Marrickville

Last night at a meeting of the Marrickville Council, the council voted eight to four to not pursue its boycott of Israel.

Marrickville Council’s abortive attempt to implement the Global Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (GBDS) campaign against Israel in Sydney’s Inner West should be a wake-up call. The moment to turn this objectionable campaign around should not be lost, else we will see more loopy home-grown forays into foreign policy. While this campaign may have been temporarily halted at a municipal level, it has gained considerable ground within Australia’s unions.

In moving her motion at Marrickville Council, Greens Councillor, Cathy Peters noted that the BDS campaign had the support of the Victorian Trades Hall Council, the South Coast Labour Council, and various state branches of the ASU, Teachers’ Union, LHMWU, CFMEU and MUA. In fact this is only half the list.

Continue reading "BDS BS: Labor’s infected and the Greens are gangrenous" »

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" »