By Kishor Napier-Raman and Stephen Brook
It was a Saturday night in Potts Point, and business was buzzing at local Vietnamese favourite Lady Chu. That is, until the arrival of a couple of rangers from the City of Sydney Council put a dampener on the evening, and attracted the ire of the restaurant’s outspoken owner Nahji Chu.
Chu, a veteran restaurateur known for her robust responses to Google reviews and a line of profane fortune cookies, has breathed life into a moribund corner of Roslyn St since her venue opened in the COVID-era, so much so that locals now term the strip Rue de Chu.
Nahji Chu is willing to go to jail to protect Sydney’s nightlife from overzealous councils.Credit: Daniel Munoz
But that success has put Lady Chu in the crosshairs of whingeing neighbours and the local council, whose rangers announced during their unscheduled weekend visit that they were there on very serious business: Chu’s plants were obstructing the footpath.
That’s when Chu lost it, whipping out her phone to film an expletive-laden rant at the rangers, who probably wished they could’ve been anywhere else.
“I’m trying to activate a dead city and you’re trying to f---ing shut it down,” she said.
“I’m not a f---ing naughty schoolkids, so don’t speak to me like that,” she continued.
And then, in a subsequent video:
“I’m paying f---ing taxes and I’m paying your wages!”
You get the picture.
Look, CBD doesn’t endorse the use of blue language as this is a family-friendly column in a family-friendly newspaper. That said, we get the frustration. Our great city has been strangled by petty rules enforced by joyless bureaucrats for too long. Local councils seem to have adopted this fun-police philosophy with missionary zeal. No serious person cares about a restaurant’s plants blocking a footpath in a vibrant, inner-city dining precinct.
When the council took up CBD’s offer to explain things, it said there had been ongoing complaints about “additional furniture, umbrellas and planters beyond the business’ approved outdoor trading area” that had caused difficulties for pedestrians.
“City staff respectfully advised which items would need to be moved,” a spokesperson said. “We commend our staff for remaining calm and professional throughout the process and we request the community act respectfully when interacting with all City of Sydney staff.”
Chu, meanwhile, maintained the rage when contacted by CBD on Monday, telling us that she wanted to take a stand against anonymous complaints shutting down the city.
“I escaped communist South-east Asia in 1975 for freedom, only to come to a worse regime,” the Laos-born Chu told us.
“If I have to go to jail to change this stupid law, I will.”
For everyone’s sake, we hope it doesn’t come to this.
Simon says
It’s hardly news to learn that Climate 200 founder and godfather of the teal movement Simon Holmes à Court has made a political donation.
But it is when that donation turns out to be to a Liberal MP.
First some background: Holmes à Court, son of Australia’s first billionaire Robert Holmes à Court, used to be a Liberal Party supporter and fundraiser. That was until a major beef with Josh Frydenberg after Holmes à Court wrote an oped in The Guardian supporting the closure of a coal-fired power station.
Climate 200 founder Simon Holmes a Court.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Holmes à Court then swiftly exited Kooyong200, the Liberal fundraising unit, founded Climate 200, which supercharged the whole teal movement at the 2022 election. And the rest, as they say, is political history – including Frydenberg, who lost his seat of Kooyong to teal candidate Monique Ryan.
So we can be forgiven for thinking the $500 donation in Holmes à Court’s name to a GoFundMe page set up for former Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto to help pay his legal costs after his defamation case against fellow MP Moira Deeming was just a troll having fun.
After all, the fundraising page records obviously fake donations for desultory amounts from the likes of neo-Nazi “Blair Cottrell”, “Peter Dutton” the “Plymouth Brethren”, “Dan Andrews” and even “Josh Frydenberg”.
But Holmes à Court tells us the donation is genuine:
“It’s unconscionable that entities associated with the Victorian Liberals – with investments approaching $200 million – are prepared to leave John and his family destitute, especially when he was acting as the leader of the party and with the full support of the leadership team,” he told us, before adding a final sting.
“Good luck attracting talent to join the party after this debacle.”
Friday fumble
Rough Friday for e-conveyancing platform PEXA, which suffered a technical outage, leaving its mum and dad customers unable to settle on their family home transactions for hours.
The company has an effective monopoly on the Australian e-conveyancing space, and Friday’s brief outage excited rival platforms like Sympli which have so far been unable to dent PEXA’s market dominance, despite spending big, and talking up federal and state reform to the sector.
But a PEXA spokesman was quick to assure us that no Great Australian Dreams were crushed on Friday, telling us the exchange “experienced a technical issue affecting mobile signing capability” on Friday morning that was fully resolved within three hours. Phew.
“We estimate that the disruption impacted less than 10 per cent of settlements during that period, which then went on later to settle or reschedule,” they said.
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