Getting to know your new Mayor

It’s been a little over four months since Hannah Fitzhardinge was elected Mayor of Fremantle, but her connection to the city goes way back to when she was enrolled in the fledgling Beehive Montessori School near Leighton Beach as a three-year-old in 1980.

“To start with mum used to drive me there from our home in Victoria Park, but later she bought a place in North Freo, which was a pretty working class, run-down area at the time. It was much more wharfies and Homeswest housing in the area back then,” Hannah said.

“We used to paddle out to the sandbar in the middle of Rocky Bay and hang out on our boogie boards. There was a lot of riding bikes around and just playing on the cliffs growing up, so we had amazing freedom.”

Back then, becoming the Mayor of Fremantle wasn’t something the young Hannah ever contemplated.

“It’s fair to say I didn’t. I didn’t really get interested in politics until I went to Curtin and studied journalism. It was the time of the waterfront dispute and I remember covering that for the student newspaper and thinking at the time ‘I’ve got a view on this. I want to join the picket line’, which I ultimately did. I realised journalism probably wasn’t going to give me an opportunity to take positions on things or get engaged in the political process.”

Spurred on by that experience, while still at university Hannah started working in the electorate office of a Labor MP, which led to a job with Opposition Leader Geoff Gallop, who ultimately became Premier in 2001.

After three years supporting policy for the creative industries and e-government in the Premier’s office she made the jump into the private sector, working in corporate affairs for companies including Woodside and CITIC Pacific, before changing tack again after the birth of her only child Edie to become a professional coach and facilitator.

But running for council still wasn’t something on Hannah’s radar.

“I’ve run women in leadership programs for over a decade now, and there’s an interesting thing about women being happy to put someone else forward for leadership roles but not necessarily seeing opportunities for themselves.

“When Josh Wilson was elected to the Federal Parliament in 2016, I started getting some phone calls about the vacancy in Beaconsfield Ward.

“There were only two women on the council out of 13 elected members, and I was thinking I could go out and find another good woman to run. Dave Coggin, the then Deputy Mayor, came to me and said ‘you’re running this women in leadership program, so why are you saying no to this opportunity?’, which was a good point.

“Running for Mayor was a bit like that as well. There were people in the community who saw that potential in me that I didn’t necessarily see myself. That said, I was hugely excited about the opportunity to achieve great things for—and with—our community.”

Hannah believes her previous experience has provided a good grounding for her role as Mayor.

“Through all of that I’ve learnt a lot about myself. I know a lot about how to manage myself, and that’s been quite useful given the stressful potential of this job. I do a lot of things to make sure I’m whole and sane and focussed, but I also know what I need to feel satisfied in my work. I know that I have to feel like I’m achieving things and getting stuff done.

“I also think that over the course of my career, I’ve learned a fair bit about people, how they work and how to engage with people, and I genuinely enjoy it. I’m an extrovert and I feel better when I’m around people, listening, learning, collaborating.”

Hannah has inherited the mayoral chains at a time when Freo is in the midst of a major transition, which she says presents big challenges but also big opportunities.

“Putting aside the COVID challenges, which you can’t understate, the more structural challenges are still around building a larger population in our CBD that really supports all the great things that people are doing here.

“The City has invested heavily in the CBD and it’s paid off in terms of the $1.8 billion development pipeline and how much everyone loves the new Civic Centre, but you go out into the suburbs and you do see that there’s quite a lot of run down infrastructure, particularly around sporting clubs and some of the basic infrastructure like footpaths and drainage that need a lot of love. We’re going to have to have a back-to-basics focus in what we deliver.

“A big job for this year will be updating our Strategic Community Plan, which will give us the chance to have those community conversations on what to do about things like the vacant spaces in the CBD, creating a genuine university town, identifying the future economic and community opportunities as the port leaves, and addressing climate change, resilience and adaptation.

“These are all seriously important issues confronting our city but, if we get it right, they also present the opportunity for some big wins which will really set us up for an exciting future.”