Paula Masselos, the former director of SBS Radio is running for local government.
The Labor Party supported candidate is up against 8 other party supported candidates and several independent candidates for the Waverly Seat.
Ms Masselos is hoping to win the Lawson Ward seat that includes the affluent areas of Bondi Junction, Bronte Beach and Bondi Beach.
With a high profile career centered on multicultural issues, Masselos is hoping to use the council position if elected to help the community she has been living in for more than 30 years.
“It’s a place I’ve always loved and I’ve been very actively involved at a community level; I feel like I should be giving something back,” Ms Masselos says of Bronte.
Initially, she was reluctant to take up the campaign, with her current position as director of Strategic Communications at Cultural Partners taking up a lot of her time.
“When I was actually asked to run, I had a serious think about it. If you’ve been working for your community, then not to be accepting this sort of honour is hypocritical,” she told Neos Kosmos.
If she wins office, she hopes to tackle big issues like overdevelopment, late night drinking, and conserving open space.
Bondi has been notorious for drunken violence in the past few years, and Masselos hopes to work in partnership with the public and the hotels in the area.
“I’m not anti-hotel, but they have to understand they’re within a residential area and they’re part of the community and need to be considerate,” she says.
Disgruntled by the overdevelopment of the area, Ms Masselos is standing up for the small business owners and hopes to maintain the community feeling of the different villages.
“I want to be able to protect [the community atmosphere] by keeping our local butchers and local chemists, doctors, greengrocers. Rather than have everything turn into a cafe.
That diversity is very important because it provides community anchors,” she says.
Her time as SBS Radio head gave her time to sharpen her corporate and budget skills to improve the national broadcaster, and hopes to use those skills in government.
“It was an interesting time,” she says about SBS Radio.
“I had almost 350 staff, I had a budget of $20 million. It was a national network and I grew the network while I was there and restructured to try and make the whole thing hum a lot better and really try and improve the programming to ensure that other segments of each community had an opportunity”.
Now on the campaign trail for the September 8 elections, Masselos is starting to understand the role she might be taking on.
Her work will be directly in the public eye, and any mistakes will be very apparent.
“You’re far more accountable, because the people are right there. You don’t have that distance you get with State and Federal.
You actually have more power for change. If it’s wielded wisely, you can do some really good things,” she says.