Our cities do the PR work for our country: Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani

Larry SchlesingerDecember 8, 2020

A “distracted” Rudy Giuliani, the former high-profile New York mayor, has told attendees at the Property Council of Australia annual congress in Sydney today of the role cities play as public relations ambassadors for their country.

Guiliani was the keynote speaker at the conference, with delegates paying up to $3,000 to hear him speak.

"Our cities are the public relations for our country," Guiliani said, according to tweets from those who heard him speak at the congress.

Guiliani was addressing the congress on how policy develoment and leadership can transform cities.

He said he had transformed New York City through long-term planning and decision making.

He added that the homelessness was a reflection of how a city respected its people.

Guiliani was mayor of New York from 1994 to 2001 and said at a press conference ahead of his address that he was “somewhat distracted” by what was going in his home country, his city and region following the devastation of Hurricane Sandy.

He also said that while it would be expensive to rebuild areas devastated by the storm, it would help the local economy.

“The devastation of the storm has been catastrophic,” he told Channel 10.

“Whenever I was mayor or just a private citizen the real loss was human life.

“Unfortunately there was significant loss of human life.”

Guiliani says property damage and the loss of profit because business and the stock exchange has closed can all be made up, but not human life.

But he stressed that New Yorkers are resilient and had already “been through so much” – referring to the September 11 tragedy.

“Twice as many people live in Lower Manhattan today then did before September 11,” Guiliani said, citing a statistic mentioned often by current New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.

This has been the case, he says, despite there being 15 known threats to attack New York since September 11, including a recent plot to blow up the Federal Reserve building in Lower Manhattan.

Larry Schlesinger

Larry Schlesinger was a property writer at Property Observer

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