Darebin City Council: Melbourne council votes for ‘nuclear weapons ban’ report

Darebin councillors have ordered a report into how they can stop global superpowers from nuking the planet into oblivion.

Darebin councillor Gaetano Greco. Picture: Angie Basdekis

City of Darebin bureaucrats have been ordered to figure out how the small inner north council can ban nuclear weapons.

A late-night council meeting, which ran for nearly four hours, was largely dominated by discussions about local heritage issues, the construction of the Northcote Aquatic and Recreation Centre and dog parks.

But in a bizarre scene, the Greens and Labor-dominated council also voted unanimously on one of the council’s pet issues, a “nuclear weapons ban”.

The move has prompted a call for the council to be sacked over its “woke” and “irrelevant” priorities.

Darebin councillor Gaetano Greco.

Labor-aligned independent councillor Gaetano Greco, who portrays himself as a “common sense” councillor dedicated to local issues, said the nuclear weapons ban was “basically an extension on the work council has already done” promoting the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, to which Australia is not a signatory.

Mr Greco’s rationale for the motion was unclear.

He said: “I have visited Hiroshima on two occasions, visited the museum there, and it’s one of the most moving museums I have ever seen, and not only the old museum, but the more newer museum (sic).”

Two Darebin residents were founding members of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which is now headquartered in Geneva, and which lobbied for the Treaty on the Prohibiting of Nuclear Weapons.

The treaty has been criticised as being “ineffective” and no nuclear powers are signatories to it.

Four Darebin councillors attended the Australian Local Government Association annual conference in Canberra in June, at ratepayer expense, where their main priority was lobbying for a prohibition on nuclear weapons.

The first atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima in the final days of WWII.

Greens councillor Susanne Newton told the meeting it was “really timely” for the motion to be presented to council, 76 years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Bureaucrats will now have to prepare a report on whether council is unknowingly “transacting” with any nuclear weapons dealers, among other issues.

Ratepayers Victoria president Dean Hurlston said the council was wasting time and money.

“If the City of Darebin councillors think that their crowning achievement .... is passing a motion around a nuclear weapons ban, it’s time to call in an administrator and sack this woke bunch of buffoons,” he said.

He said ratepayers wanted councils to spend their time on issues that were relevant to the streets they lived in.

The only nuclear weapons detonated in Australia were on the Montebello Islands, off the northwest coast of Western Australia, and at Emu Field and Maralinga in the far north of South Australia, between 1952 and 1963.