Sunday, November 12, 2006

Council biased against our community (part III)

Readers of this blog will remember my confrontation of Clover Moore about Council breaking its own rules to over-fund the Kings Cross Partnership and halve funds for the KX Arts Guild's annual arts festival, now effectively completely defunded. (See blogs below)

Months later, Clover has replied with a two-page letter that completely ignores the specific references I made to the council resolutions that had been disobeyed by staff. Clover rabbits on, basically re-stating what council did in a typical bureaucratic snowjob.

So Clover has now specifically endorsed what seems to be blatant staff misbehaviour.

Meanwhile council continues to fund an unrepresentative body which has little support in Kings Cross and is chaired by a commercial real estate agent from Blakehurst. Its recipe for revitalising Kings Cross as an exclusive haven for A-list gentry has always failed and will always do so because the social forces which create the place are not just going to evaporate.

Meanwhile the City has de-funded a widely supported arts body which exists on volunteer labour and has repeatedly mounted highly successful festivals even when funding was improperly halved, and continues to function with no funding. This is entirely contrary to Council's spin around our Local Area Plan which goes on and on about the importance of the arts.

The reason is obvious: The former has an agenda that reflects Clover's obsession with converting Sydney's entertainment, red light and backpacker precinct into a high-cost 'mother and child friendly' retail-and-latte nonentity.

The Arts Guild network on the other hand consists of people who live here because they like it and whose events tend to enhance the area while maintaining its character.

The matter will be considered for further action at the next 2011 Residents Association meeting.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Just hang in there, you bastards, and defeat them at the shopfronts, the trenches, the roadworks, and with the fighting spirit that is within the ornery denizens of King's Cross.
Remember her as Queen's Cross.
Remember Rushcutter's Bay as the scene of the first white massacre by the natives.
God save you all, in this bloody new-age battle for land and the rights of the indigenous people.
Long live the business precinct!
Long live the Pub!
Is there no harmonious path for all the warring parties?
I need to walk my baby on the paths, be they littered with the filth of the poor, the rich, the elderly, and the residents!
God save my right to walk safely!