Once you rename a council for being racist, you’ll have to go after the street names

Finding ‘racist’ names, banana art and telling sporting groups how to spend their money. How much council crazy can you get?

Where will the woke revision of history end?

In a week thick with crazy council conduct, Moreland wanting to change its name because it is taken from a Jamaican sugar plantation that had slaves takes the cake.

The council’s newly minted mayor, Mark Riley, is apparently offended that the bloke who named his land Moreland took it from his grandfather’s estate overseas.

It had hundreds of slaves.

There is no suggestion that Farquhar McCrae – a swashbuckling surgeon and magistrate – ever kept slaves himself. But that is not good enough.

Farquhar McCrae is the pivotal character in the Moreland name.

Where does this end? Once they’re done renaming Moreland, will they start analysing the streets and expunge every name associated with someone who did something wrong 300 years ago?

No matter where you look, you will find bad things in history. Standards, morals and laws change. It has always been thus.

This kind of misguided absolutism seeks to banish the names of anyone who did something wrong or, in this case, a location where bad things happened.

It ignores any good to be found within these people and places and removes the history from which we are meant to learn.

Just look at a statue of Thomas Jefferson, a founding father of the United States, being removed from the New York city hall. That is where we are going.

While Moreland Council was carrying on with this, Yarra Council was wasting money on a massive, ghastly banana in Fitzroy.

It is ugly. There is no other way to describe the sculpture. And it cost the taxpayers of Victoria $22,000.

To make matters worse, Yarra Council took that money from a $100,000 grant from the TAC.

What a skull-bearing banana has to do with road safety is beyond me.

The “Fallen Fruit” sculpture in Fitzroy. Picture: Alex Coppel

According to its description, this horrid thing is “an absurd warning about our human compulsion towards an excessive drive”.

Too right it is. It stands there as a warning of what council staffers will do when you give them too much of our money.

It also possibly represents how dead I feel inside every time I pass through Fitzroy.

And just to cap things off, Bass Coast Shire is going to force sporting organisations that hire its buildings and grounds to give equal prize money to men and women.

What business is it of a piddly council to tell sporting groups what they can do with their money?

These people are employed with our money. They take our rates compulsorily and seemingly find the worst way to spend it.

I am offended by the way our councils conduct themselves. But you can bet your bottom dollar they won’t rush to fix that.

Originally published as Once you rename a council for being racist, you’ll have to go after the street names