Protecting our Noosa environmental assets from development is essential – both for their intrinsic ecological values and to ensure a prosperous future for Noosa’s major industry – green tourism.As I contemplate the ongoing zionist invasion of Palestine against the popular will of Indigenous Palestinian people, this happy local event reminds me that privileged white people are winning in a predominantly white democracy where Indigenous people are marginalised.
On another level however, this first step toward Noosa’s de-amalgamation from the Sunshine Coast Regional Council represents what a community can do from the grassroots to redress undemocratic wrongs – the forced amalgamation by the Blight government and theft of our successful shire’s money to prop up two unfinancial southern shires ravaged by Councils complicit with developers’ unsustainable greed.
NOOSA’S bid to separate from the Sunshine Coast Regional Council is one step closer to success.
Local Government Minister David Crisafulli announced this morning he would progress Noosa’s application for de-amalgamation to the Boundaries Commissioner for further consideration.
Noosa is only one of five successful applicants.
Nineteen former shires applied for de-amalgamation.
Boundaries Commissioner Col Meng and the Queensland Treasury Corporation will work together over the next two and half months to consider the cases for de-amalgamation.
“This was always going to be a difficult process but if a proposal stacks up, the community will make the final decision at a referendum,” he said.
Free Noosa chairman Noel Playford says he’s delighted that Noosa has made the cut, although not surprised.
“Let’s be honest, if our submission had not made it to the next stage, then nothing would.”
Mr Playford took Noosa’s 70-page submission and a petition of residents to the Minister’s office late last month.
He says the Boundaries Commissioner and his staff will soon be heading for Noosa to speak with local people and gauge for himself just how deep is the passion for de-amalgamation.
The former Noosa mayor said it was a once-only shot at breaking away from the “giant Sunshine Coast Regional Council”.
“For those who want to protect our balance of low-key development, lifestyle and natural beauty, we will probably never get another chance.”
Mr Playford has urged local people to make a brief statement to the Boundaries Commissioner on the issue.
“We need people to tell him what they think, why they want their council back. He’s read about the passion for independence in Noosa, but now he needs to see if for himself.”
The Noosa area – a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve – represents an environment on which we humans and the animal and plant species with whom we share a habitat rely. Having respect for the land on which we all depend means having respect for Indigenous values. Noosa will be protected through de-amalgamation – and our environmental and democratic values will prevail.
“A Noosa businessman suggested to me the other day the SCRC is like a giant slug sucking the life out of Noosa. That may be a little over the top but you get the picture.”
Elise Hendrick [@translator_eli] takes a satirical look at the duplicitous efforts of mainstream privileged white media to promote bigotry and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s islamophobic, faux-feminist views.
In Australia, neoliberalism is understood largely as an economic model, characterised by the sweeping privatisations that Carr championed in NSW. But, actually, it’s more than that. Neoliberalism differs from a classical free market orientation precisely because it extends beyond the economy to embrace the entire social world, which it then recasts on market lines. The neoliberal project doesn’t just assign to the market those roles previously understood as quintessentially responsibilities of government (such as, say, the provision of utilities); rather, it recasts governance itself as an entrepreneurial project, with productivity and profit increasingly normalised as the criteria to judge success and failure.
In other words, neoliberalism effects a thoroughgoing depoliticisation. Most obviously, this manifests itself in a belief, now shared by almost all mainstream politicians, that government should not intervene in the market. This conviction – a consensus about the role of politicians as simply economic caretakers – already renders out of bounds most of the policies that previous generations of social democrats would have taken for granted.
More importantly, neoliberalism also recasts governance and the democratic process in market terms. The resulting political culture casts citizens as autonomous economic agents, relating to each other and to the state as individual entrepreneurs. The politician no longer appeals to party members, unionists, religious believers or specific communities; instead, he or she addresses individual consumers, touting for their business in much the same way as any other corporation.
In the neoliberal polity, it makes no more sense for citizens to rally than in does for, say, users of Apple computers to hold a march. In both cases, their role is simply to consume, with the ballot box understood as an extension of the cash register. If the latest iPhone is a dud, buy an Android; if the Labor Party’s been in power too long, vote Liberal.
Because democracy is understood as a market, rallies, protests, demonstrations and strikes seem, to the neoliberal, not as expressions of the popular will but as outrageous assaults on the democratic system.
To be clear, we’re not seeing the end of the right to protest, so much as its hollowing out. In the neoliberal era, tightly-controlled top-down events are still considered legitimate – witness the staged spectacles at the recent Republican and Democratic conventions in the US.
