letters
Rosebery ‘buried’ in the City of Villages.
The City of Sydney council publicly state that they want to create a “city of villages”. Sadly, they seem to want to do it at the expense of destroying existing communities. Take Rosebery for example. Council allowed Hillsong Church to buy the old RTA building which has since become a white elephant as the massive “entertainment centre” style church that Hillsong wanted to build there was not approved. Now it’s a deserted building with broken windows and graffiti on every available surface. Gorgeous. Lately other blocks of land have been sold within Rosebery and converted from light industrial estates and factories to residential homes and home units, thus bringing more of a community spirit to the suburb. Now, Council has purchased the old Aristocrat site in Rosebery to build a “works depot” (also known as a garbage truck depot) to service their beautiful new village in Green Square (planned, not existing). Rosebery seems destined to become a service corridor to serve Green Square. We simply do not need the constant movement of garbage trucks 24/7 in our quiet residential suburb. Incidentally, the heritage value of Rosebery is not insignificant and should be maintained. In fact, some parts of Rosebery (including the street where I live) have very stringent restrictions for home renovation or redevelopment. There are severe height and other restrictions imposed to maintain the look and feel of this suburb. So why then, just a few streets away, is a garbage facility of huge proportions being put forward for approval? It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
Sincerely,
Mandy Geddes
Rosebery
Sydney Writers’ Festival
It is most unfortunate that the Sydney Writers’ Festival does not seek to discuss and air these issues involving free speech. Thankfully, Crikey, the SMH, City News and City Hub has taken them up.
Following the decision of the Sydney Writers’ Festival not to invite UTS Journalism to produce Festival News, we teamed up with the Alternative Media Group to produce copy inside City News amd City Hub and a stand alone independent review on the Saturday of the Festival.
I was most concerned that as a result of this move in favour of critical thought and free speech, Lawrence Gibbons found himself threatened with arrest.
UTS journalism lecturer Jenna Price and I handed out nearly 400 to copies of AMUSE to festivalgoers, nearly all of whom were aware of the issues and were interested in the publication. I was then approached by a Festival guard and then the Operations Manager who questioned my right to hand out the publication. She then went away to seek permission for me to hand it out and returned and said it could not be handed out for ” environmental reasons” as people could drop it in the water and cause “pollution”. This was ludicrous because there were piles of unprotected Sydney Morning Herald Festival Guides and other pamphlets lying around the Festival venue. She did not mention the private company.
There needs to be an open public meeting before next year’s Festival to air some of these issues.
Your reporter correctly reports that Wendy Were objected to me speaking at the Festival. According to her own emails, this flowed from my support for last year’s Festival News.
Some journalists invited me to be on a panel about rebel voices. I accepted. They were then told by Wendy Were that I could not be part of the panel. For this reason only, they withdrew the panel as they were not prepared to go forward on that basis. I do not understand why the Festival would want to deny these events.
Crikey was onstensibly ejected for reasons of ‘copyright’. This incident was filmed and is on Crikey at
In my article in Crikey earlier in the year :
http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/03/09/uts-the-sydney-writers-festival-and-the-stifling-of-dissent/
and in the City Hub:
http://cityhubsydney.com.au/freedon-of-speech/5587 , I explored the background and implications of these issues.
Wendy Bacon
Correction
In The City News story ‘Benedicts beats off brothel aplication’ published on June 4, Jai Reid was named as the applicant. He is in fact the City of Sydney Planner who assessed the application, not the applicant.
