Fiona Byrne

Welcome to The Punch’s Biggest Moments of 2011. Each day until the Friday before Christmas, we’ll be counting the events which marked 2011. Our list contains moments from politics, popular culture, tragedy, sport and more. Some are frivolous. Others are deadly serious. These are the moments which had us talking in 2011. More to the point, they’re the moments that had YOU talking.

What happened
Fiona Byrne, the mayor of Marrickville in inner Sydney, backed a motion to support the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. This basically meant that no Israeli products would be sold within the boundaries of Marrickville Council. Tough luck, bagel-lovers. Good news for Vietnamese pork roll sellers.

What happened next
All hell broke loose. Some argued that councils should stick to local services like rubbish collection. Others pointed out that in a region which has nearly 200 ethnicities living cheek to jowl, there were plenty of evil repressive regimes much more worthy of attention than a democratic state fighting for its right to exist – even considering the ongoing claims for Palestinian statehood.

Continue reading "Biggest moments of 2011 #23 Marrickville invades Israel" »

Kosher pickle lovers, rest easy. Sydney’s Marrickville Council has backed down overnight from its plan to boycott all things Israeli.

This is a win both for common sense, and for anyone who enjoys the delicious, sour, garlicky, Israeli Eskal pickles pictured above, which will continue to be available for purchase on the shelves of Marrickville Woolworths, as they have been for a decade or more.

Despite butchering her run at state parliament, not to mention the credibility of both the Greens and her own council over the Israel boycott, Marrickville Mayor Fiona Byrne went down swinging in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, with a bizarre, longwinded justification of her council’s right, nay civic duty, to embroil itself in matters beyond garbage collection.

Continue reading "Eskalating pressure gets council out of a pickle" »

It’s a telling reflection on the Greens’ woeful campaign at last Saturday’s NSW election that the one politician they may have helped elect is the founder of the One Nation Party, Pauline Hanson.

The Greens were meant to cruise into office in the Lower House in New South Wales in at least two seats. Given how badly the former Labor Government had been going, and how strongly the Greens’ primary vote had been standing up in the polls, they could and should have been expected to return more than just a couple of MPs.

Instead, their campaign crashed and burned. And it did so in a way which may have caused enduring acrimony with the Labor Party. Needless to say, with federal Labor having the most precarious grasp on power courtesy of a formal coalition with the Greens, these tensions in our biggest State have the potential to strain this arrangement.

Continue reading "The Greens: when all else fails cry conspiracy" »

It will be one of the greatest carve-ups the country has ever seen – an election which is nothing other than a plebiscite on the uselessness of a government which even its own members find embarrassing. The polls don’t suggest NSW Labor is in trouble. They suggest NSW is in so much trouble that it might lose seats which don’t even exist yet.

The galvanising effect of this seething dislike for NSW Labor is that third parties such as the Greens will be an irrelevance in the result. There will be no hung parliament after March 26. Even if people still don’t know much about Barry O’Farrell or his policies, they will vote in their droves for the Libs. This election is purely about knocking off the ALP.

There are just two seats where the Greens are expected to trouble Labor or triumph over Labor. They’re Marrickville, held by deputy premier and health minister Carmel Tebbutt, and Balmain, held by education minister Verity Firth.

Continue reading "The weird, unscrutinised world of the NSW Greens" »