Meet the Mayor – Adelaide Hills’ Jan-Claire Wisdom

Dr Jan-Claire Wisdom was born in Northern Europe and educated in Britain, where she lived until emigrating to Australia in 1991.

She has a background in tertiary education and military service, and was first elected to the Adelaide Hills Council in 2010, becoming mayor in 2018.

The council is home to 40,000 people in communities spread across an area of nearly 800 square kilometres to Adelaide’s east.

Q: What does your typical mayoral working day look like?

There is no typical day for me which is part of
the fascination of
the role.

Aside from my role as
Mayor of the Adelaide Hills Council I am also a director on the LGA of South
Australia
Board, the Southern and Hills Local
Government Association, the Greater Adelaide Region of Councils, and until
recently on the State Libraries
Board.

My only other occupation now is as an adjunct Research Fellow in
the Business School of
a local university.

Generally, I reserve Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday for office-based work and local meetings. Thursday and Friday are for other Board and MP meetings, and weekends can include hosting or attending community events.

Q: What is the best aspect of
your job?

Variety, strategic thinking, and community engagement.

I also like having a diverse team – I
am always fascinated
by the different perspectives people
bring to the decision-making process.

Q: What is the worst aspect of your job?

To be honest I can’t think of a “worst” aspect, but the most frustrating aspect is the State Government’s attitude to local government.

Cost shifting,
not
matching federal funding opportunities, and the hypocrisy of making accountability demands of LG
that are not reflected in
state government.

Q: What is the most rewarding project you have worked on during your time in local government?

The Cudlee Creek Bushfire because I learnt so much and got so very close to the community and our council staff.

It
was also the one community issue that I had dreaded
for
years, both as
a resident and as an elected member.

So facing it head-on just a year after becoming Mayor was very instructive and reinforced my resilience. I’d spent 10 years in the army reserves and that mindset experience was both instinctive and helpful.

Our communities were magnificent in the way
they supported one another and it was an honour to be able to help them.

Q: Your council is among the many that bore the brunt of
the Black Summer bushfires. What are the lessons, looking ahead, for disaster preparedness and mitigation at
the
local level?

We [AHC] spent 2019 building an emergency management team with supporting protocols and systems. It is a decentralised rather than a dedicated permanent team, and forms when certain triggers occur.

The
Cudlee Creek Fire was its first major
challenge and it operated really well in conjunction with the local CFS,
the LGASA’s own
Functional
Support Group and
neighbouring councils.

We are sharing this
experience with other councils
around the State and I
would encourage
all councils to put a priority on being prepared to function in an
emergency.

Another important
preparation is developing community capacity to operate independently in
an emergency when main roads
and utility services are cut off.

We call this our Community Ready program and it is in its early stages. In the short term, it means ongoing community education but in the longer term it needs to be absorbed into planning. For example, so that sport and community facilities are built with the maximum flexibility in the design to be multi-purpose.

Another
critical area that needs private, federal and
state investment is
the
improved performance, capacity and operational
resilience of digital and other telecommunications.

Q: The coronavirus pandemic has created serious financial headaches for councils. What can be done longer-term to ensure local government funding is adequate
to provide the services
residents, businesses and communities expect.

Unlike many other councils AHC gets 80 percent of its income from residential rates and has less Covid impact from loss of fee and service income or business rates. This means our Long Term Financial Plan must be sustainable.

The
biggest threat to this
is state-proposed
rates capping.
It has proven not to work elsewhere and can result in huge long-term infrastructure investment and maintenance
backlogs.

 (I do wonder how
much
this contributed to the bushfire
recovery
outcomes in the Eastern States
where capping has been in
place for a long time.)

It
is essential that local democracy prevails
and
that communities can have a say in what
they want and how much
they
are prepared to pay for
it.

Q: What is the best piece of advice you have received regarding local community service as an elected official?

I can’t isolate a
particular piece of advice. I attended
a Governor’s Leadership
Foundation course a
few years ago and the personal
skills and exposure to other people’s perspectives has
been invaluable.

Operating on the ground at the local level can mean getting weighed down by detail and the noise of squeaky wheels rising to a crescendo. When this happens, I ask myself: “Is the sky going to fall in?” and I try to refocus by reminding myself to “chase the dream and not the competition”.

Q: If someone standing for council were to ask you for advice, how would you respond?

I am a believer in active participation and developing councillors as community leaders.
This means
having a platform to indicate where your
interests and values lie so residents can identify with you.

I don’t believe councillors are simply a mouthpiece for a particular community – they have to have something to
offer in themselves.

Councillors
need to listen
to ratepayers and be prepared to remain calm
and respectful under stress. They need to enjoy connecting and learning from others, to ask questions, weigh the evidence and make decisions in the best interest of the community.

My personal style is to lead
by consensus
not compromise or coercion. Candidates need
to be prepared
to develop a high-level of self-awareness and put in a lot of
time to reading and thinking.

Essentially what you get out of
being a councillor depends on what you are prepared to put in.
You
will need courage, compassion, good communication and a healthy dose of
humility.

Q: What is your favourite place, and why?

What a lovely question! I’m an immigrant from the northern hemisphere and very much appreciate my adopted home here in the Adelaide Hills. Home for me is on top of a north-facing ridge where I can see down and across a valley of majestic gums and stringy-barks.

Although just 20 minutes from Adelaide’s CBD, wild kangaroos live just 50m away, and the garden is never empty of koalas and parrots. We live among vineyards with the beach also just 30 minutes away.

I have another favourite council landscape which is a country road that winds through a
steep gorge from the
city through Kenton Valley to a town called
Lobethal – the centre of
the recent bushfires.

The sheer beauty of this landscape takes the traveller across the spectrum of the Adelaide Hills landscape – deep gorges, steep climbs, winding roads, spectacular views, rolling hills, vineyards, orchards, and little townships from Mt Lofty to Mt Torrens.

This is evidence of the
continuing agrarian landscape
that as a council
we
are working to get listed
as World Heritage.

Q: How would you reflect on the
difference that you’ve made in your community and local
government in general?

Have I made a difference? That’s
really for others
to
judge at the ballot box.

I have a progressive rather than conservative mindset and I believe that I have helped direct the council in that direction. I see opportunities everywhere!

My “platform” when I joined the AHC 10 years ago was to raise the profile of arts and culture and I have done this and shown it to be an essential part of community capacity-building and wellbeing.

I also campaigned on advocating for bushfire mitigation, the critical importance of conservation of
our
unique biodiverse environment, and for
council
to play a greater
part in the local economy and tourism. I believe I have been faithful to those commitments. The ballot box will tell!