Councillor Chris Harris

Sydney put on a great welcome for World Youth Day and the City of Sydney did its bit to facilitate a lot of the practical requirements so that the event ran smoothly.

However, the State & Federal government funding of $160m and almost $3m from the City of Sydney meant that the Catholic Church, a very wealthy organization, was given favoured treatment. I do not agree that public funding on this scale should be provided to a private, non-inclusive, religious organisation. The Greens and several other groups in our diverse Sydney community who also took umbrage over some of what the Pope and the Catholic Church stand for or don’t stand for and a number of our members participated in the “No to Pope” peaceful protest.

For a while it looked as though annoying the pilgrims was to be deemed a crime but sanity prevailed and cheeky T-shirts and a protest march were given the go-ahead.

Greens member, Will Paauwe, took part in a rally and march from Taylor Square on the Saturday and filed this report on the event.

Hi, my name is William and I’m a gay Green and happy Green!  I have been a coordinator with the Mardi Gras Parade for many years, Committee Member of  Gay & Lesbian Rights Lobby for a time and member of LGBTI (Lesbian Gay Bi Trans Intersex) Committee NSW Greens, and worked with CAAH (Coalition Action Against Homophobia).  One thing I have learnt through my time with various organisations, we can’t move mountains from our arm chairs!  We need to get up onto the streets occasionally, ask a few like minded friends to shout “its not right, it has to change, its unjust”!  Drop the remote control and join in.

I attended one such protest during Catholic World Youth Day events, not entirely sure what 500,000 pilgrims would look like or be like!  It was some time before we were even allowed to see a pilgrim!  Pilgrims were carefully corralled behind barricades & police.  I spent so much time building an impression of what these people would look like in my mind, they must be scary, horrid, ugly. 

The first wave of pilgrims came by, my first impressions were quite underwhelming, they looked much like us, they were smiling and very proud of their day marching up the street.  As proud as we were marching for 30 years up Oxford street protesting discriminatory laws and heavy handed police action.  I realised that pilgrims were indeed followers and they followed a Pope who would tell them things that are wrong.  There was a very big difference, there were 200,000 pilgrims marching on our hallowed ground, where for the 30th Mardi Gras parade only 10,000 participants marched. 

The number of pilgrims was phenomenal! World Youth Day to me was a bunch of people invading my city, costing my city/state 10s of millions of dollars, blocking streets, celebrating at great cost to me and the city.  I think Rachel Evans, convenor of No To Pope Coalition did a fantastic job of organising a major protest telling the 100s of 1000s of people invading my city, that we don’t agree with state branded religion, we don’t agree with City of Sydney & NSW Govt inviting a Pope that thinks of me as a “intrinsic moral evil”! Telling an entire population of a developing nation suffering under massive HIV/Aids infection its a sin to wear a condom to me is the most ridiculous idiotic nonsense ever thought of in modern times and “The Pope Is Wrong, Put a Condom On”, cried the crowd on Saturday!

The pope of 1000 years ago seems to have a lot of influence over our modern society?  It seems the current pope managed to influence $160 million dollars out of our city/state/nation!  He is doing well! I could cry at the number of homeless people $160,000,000 (looks better with the zeros) could have fed.  Just to put the $160million into perspective,  Oz Harvest (4) an Australian Charity that delivers meals to homeless, delivered 903,032 meals in 2007 (Annual Report page 2), they noted their income as as $784, 880 ($0.7million Annual Report Page 2).  If the $160 million (sorry $160,000,000) was given to Oz Harvest they could have provided 139,065,725 (139 million) meals to homeless and the less fortunate, that equals 7 meals for every Australian (estimate 20million), staggering amount of money!

More to why I went along to the protest.  Pope Benedict has said, “Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder” (Quote from SBS News).  I don’t think anyone in Sydney has come up to me and said to me I am a “moral evil”. They may have called me a few other things.  It is such a horrible thing for young gay, lesbian, bi, trans people to hear from someone who is a spiritual ruler.  I don’t remember Pope John Paul saying such horrid things when he was alive.  I know millions of us are not intrinsically evil, I do know that allowing our African brothers & sisters to die unnecessarily in the world, and you can quote me, is completely evil and it has to stop.

THE POPE IS WRONG - PUT A CONDOM ON!

William Paauwe
Sydney Greens

New cuts to the 311 bus service are the latest insult to East Sydney residents who have seen their bus services decrease over the past six years.

East Sydney residents need better public transport services, not more cutbacks.  It is tragic that this government is making cutbacks to public transport at a time when the need for an efficient, reliable system is the only thing that will get people out of their cars.  But worse is that those without the use of a car, the elderly and not so mobile, are being denied access to parts of the city to attend appointments and to link up with trains and ferries so they can go further a field on public transport.

The route will run to and from Gresham Street, quite a walk for an elderly or disabled person down to the Quay and will have fewer stops around the CBD.  The bus will now travel along St Mary’s Road to Macquarie Street eliminating important pick-up and drop-off points for passengers wanting to access the city’s commercial centre around Elizabeth, Park and Market Streets. It will no longer continue to Railway Square, thus denying passengers access to a major transport hub.  A loop via Billyard Avenue in Elizabeth Bay will be discontinued, meaning accessing a bus will be impossible for some residents. Roads are narrow here but smaller buses could be a solution if the government was serious about providing services for its constituents.

