On this night I went with one other person to make a Deputation in the Council Chambers against a motion aiming to ‘Declare a Climate Emergency in Onkaparinga’.
This motion has no definition of what an emergency is or what the Council would be permitted to do if an emergency were declared. There was also no way specified way to determine when an emergency had ended. Those ambiguities could lead to all sorts of abuses.
Many people fear that if a branch of government is allowed to declare another emergency, like we all experienced during the COVID debacle when the state was locked down, then more people will suffer ruined businesses and ruined lives. People need to realise that the climate always changes so if a Climate Change Emergency is declared then how is it possible to identify when the emergency ends? Definitions become far too subjective so potentially an emergency would be never-ending.
It will affect everyone. Travel could be a thing of the past and your ability to buy and sell will be impacted far more than you think, if the experience from overseas is anything to go by.
Here is the Advertiser’s slant on events:
The point of this article is that at this meeting I sat in Council Chambers with another concerned rate payer waiting for our turn to speak against this motion and all of our supporters where sitting in the over flow room hoping to hear the proceedings on the TV audio system.
Perhaps after about 15 minutes we could hear shouting but it took, what seemed like, forever to find out what was wrong. There was a security guard at the door and no one was getting past. We were all ‘safe’ locked inside.
Only after a considerable delay someone (I’m told it was either a Police officer or another Council security officer, but someone in uniform) came into the Council Chamber and called out to those in charge saying there was no sound and no one could hear the meeting, can someone fix the technology.
Mayor Moira Were replied, and these are her exact words taken from the video of the proceedings, “Thank you so much. I appreciate your point of view, I think we have all got all the tech that we need”.
I found this response from the Mayor to be disgraceful. Could the Mayor be so ill prepared or ignorant of dealing with groups; surely not. It was such a crazy irrational response, many were lead to believe it was a deliberate provocation.
Things obviously didn’t go well and the people out there in the overflow room thought they were being played like fools because the audio system was reset by Council staff to its lowest level and locked. See my attached photo. No one wanted to help or even tell the rate payers what was wrong, and so it escalated. The meeting was adjourned but everyone stood around in Chambers just waiting.
Police were called. Up to 25 police attended with a crowd they estimated at 150 to 200 people. Some people got unruly. Police were force to act as the mediators between angry rate payers and a Mayor who would not communicate with them. It was a ridiculous situation that could have so easily been avoided.
In general I thought police were good in these trying circumstances.
After the meeting stalled everyone still waited around for a long time because the Mayor would not formally declare an adjournment. They feared the Council might restart the meeting without the two of us to speak against the motion which would then be passed uncontested. It took possibly up to 45 minutes after the meeting ended to get the formal adjournment. During this time people did get noticeably sick of it all and reacted badly.
The Mayor could have ended the whole incident very quickly by formally adjourning the meeting quickly.
This makes a mockery out of her campaign promises to listen to the community, of transparency and of facilitating greater community participation in decision-making.
People were angry at what they saw as a deliberate act of sabotage to the meeting by the Council.
These rate payers did not attend as protesters. They only began to protest once the audio was sabotaged and the Mayor refused to speak to them.
It could have all been avoided.
I didn’t get a chance to address the Council again about this disastrous Climate Change Emergency.
The Advertiser’s reporting cask me and the rate payers who supported me with their usual litany of exaggerations and lies. The concept of ‘truth in reporting’ is completely foreign to them.
And so we began to hear of the ‘Storming of the Council Meeting’ comparing it to the storming of the US Capitol in Washington DC on 6 January 2021
My response to this style of reporting is to say that when you are maligned, misquoted and outright slandered then you know you are probably on the right track.