clerk.
In those days, if the men digging trenches could not work in the rain they went home without pay.
This didn’t sit well with his natural sense of justice.
By the time he left the organisation more than 40 years later he had been elected to the board itself, voted on as the workers’ representative with a well-earned reputation as a man who would fight for what was right and who wasn’t afraid of a little hard work.
Nothing has changed.
As his last shire council meeting finished on Monday night, Cr McDonell, 69, was wishing he could continue the community work he had started 21 years ago.
But instead of testing himself with the electorate one more time he was taken out of the race before it began, the victim of a Labor Party preselection challenge.
The party wanted younger blood and Cr McDonell wouldn’t run against the organisation he’d been dedicated to for so long.
It was a bitter way to end more than two decades of involvement with local government.
“I was pretty honoured to be approached to run when I did in 1987,” he said.
“We have done a lot in that time and 21 years has gone very fast.
“I guess what does make me angry, when I think about it all coming to an end, is that I was ambushed. I was told a month before the preselection I would be opposed.
Ken is a victim of Labor party machine politics. The ALP do not care what the electorate thinks or want, the ALP only cares what the strongest Labor faction wants. Don’t waste your vote on September 13, vote for a candidate not held hostage to Labor’s undemocratic factional warfare, vote 1 Darrin Hodges!