It’s probably not going to happen but I’d give my right nut to see Vicki Howard turfed out of Brisbane City Council at today’s municipal elections.

Bugger it, take both – they’re of no longer any use, anyway – if the good citizens of Central Ward finally call time on Ms Howard’s time in council.

Why so nasty, I think I can hear my loyal reader ask? Look, from everything I hear, Vicki Howard has been a hard-working local councillor who rocks up to all the important events in the ward – I hear she’d attend the opening of a wound – and works her patch very well. She could be very well liked locally, for all I know, and that might be reflected in tonight’s count.

But I’ve never forgiven her for all the things she agreed to go along with to get her bum on her council chamber seat in the first place.

Both sides of politics probably use this sort of tactic, but the LNP advertising before the 2012 municipal poll that described Vicki as “the Lord Mayor’s representative in Central Ward” was red hot. As the CBD community paper The Independent that I was proudly part of at the time said, it was the perfect pitch for a ward that historically had a large turnover of voters every four years.

And surely any residents of the ward were entitled to believe that Vicki was already the local councillor, considering her big role in air-conditioning hundreds of the council’s bus fleet and introducing the CityGlider bus service. No wonder Vicki was subsequently reelected – sorry, we meant to say elected!

And if any of you BUGers out there don’t believe that whole process was largely to plant in local residents’ minds that Vicki Howard was already in City Hall, well, do we have some bridges to sell you!

But for The Independent at the time and this august organ since, it was Vicki Howard’s total and unequivocal support for the LNP Queensland’s ruthless rorting of the city council’s cleat, shown above at left in an ad placed, in all places, on the front page of The Independent at the time.

She would have known it was totally against council rules for that cleat to be used for political purposes. Her desire to become a councillor overpowered any commitment she might have had to playing open, honest and ethical politics.

For make no mistake here. Along with Quirk and the LNP, Vicki Howard repeatedly told The Independent she did not use the council cleat. We repeatedly called bullshit on that! It is our firm view that Vicki Howard in 2014 and in BCC elections ever since, has broken both the letter and the spirit of council rules.

Since 2004, LNP Queensland has used the cleat as a powerful subliminal message to the residents of Brisbane. The LNP has the endorsement of City Council. The LNP is the council’s political partner of choice.

It didn’t take the full two decades since for the LNP to absorb the council’s IP and make it their own.

I repeat: Vicki Howard over the years has broken both the letter and the spirit of council rules. Her response over and over to The Independent parroted that of Lord Mayor Quirk and the LNP Qld at the time: “We do not use the council cleat.”

PURE, UNADULTERATED, BULLSHIT. As The Independent explained at the time.

Hence the hope I’ve expressed at the top of this post. Any councillor who without hesitation gladly goes along with breaking council rules to get elected has no right to expect her local people to always obey council rules and regulations. If she can’t, why should they?

Vicki Howard thoroughly deserves to be bundled, finally, out of local politics today.

Probably won’t happen and that’s a crying shame.

Don Gordon-Brown

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