How a cancer diagnosis hastened this councillor’s timeline to make a real impact

Welcome to Brisbane Times’ CityChats interview series. This week, Ryan Murphy, the chair of infrastructure at Brisbane City Council, tells us about his cancer journey, as well as April Fools’ Day, and that Glee guy. We meet Murphy at North Quay ferry terminal, a short walk from his office at Brisbane City Hall.

Having previously served as the council’s chair for transport, he’s all too familiar with CityCats. What got you into politics? I thought I could do a better job than the guy who was doing it [then].

He’d been the councillor for 30 years and I put my hand up to run against him. I won that election by just 2000 votes, so it was very close, and then I won the next one by more. I’m still here about 14 years later.

I’m here because I love the job. I think serving the people and being very close to the people in local government and their problems is one of the most rewarding and gratifying levels of government to work at. I see state and federal politicians, they’re often caught up in parliament or just writing letters to ministers ...

local government councils actually get to effectively act sometimes as middle managers in their community, actually connecting the problem with the solution and the needs. It’s a very, very good and gratifying role. You’re known as a councillor for your sense of humour, including your posts on April Fools’ Day.

How do you come up with those? That’s really all in my tortured brain. I think we should take our jobs seriously as politicians, but not ourselves, and I think too many politicians take themselves too seriously.

I think April Fools’ Day is like our Hunger Games Day – it’s our one day to have a crack at each other over things. Not many people do it, but I like to do it. We can get a little bit too caught up in ourselves.

Have any of your prank posts come true? Not that I can think of. We haven’t annexed the Redlands yet.

No itty bitty cats? We had the KittyCats. We were looking for a name for these little small catamarans we were bringing up after the wooden ferries.

We had to take them off the water and it was like an episode of Utopia, we were up there in the building trying to pick the name for these things, and I can’t remember who it was, but someone came up with the name CityKitties, and we were like, “oh, it’s just not right”. And then we flipped it. We didn’t have a focus group or do any research, we just knew then and there in the transport team that that was going to be the name.

On a more serious note, you’ve been open about your cancer diagnosis. Has that changed how you approach your job at all? It has, actually.

After you win that first election and you’re elected, you’re very much worried that you might never get re-elected and so a lot of politicians get caught up in this election-cycle trap where they don’t want to do things too boldly because they’re worried that maybe they won’t get re-elected in the future or people won’t support them. For me, the cancer scare really made me wonder. It might not be losing an election, it might be just losing my life or something else.

I might get hit by a bus or a car and life’s over the next day. It’s really, I suppose, hastened my timeline to make a real impact in the time that I’ve got in the role that I have. And so we are doing a lot of things very fast in my portfolio at the moment, whether that’s how we surface the roads, how we trim the trees, how we fix potholes, our works management system, our ability to communicate with our customers – the residents of the city of Brisbane – about how and what we’re doing, the use of AI and operational efficiencies.

We are building a team here that is getting the city ready to host the Olympic Games in 2032 and there’s no time to waste. If there was a pipe dream you had for infrastructure in the city, what would it be? It’d be all of our Metro extensions delivered on time and on budget before 2032.

We’ve seen the ability of just a large electric bus to make a massive difference in the quality of public transport in this city. And we know how to do it now, there’s really no R&D left to do. Now it’s about rolling it out, and we know that it has a really strong benefit-cost ratio to the city.

We could be talking about light rail and heavy rail for another 100 years, but we could get Metro done in the next six years if we’re really careful about putting together a strong case. We’re going to need to work with the state government and our federal funding partners to make it happen. It’s going to require a bit of vision.

You said that when you got diagnosed, you weren’t scheduled for a test for 14 years. Do you think that’s something that needs to change? I do, and I understand that the federal government is about to release the new testing guidelines, but we haven’t seen them yet.

I’m very hopeful that they will bring the age down to 45, and 50, but the big challenge is that a lot of men don’t even know about this test and they don’t even know that prostate cancer is someth