Barry de JONG (above) says Melville is too arrogant to entrust with East Fremantle’s future, which is why he’s running for town mayor.

“In conversations with Melville, they started using the language, ‘we will look after you’,” the Preston Point ward councillor says. “And don’t worry you will be ok.’ It’s incredibly patronising.

“We are self-sustainable, we are debt-free, we punch well above our weight. I have referred many times to East Fremantle as a boutique council—we sit in a nice little niche, we have our own identity.”

He’d prefer the town be left alone but if it must merge, he says there’s a synergy with neighbouring Fremantle.

“The language from Freo was they were talking about a partnership, and there were talks about the deputy mayor coming from East Fremantle.

“The other problem with Melville is you would have four competing activity centres: Fremantle, Canning Bridge, Murdoch and Garden City—which is going to double in size. So Fremantle is trying to revitalise and regenerate how would it do that if you had four competing activity centres? Doesn’t make a whole heap of sense for us to go east.”

The 51-year-old says if elected mayor he’ll donate the mayoral allowance of roughly $12,000 to establish an art award.

“One of the things that binds community is arts—music, arts all those sorts of things. I don’t want it to be called Barry de Jong, it will be called the East Fremantle community arts award.

“And my mayoral allowance is going to fund that.”

An air traffic control manager at Jandakot airport, he wants the town to have a bigger and better social media footprint.

“We don’t have a Facebook page and as mayor I would tweet. If people want to post they are not happy, I’m good with that. We can’t respond to people’s concerns if we are not hearing them. And social media is always going to be a small part of that.

“There is nothing worse than a dead social media page or an inactive social media page.”

His rivals for the job are acting mayor Alex Wilson—a council colleague—and former mayor Jim O’Neill, who’s seeking to come out of self-imposed retirement.

“[Mr O’Neill’s] claiming when he was the mayor he was responsible for the underground power and yellow tops bins,” Cr de Jong says.

“But if you checked with [former mayor] Andrew Smith on that you would find it was him

“And at the electors’ meeting earlier in the year [Mr O’Neill] was yelling at people. That’s not communication. It beggars belief why anyone would vote for him.”

by BRENDAN FOSTER