I still remember the first time a councillor described to me, almost in passing, the abuse she’d copped that week over a development application, and how normal she made it sound. It was as though this was simply the price of the job now, and it’s stayed with me ever since as a marker of how much has quietly (and sometimes epically noisily) shifted.
Across Australia, councillors are reporting increasing levels of hostility, abuse and personal attack. What was once healthy and robust disagreement has, in far too many places, curdled into something genuinely corrosive, where public debate gives way to outrage. Suddenly we find that a difference of opinion is read as a personal failing. The legitimacy of an elected representative is being frequently tested, not through the contribution in council, but through ridicule, intimidation and plain hostility in the public domain.
Across Australia, we’ve spent a great deal of energy talking about the declining trust in institutions, and rather less talking about what happens when that distrust stops being abstract and starts being aimed, personally, at the individuals who are willing to serve.
Democracy depends on participation
Local government was never meant to be easy, and I don’t think many people who’ve been successfully elected ever expected it to be. Councillors are asked to weigh competing interests, make hard calls on the information provided by the organisation, and represent communities whose needs pull in every direction at once. In any democracy worth the name, disagreement is simply part of the furniture.
Abuse is not.
When people are attacked personally, simply for having put their hand up to serve, the damage doesn’t stop with them. It ripples outward and quietly discourages exactly the people our communities need most – the thoughtful ones, the capable ones, the ones who would have given their time and energy in good faith, but who now, understandably, may decide it isn’t worth it.
The cost of incivility
The cost rarely stays with the person on the receiving end, which is the part I think we underestimate. Incivility changes how people show up. It trades curiosity for defensiveness, and thoughtful deliberation for the false comfort of certainty. It slowly narrows the room until there’s no space left in it for complexity, nuance or genuine disagreement.
Eventually it reaches all the way into the decisions themselves, because people become less willing to hold a difficult position, less likely to voice a dissenting view, and increasingly inclined to simply avoid the conversation altogether. When fear enters the room, leadership usually leaves it.
Why women carry a heavier burden
While this abuse touches councillors of every background, women in these roles carry an additional layer of scrutiny and hostility, and it’s something I’ve watched up close for a very long time. It came up throughout a recent masterclass for members of the Australian Local Government Women’s Association, where the room explored not just the toll of incivility itself but ideas like the Queen Bee Phenomenon, and the particular pressure women feel operating inside cultures marked by conflict, exclusion or a level of scrutiny their male colleagues simply don’t experience in the same way.
The question is never whether women are resilient enough to withstand this. The real question is whether our councils are building the kind of cultures in which good leadership, of any gender, has any real chance of flourishing, particularly amongst and on behalf of the councillor body.
The leadership challenge
Councils invest a great deal of energy in governance, in strategy, in compliance, and rightly so. But far less attention tends to go to the quality of the relationships sitting around the council table itself, and I think that’s where the real work needs to be done.
Councillor’s interactions and confidence affects the culture of the community and the council itself. It informs how leaders disagree with one another, the way conflict gets handled, the way authority is worn, the way difference is navigated in the room, and every one of those small behaviours sets the tone for everything and everyone that follows underneath it.
If we’re serious about strengthening our councils, about restoring community confidence, and about encouraging genuinely capable people to put their hand up for office, then we have to get equally serious about the quality of leadership culture we’re building around the councillor table. Because rage might win attention. It has never once built trust. And without trust, neither leadership nor democracy has much of a chance.
This article was originally published by Government News on 12 October 2026
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