Sabra – a sleeping girl
The men left
War slept for two short nights,
Beirut obeyed and became the capital…
A long night
Observing the dreams in Sabra,
Sabra is sleeping.
Sabra – the remains of a dead body
She bid farewell to her horsemen and time
And surrendered to sleep out of tiredness.. and the Arabs who threw her behind them.
Sabra – and what the soldiers Departing from Galilee forgot
She doesn’t buy and sell anything but her silence
To buy flowers to put on her braided hair.
Sabra – sings her lost half, between the sea and the last war:
Why do you go?
And leave your wives in the middle of a hard night?
Why do you go?
And hang your night
Over the camp and the national anthem?
Sabra – covering her naked breasts with a farewell song
Counts her palms and gets it wrong
While she can’t find the arm:
How many times will you travel?
And for how long?
And for what dream?
If you return one day
for which exile shall you return,
which exile brought you back?
Sabra – tearing open her chest:
How many times
does the flower bloom?
How many times
will the revolution travel?
Sabra – afraid of the night. Puts it on her knees
covers it with her eyes’ mascara. Cries to distract it:
They left without saying
anything about their return
Withered and tended
from the rose’s flame!
Returned without returning
to the beginning of their journey
Age is like children
running away from a kiss.
No, I do not have an exile
To say: I have a home
God, oh time ..!
Sabra – sleeps. And the fascist’s knife wakes up
Sabra calls who she calls
All of this night is for me, and night is salt
the fascist cuts her breasts – the night reduced –
he then dances around his knife and licks it. Singing an ode to a victory of the cedars,
And erases
Quietly .. Her flesh from her bones
and spreads her organs over the table
and the fascist continues dancing and laughs for the tilted eyes
and goes crazy for joy, Sabra is no longer a body:
He rides her as his instincts suggest, and his will manifests.
And steals a ring from her flesh and blood and goes back to his mirror
And be – Sea
And be – Land
And be – Clouds
And be – Blood
And be – Night
And be – Killing
And be – Saturday
and she be – Sabra.
Sabra – the intersection of two streets on a body
Sabra, the descent of a Spirit down a Stone
And Sabra – is no one
Sabra – is the identity of our time, forever.
‘Let me tell you about what life is like for the Palestinians I know still living in Sabra and Shatila. More than 9,000 refugees live within one square kilometer. Most of the dwellings are overcrowded, damp, and poorly ventilated; some have tin roofs. Open sewage systems run through the camps. The population is vulnerable to hostilities between various political factions. Refugees are denied the right to work in most jobs. Impoverished, they depend on an already overworked and underfunded UNRWA for basic health services and education. Inadequate nutrition, chronic illnesses and poor health are common. Children are deprived of a good education. Many refugees have never been out of their camp! Third and fourth generations are being born, growing up, and dying in these camps. It is bleak and appalling. The future holds little hope for any improvement in their lives.’
Following the sessions in Barcelona (which focused on EU complicity), London (on Corporate Complicity) and Cape Town (on the crime of Apartheid), the New York Tribunal will go back to the root of the conflict and focus on UN and US responsibility in the denial of the Palestinian right to self-determination.
Alice Walker, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and others tell you why you should support this historical initiative to bring Israel to account for its brutal crimes against the Palestinian people under the aegis of international law.
‘The Tribunal finds that Israel subjects the Palestinian people to an institutionalised regime of domination amounting to apartheid as defined under international law. This discriminatory regime manifests in varying intensity and forms against different categories of Palestinians depending on their location. The Palestinians living under colonial military rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territory are subject to a particularly aggravated form of apartheid. Palestinian citizens of Israel, while entitled to vote, are not part of the Jewish nation as defined by Israeli law and are therefore excluded from the benefits of Jewish nationality and subject to systematic discrimination across the broad spectrum of recognised human rights. Irrespective of such differences, the Tribunal concludes that Israel’s rule over the Palestinian people, wherever they reside, collectively amounts to a single integrated regime of apartheid.’
Music industry figure in Israel, Jeremy Hulsh of Oleh! Records, is encouraging the Israeli government to invest in up-and-coming musicians as soft sell ambassadors for state propaganda. From Oleh! Records’ business plan, the company has a broad interest in utilising culture as hasbara:
contributing to the overall Government’s desired long term outcome for the areas of Culture, Economic Development, Regional Cooperation, Public Diplomacy (branding), and Diaspora Relations – ‘A right to culture’ the right to create a culture and the right to consume culture’ as laid out particularly by the Ministry of Culture and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
…
Defining Israeli industry “characterized by groundbreaking entrepreneurship, Israel yields pioneering technologies, profitable business opportunities and high investment returns” – as claimed by the Ministry of Trade & Labor. Likewise- the explicit national agenda to “make it possible for every Israeli to participate in improving Israel’s image in the world, and thereby contribute to its political and economic strength as well as its international standing.” – as promoted by the Ministry of Public Diplomacy.
