I’m running for Mayor in the City of Sydney council elections because it’s quite clear we are living through a critical moment in history. That’s the funny thing about history – it’s not just something you read in books, it’s happening all around us. Right now, every single one of our institutions is being simultaneously attacked by a set of dangerous and divisive ideologies that Lord Mayor Clover Moore and her council have entirely taken the knee to. And I submit that there is no room for ideology in council.

The biggest and baddest of this ‘hydra head’ of ideologies is Cultural Marxism which insists we view the world through the lens of the oppressor and the oppressed, encouraging historically marginalised groups to believe they will be victims in perpetuity, which is the worst possible thing you can do, say, or think.

Spinning out of this narrative is the belief that the entire Western project was a racist attempt to oppress, hence the need to ‘decolonise’. Now we find that the Sydney City Council is reviewing our historical statues, and as George Orwell said, ‘The most effective way to destroy people is to obliterate their own understanding of their history.’

This is all under the banner of ‘truth-telling’. Well, am I allowed to tell the actual truth that in the 18th Century a Christian-led moral revolution swept England and King George III instructed all governors to quote ‘live in kindness’ with ‘native inhabitants’, that they were free men and women with the ‘same rights as those under the Crown’. And if any harm should come to them, ‘That man shall be hanged as if he had harmed one of the Garrison’. The call of genocide is the stuff of fantasy.

But the narrative persists, with the Mayor referring to Australia Day as ‘Invasion Day’. For the sake of all of us, we must stop sowing the seeds of division and picking at the scabs of history. We must love and accept each other today as Australians, and indeed Sydneysiders, best thinking of one another as somewhat of an extended family.

Unfortunately, the council has run in the opposite direction, pledging $500k telling us we should vote ‘Yes’ in what was a divisive, ideological, and I believe, racist referendum.

The narrative of the oppressor has also led to council, under the leadership of Clover Moore, to push for a ceasefire in Gaza and the boycotting of Jewish businesses that appeared on the Boycott Israel campaign.

Another head of the hydra is the ideology of Critical Race Theory that insists skin colour is the most important thing about your identity. It is a dehumanising about-face from Martin Luther King’s exquisite dream of being judged by character over colour.

Spinning out of this is the policy of anti-racism that insists in order to fight racism we must be thinking about race at all times, which is the very last thing we should be doing. This has manifested into the council’s ‘#racismnotwelcome’ street signs which are entirely redundant.

There’s Gender Ideology, that essentially pits women against men. Clover Moore now oddly insists on gender quotas for specifically architects, of all professions. Surely we want the best people working for our city based on merit alone?

I find it fascinating that Clover Moore privatised the rubbish in 2019. I can’t help but think she and her council think their role is not to collect rubbish, but to be the moral arbiter of our lives, which it is not.

Nor should it be the role of council to solve the global problem of climate change or reach Net Zero.

To give some context, Australia is exporting 300 million tons of coal every year, China is building a coal-fired power station every week and India is not far behind, and this Mayor wants to single-handedly solve climate change with bike lanes, EVs, and battery-powered leaf blowers.

This is not just hubris. It is madness. I promise you, generations in the future will look back with incredulity at how ostensibly the smartest people in the room could be so wrong.

They are blinded in a blizzard of ideology such that now they’re the ones ignoring ‘the science’. The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, the IPCC’s ‘Working Group 1’, who are the only actual climate scientists, do not say anywhere in their 6th Assessment Report to the UN that we are facing an imminent global catastrophe. In fact, they are now saying the extreme climate modelling is wrong.

They state that global warming is real, is man-made, and it is a problem but it is manageable, and it is not in fact, ‘Red Alert for Planet Earth’.

No, I am not a climate change denier. I am a doomsday denier. Because I trust ‘the science’.

Yet in 2019, Clover Moore declared a ‘Climate Emergency’ for Sydney. How many climate related deaths have there been since then? The very question highlights the absurdity of the proclamation.

What about actual Sydney emergencies like affordable housing, the cost of daycare, people not being able to pay their rent, their rates, there’s zero nightlife, congested roads, and nowhere to park.

Small businesses are the lifeblood of the community and should be the engine room of the economy. But they’re dying. We must help them by cutting red tape, and green tape.

And no ‘Moore’ bloody bike lanes! Particularly around shop fronts critical to small businesses. I have been told by the council that part of their end goal of reaching Net Zero is to squeeze out cars with bike lanes. And in this obsession, leaders seem to have forgotten that people, particularly families with little kids, need cars and somewhere to park.

There’s a cost of living crisis and we’re being gouged with unnecessary fines. In 2023, the City of Sydney raked in $39 million in parking fines, the most of any council With $763 million in the council’s bank, heavy fines feel like cruelty. Restrictive rules abound, and now there’s the plan to reduce the speed limit to 30km/hour. Unnecessary permits must end. Kids should be able to have a lemonade stand on the street while neighbours enjoy a drink together.

We need to freeze rates for residents and businesses, partly by cutting council spending. Moore indulges herself with a personal political staff of 22.

And finally, it is time to help the majority.

The so-called ‘progressive’ left pride themselves in ‘being kind’. But kindness in government is mutually exclusive. If the council donates $450K to overseas charities and $1 million to World Pride and an LGBTQIA2S+ museum ‘Qtopia’ over here, that’s almost $1.5 million not going to struggling families or affordable housing over there.

So, I say let’s take the ideological garbage out of council so the council can go back to what it should be doing – taking out the garbage.