Several new councillors are beginning a political career, although not all are strangers to the world of politics.
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Merimbula native and Dulcie's Cottage bar owner Councillor Mitchell Nadin, who is enthusiastically looking to see the shire grow economically, hit the headlines in 2012 while a cadet with The Australian.
The now 30-year-old, who has had a long-term interest in politics, said his time with the newspaper had been an “incredible insight into politics, business and the relationship with media”.
"It also taught me how to listen and how to decipher large amounts of information," he said.
Cr Nadin was present at the now infamous Sydney Young Liberals fundraising dinner hosted by the Sydney University Liberal Club, where broadcaster Alan Jones told the audience then prime minister Julia Gillard’s father had died of shame due to her political views.
The former Eden high school student was criticized in mainstream media for not telling his editors of his presence until the story broke, although he claimed at the time there were rules requiring sources be kept unidentified at the event, a claim he had anonymously passed on to Fairfax journalist Kate McClymont on the night.
The event was secretly recorded by fellow News Ltd journalist Jonathan Marshall, who broke the story and later said he had not heard mention of the stipulation, either on the night or on his recording.
Mr Jones later publicly apologised, saying his words were "unacceptable".
When Broadwater’s Cr Robyn Bain ran as an Independent for Eden-Monaro in the 1996 Federal Election, it was under her maiden name Loydell, before her marriage to one-time National Association of Forest Industries executive Robert Bain.
Born in Nimmitabel, the logging industry was part of her daily life and the controversial forest debate drew her to politics during a career as a forestry lobbyist.
“I started to stand up for what we were,” she said.
Cr Bain finished third behind the Liberal Party’s Gary Nairn and Labor’s Jim Snow, and said her motivation to run in the election was to show an Independent with a pro-logging campaign could garner more votes in the region than the Greens.
In 1995 she organised a five-day truck blockade of Parliament House, with almost 500 trucks involved.
She was a founding member of the Forest Protection Society, initiated in the mid 1980s with support from the Forest Industry Campaign Association despite being listed as an Environmental Protection Organisation in the 1994 Directory of Australian Associations.
The former chair of the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network, a lobby group for industry on issues of climate change, appeared on a 2006 episode of the ABC’s Four Corners program titled The Greenhouse Mafia, where she denied ever hearing of the term.