…
While Israeli music industry and culture professionals have long been aware that independent musicians and Israeli music sector-at large make significant contributions not only to local culture and the economy, Israeli music culture significantly improves relations with the Diaspora community and foreign populations as a measure of soft power.
Oleh! presently obtains funding from “philanthropic support outside the State of Israel including Australia and United States based foundations” and envisages that “Israeli Music will benefit from a synchronized brand identity which must be coordinated and marketed by a non governmental Israeli body with an apolitical association“.
In 2005, Nissim Ben-Sheetrit of Israel’s Foreign Ministry stated: “We see culture as a propaganda tool of the first rank, and I do not differentiate between propaganda and culture.”
Overcoming Israel’s unflattering image in the international media — especially in Europe — is another challenge. Malcolm Haynes, a music programmer for the U.K’s Glastonbury Festival, said he came to Israel to learn about the music scene and a little bit about the politics.
While Israel remains an obscure music scene, booking Israeli acts runs the risk of triggering boycotts, he said. Despite that, Haynes said he had been impressed by the musicians at the conference, and expected some might get invitations to play at Glastonberry. “I’m about building bridges.”
Despite the potential for boycott, Oleh Record’s Hulsh says that Israel’s government should invest more in helping fledgling artists reach concerts abroad as a way to boosting Israel’s image in an organic way rather than with heavy-handed propaganda.
“Each of them is an authentic cultural ambassador,” he said. “When they get on stage and tell their story, they change a narrative.”
All Israelis performing abroad who obtain Israeli government funding to do so are required to sign a contract which converts them into a marketing emissary for apartheid:
“The service provider undertakes to act faithfully, responsibly and tirelessly to provide the Ministry with the highest professional services. The service provider is aware that the purpose of ordering services from him is to promote the policy interests of the State of Israel via culture and art, including contributing to creating a positive image for Israel.”
No promotion of the state, no funding. Who can trust the stage ‘narrative’ of artists beholden to an apartheid government for favours?
Music cannot cross apartheid walls and it is an obscenity to pretend otherwise when oppressed Palestinians have requested global solidarity for boycott, divestment and sanctions in order to obtain their just rights.
Say no to musicwashing Israel’s continuing oppression of Indigenous Palestinian people and refuse to entertain musical hasbara agents who are complicit with apartheid. Palestinians do not have a massive, well-funded state apparatus to broadcast their plight, and they deserve support from conscientious people around the world. Boycott!
The latest target of the Tourism Ministry is the foodie world, specifically food bloggers, who are brought on paid trips to Israel where their senses are dulled by stolen hummus and they go home and gush appropriately about what they have seen. Indeed, “David Lebovitz, an American writer and pastry chef living in Paris whose food-centric personal website receives nearly 2 million unique visitors per month, wrote seven posts about the trip, all of which presented Israel (and its cuisine ) in a positive light.” How’jya like them apples BDSers?
In 2009, then spokesperson of Israel’s Foreign Ministry Arye Mekel said the initiative to “re-brand” Israel involved sending “well-known novelists and writers overseas, theatre companies, exhibits … [to] show Israel’s prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war.”
Likewise, current deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon has said: “Branding Israel is a way to bring who we are, without the prisms of political agendas, to the masses.”
“We understood that it wasn’t enough to say we have creative energy – we actually had to be that way,” says Friedman. “This is the essence of Israelihood – everyone does what they want to do. It’s not refined, but dynamic and varied.”
Natanzon says that the Foreign Ministry considered adopting the values from the “Start-Up Nation” book, by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, when branding Israel.
“But we didn’t want to do that,” he says. “It would only reference one sector of the population, and exclude the others. We wanted to take it to the next level, to showcase the variety and creativity there is throughout the whole country.”
Out: Jewish heritage
It’s impossible not to notice that the new branding excludes central characteristics associated with Israel, such as Jewish culture and heritage and the country’s holy sites – all of which appear in countless official adverts.
“The branding looks at something broader,” Natanzon explains. “The aim was to create a new range of conversations for the country’s brand. The historical components are already part and parcel of its image.”
