A Clarence councillor has been reprimanded after a code of conduct panel found he bullied and harassed the deputy mayor during last year’s Pembroke election campaign.
According to the panel’s report, Tony Mulder treated deputy mayor Allison Ritchie unfairly and caused offence and embarrassment across four incidents between February and May 2025.
Both councillors were candidates in the May 2025 Legislative Council election for Pembroke, which the report said tied the incidents together.
The first incident was a Facebook comment accusing Ritchie of taking credit for street sealing she had nothing to do with.
The second was a remark at a workshop, where Mulder said he supported electing deputy mayors – “just not this deputy mayor”.
The third involved a series of questions about who paid for Ritchie’s community meeting notices, while the fourth was a late-night email accusing her and the mayor of lacking integrity.
Ritchie’s complaint also alleged Mulder had unlawfully removed her election signage, but the panel dismissed that allegation, finding both councillors genuinely believed they had legal authority over the posters.
The panel said the upheld comments, taken on their own, “may not seem too serious”.
But as a sequence, it found, they pointed to “a pattern of behaviour” that “could … only be characterised as bullying and harassment”.
The report said Mulder did not dispute the facts, but argued his conduct was “normal hurly burly” between two political candidates.
The panel imposed a reprimand. It rejected Ritchie’s call for a suspension as excessive and declined to order an apology, saying one would have “little or no meaning for him”.
Ritchie lodged the complaint on October 3, 2025. The council formally received and noted the finding at its meeting on Tuesday.
Speaking to the report, Ritchie said the process had never been about personalities but about standards.
“The way we treat each other matters,” she said.
Ritchie told the meeting she had been “subjected to some heinous events” since being elected.
“Those events have included homemade bombs being thrown through the windows of my property on two separate occasions, windows smashed in, my house set on fire while one of my children was inside,” she said.
Ritchie said the events were not connected to the report and were under ongoing police investigation, but she raised them to make a point about conduct.
“These are deeply serious incidents … but I raise them because the point is that the tone, the language and the conduct matters because when public discourse becomes personal and targeted, it contributes to the way the broader community thinks about us,” she said.
“It’s not healthy and it’s not safe.”
Mulder told the meeting he accepted the determination.
“I accept that I have crossed a line,” he said. “It’s a line that I thought is not where it ought to be but it is a line and I accept that I have crossed it.”
Mulder said he too had been the subject of “community vilification” and that others had said “infinitely worse things” about the deputy mayor during the campaign.
“And that is where I come from in the fact that these are, I would see as, part of the party of politics,” he said.
“Can we not, in an adversarial environment, even take a pot shot at someone without causing this amount of stress? The answer quite clearly is no.”
“Anyone else in the community can have a shot at them, any other candidate can, but not a fellow councillor.”
