Instead, the councils opted for signs on their outer precincts, proudly declaring their distaste for nuclear obliteration.
At the time, it conjured images of a panicked adjutant tearing around the Kremlin before bursting into Leonid Brezhnev’s office.
“Comrade General Secretary, our glorious plans for global nuclear annihilation have been thwarted. Collingwood City Council has just announced it is a nuclear-free zone.”
It might be a stretch of cause and effect but what we do know is the signs existed and there was no nuclear war. Prove me wrong.
The more important question is, do Australia’s current political wannabes contain more nuts per hundredweight than those inner-city political try-hards of fifty years ago? The evidence is piling up.
On June 3, councils in Sydney’s inner west were beset with an unusually large amount of paperwork, declaring Sydney’s west had moved into an uneasy ceasefire which may only last as long as an argument over turf between drug dealers in the carpark at the KFC in Punchy.
Demilitarised zones have been established by order of badly spelled pseudo-legal documents or proclamations. If you were thinking of rolling a Leopard tank through Norton Street, Leichhardt, this weekend, think again.
These particular proclamations took the form of baseless indigenous claims of sovereignty without the endorsement of the indigenous community or genuine tribal leaders. The proclamation read, in part, “Whereas the First Nations … the tribe of the Nmdaka Dalai, they are declaring that you cease and desist in your operations of pushing a foreign military force and crimes against humanity.”
Foreign forces? Sov-cits believe the government in Canberra and its state counterparts are phony and controlled by interplanetary lizard overlords or something. It’s a bit like living in Superman’s backwards world. The police are criminals, the criminals are out of luck freedom fighters and men in sweatpants who live in caravans know what’s best for ratepayers.
Serving the documents was a man named Rocco Varty, who boasts 1200 followers on Zuckerbook. A few followers short, I’d wager, to order a full blooded coup d’etat in Australia, or even in Bankstown. Probably not even enough for a modest supplementary income in tupperware direct marketing. His posts are dripping in victimhood with videos of him annoying pharmacies who offer influenza and Covid vaccines. His Zucker-friends look like the extras cast in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I’ve seen better heads on cabbages. But, as we know, politics is show business for the aesthetically challenged.
Rather than regard this idiot with the contempt he deserved, reception staff at the council presented with a gravitas many of us would have struggled to maintain. The clerk was endlessly polite and promised the proclamations would be dispatched post-haste to the council’s executives.
In other words, I won’t put these worthless badly-spelt documents in the bin where they belong but I will pass them on to someone more senior who will.
Meanwhile in Townsville, voters have voted in a mayor who, if I may exaggerate his exaggerations for comic effect, claims to have fought and died in three world wars.
Well, not quite. Mayor Troy Thompson claimed he had served five years as a reservist in Australia, with the 109th Signals Squadron before serving with the Special Air Service Regiment’s 152 Signal Squadron, finishing his service with the 105th Signals Squadron. Impressive but untrue. After a bit of to and fro, it was discovered he had spent less than three years as a reservist, much of it with the Army’s catering corps.
When confronted with a dose of reality in the form of his service record, Thompson explained that he had been frequently concussed, suffers from epilepsy and has memory loss to the point where at least five years of his life has been lost to hallucinatory feats of service and commitment.
Embellishing one’s resume is a no-no and may even be a criminal offence, if you believe the illegal corporate government that is openly traded on the New York Stock Exchange and whose constitution is an elaborate hoax to mask the real Australian Constitution which I and only I have in my possession and can be purchased for $30 (postage and handling extra).
While a certain scope is extended to political candidates and their cobbled together log cabin mythologies, garnishing one’s service history with unlikely interactions with the SAS in an army town is a slap in the face to serving ADF members. I can only imagine this is the first case of pre-mortem CTE in medical history. His fellow councillors voted unanimously to have him stand down earlier this week. Too late, Mayor Thompson, on a lazy 200 large a year, had decided to take himself off on mental health leave.
The third tier of government is wide open for this sort of nonsense. Following local government elections in Queensland earlier this year, and with NSW and Victoria off to the polls in September and October respectively, a lot of embellishment of resumes has and will be going on driven by an amorphous and largely anonymous group of political agitators known as My Place.
The My Place movement is spreading, driven by kooks and freaks where political ambition meets utter boredom from voters who want to hear little more from their local councils other than having their bins collected and potholes filled on a semi-regular basis.
My Space is not a political party and does not appear on ballots. Instead, candidates with My Space’s imprimatur will appear in council elections listed as independents. The group is exerting influence across the country, with hubs in the southern suburbs of Melbourne and in the Hunter Valley with little fanfare or media coverage. The idea is to fly below the radar and hope voter ennui gets them across the line.
The answer, I’m afraid, is eternal vigilance or at least doing your own research (one of their favourite sayings), so you don’t wake up with a hangover on a Sunday morning to find the man or woman charged with the administration of a multi-billion dollar budget in your local community is a Holocaust denier who thinks our alien lizard superiors use 5G networks as state surveillance.
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Readers of a certain vintage may recall inner-city local governments’ anti-nuclear posturing in Sydney and Melbourne in the 1970s. It goes without saying that these councils had no nukes, no index fingers trembling over red buttons, no uranium mines and no nuclear reactors within their jurisdiction dispatched for a hasty dismantling.