Understandably, East Sydney residents are up in arms again. They have suffered these cuts for years and one local resident describes the government’s intention like this: “The service will certainly be even shorter in terms of time because there will be fewer and fewer passengers on the bus due to the fact that it no longer services the main commercial area of the city.”

Residents say the bus which used to run every 10 minutes in peak hour and had standing room only, an indication of how well patronised it was, is now supposed to come every 15 minutes, but often doesn’t come at all and carries only a handful of passengers.  The areas of Elizabeth Bay and Potts Point have had massive population increases over the last few years and yet public transport has decreased.

I strongly urge people affected by these cutbacks to flood the Minister of Transport’s office with phone calls, emails and letters to complain about the cutbacks and demand the reinstatement of an efficient and reliable service.

Contact details for Minister for Transport

Mr John Watkins
Minister for Transport
Level 30 Governor Macquarie Tower
1 Farrer Place
Sydney 2000

Phone: 9228 4866
Email:  dp.office@watkins.minister.nsw.gov.au

After advance warnings to all councillors by City of Sydney’s CEO and the Department of Local Government about using council resources for electioneering purposes, The Lord Mayor was caught red-handed at her own campaign launch.

Her Communications Manager, Jeff Lewis, was handing out promotional material at the launch, but when questioned about this, said he had taken a few hours leave to volunteer in his own time.  After I made a formal complaint about his involvement in the launch, we were told Mr Lewis had taken a pre-approved half-day leave.  I am yet to receive a response to my request to see details of the approval.

Garry Payne, director-general of the Department of Local Government, said that if a staff member is on leave there is no issue, but normally someone would take a few days or a week. He said he had never come across someone taking a few hours.

The story was picked up by the Sydney Morning Herald and the Wentworth and Central Couriers.

SMH link

clover-launch.pdf

On 10th March 2008 I presented a motion to Council calling for Council’s support of the community campaign to stop the sell off of the state’s electricity system.  My motion was not supported by Labor, Liberal or Clover Moore Party councillors.

The sell-off is not a done deal and the campaign to keep power in public hands is still being waged.

Privatising electricity will lead to higher power bills, lower levels of service and increased greenhouse gas emission. If Treasurer, Michael Costa, gets his way and the electricity system is sold off to the highest bidder, the people of  Sydney will end up worse off.

Privatising essential public utilities like electricity and water leads to increased prices and reduced services as the new private owners try to maximise their returns. We have seen this happen with past privatisations from the Commonwealth Bank to Telstra to Sydney Airport.

Private owners will try to increase power consumption to maximise profits, the exact opposite of what we should be trying to achieve. Increased consumption of electricity will lead to potential blackouts and will increase greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to dangerous climate change.

The Greens think that it is the role of government to show leadership by dealing with global warming and climate change. Electricity generation by burning coal is the largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions. The state government should be looking at phasing out the burning of coal and replacing it with renewable energy alternatives. Reliable technologies such as solar thermal and wind already exist and are being employed in other countries as a replacement for the burning of coal, gas and oil. The Greens are very concerned that the government will offer guarantees to any purchaser of the power stations and that the move away from coal will be much more difficult as a result of those guarantees.

Think about it logically - would you hand over billions of dollars for a bunch of power stations when you were unsure of their future viability? You would want an assurance that government would not do anything that would lessen the value of those power generators. That’s why power generation should remain in public hands - so that the government wll be free to make whatever decisions that it needs to when considering the future of energy in a low emission environment.

Many residents of the city of Sydney are doing their bit to battle climate change by installing solar power and recycling water but the challenge can’t be met by individual households alone. The state government should be taking the lead on climate change, not sending us backwards.

 A copy of my motion appears below:

1. The City of Sydney opposes in the strongest terms the NSW Government’s plans to privatise NSW’s publicly-owned electricity retailers and enter into long term leases of the state’s generators.
 
Privatisation would:
•         weaken the ability of the people of NSW to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and urgently respond to climate change,
•         result in job losses and reduce working conditions in the electricity industry,
•         increase financial hardship for consumers, and in particular for low income households and pensioners,
•         reduce state revenues by at least $1 billion per annum, as profits are shifted from the public purse to private corporations and
•         destroy public control over essential energy assets. 

2. Council also believes that privatisation would impact severely on local government as major electricity consumers.
3. Council calls on the NSW Government to better manage NSW’s future energy needs and take urgent action in response to climate change by investing in energy efficiency in homes and businesses and increasing its renewable energy targets.
4. The General Manager urgently convey this motion to the NSW Premier Morris Iemma and Treasurer Michael Costa; the NSW Local Government Association, all City of Sydney based MPs and MLCs, Unions NSW and the Total Environment Centre.
5. The reasons for Council opposing the sell-off are to be widely advertised including in local newspapers, on the Council website and by media release.