Our Mayor Is FFFFFed Up With Us
What have we done?
Even in normal times, it can’t be easy being a politician. Is it meant to be? Take the Mayor of the Blue Mountains, Mark Greenhill, as an example. Part of his current role seems to be to praise and curate the values of residents in leading them to the acceptance of essential narratives. The term for this is agnotology.1
AGNOTOLOGY - the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt.
Conversely, he must discredit and marginalise those who have “unacceptable” views. This is an important public performance. He is aided in this by media, other levels of government, consultants and programs developed by various behavioural psychologists such as BETA.2
How big is his role? Not big, traditionally, but local Councils are increasingly the focus for a new battle between the public, their governments and very large international players. Unfortunately, it appears that governments quite often are not on our side.
No matter how small the country, how poor the population, the vision as clearly stated in United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16 is for every person on the planet to be issued a digital id. We are told this is about INCLUSION. And if inclusion means anything, much of it is experienced locally.
Our Council has made clear its strong commitment to all 17 Sustainable Development Goals. I don’t recall any of our Councillors running on this platform.
See the related indicator which requires governments to have sound records of how they are progressing towards this goal. They will be measured on this and critical infrastructure spending will follow or be denied based on performance (see fiscal space and COP 28).3
Some partners can be very demanding
Local government is the place where the results of a lot of smart thinking are implemented. It is also where the instructions from organisations like ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability), C40 Race to Net Zero, Global Covenant of Mayors, CDP, WWF, the World Resources Institute, Resilient Sydney and the Conference of Parties (COP) are followed.
These organisations are clearly defined as Blue Mountains City Council Partners4. For example, Council has had some sort of relationship with ICLEI since at least 2005 but I have never heard its name mentioned until recently.
The partnerships might be observed, as in the case of our Council, in the implementation of LED lighting, smart parking meters, 5G towers (allowing them to happen), ending the use of gas or wood heating, Net Zero policy statements and other mitigations measures, creeping promotion of transgenderism, queer culture, downturn in the local economy and many more things labelled smart.
This might seem to be outside the scope of a local Council. Often today, this is not the case. Even the lowest level of government can now play a role in this ambitious global agenda. Increasingly, it is a very important one. Departments are formed within Council and specialised staff are sourced and set to these purposes.
Risk is now everywhere and who better to point out this risk than the man known locally as Captain Fear5. Again, much of this is felt locally (See Kate Mason on Managed Retreat).6
So our Mayor has an important role in managing all of this. So how is he going and why is he fed up with us? Well, that depends on who you ask and who was at the Council meeting last Tuesday.
As we discussed, he needs enough people in the agnotological group to make any dissenters from his “everything is great” narrative appear irrelevant if not mad, dangerous, conspiracy theorists.
His task is made increasingly difficult as the stories he is expected to sell stray further from the public interest. When you hit sane people over the head with a carbon neutral policy, it is hard to convince them it is for their own good, let alone convince them it will be enjoyable. Even a Rockefeller Planetary Health project will have trouble making this palatable.
Learn to love your cognitive dissonance
This demands keeping enough of us insane. Burgeoning mental health spending, as evidenced by the number of bright new mental health facilities opening regularly in Blue Mountains towns, suggests this may be working. The Mayor’s Labor colleague and our Federal member, Susan Templeman, is convinced expanding mental health spending is something to celebrate, as her promotional brochures affirm.
How easy is it to manage these competing interests? For someone with a strong belief in public debate, fairness and goodwill, particularly so. Fortunately, our Mayor’s selective disregard of propriety and growing disdain for contrary opinion makes this easier than it should be.
Can I prove what I say? I think I can and I have a recording of a recent Council meeting as evidence. I hope you find his performance at last week’s Council meeting as hilarious as I did.
On at least three occasions, he threatened to send people home. Not merely order them to sit down, be quiet or promise their expulsion. He seems to think he has the power to confine people to their home. Two examples of his extraordinary powers are provided below.
Click on blue links for audio.
Mayor to Resident One:
”Don’t interrupt me. No, don’t interrupt me. You’re about to go home if you interrupt me again”.
Mayor to Resident Two:
”I’m the Mayor. This is a Council meeting. Interrupt me one more time and you’re going home”.
Get your poison here
Maybe he was practising for Pandemic2 - “Threat of the Chicken”. No-one can accuse him of not playing his role in Pandemic 1 either. In this 8 minute clip from September 2021 you will hear his call for a local vaccine hub so people had no need to leave the Blue Mountains for their poisoning. At the time, he also celebrated the lockdowns and how police were stopping visitors from travelling to the mountains which has been a major tourist region.
This policy has proven very successful post-Covid as the numbers visiting our towns have remained historically low. This is despite his regular quoting of Council figures to suggest the number of visitors is up. Just another agnotological trope that the Mayor throws out to us like offcuts to a dog.
Resident One (see above) was certainly off the Mayor’s Christmas card list when she pointed out the dire state of the Blue Mountains main town, Katoomba. One in eight shops is empty and many more businesses are just hanging on. Here the Covid induced downturn received a timely fillip from Council’s implementation last year of smart pay parking meters. 7
By way of a minor interruption, I thought one Councillor’s entrance into last week’s debate quite humorous. I don’t think she meant it to be. Council’s Net Zero plan was centrally about reducing CO2. This Councillor equated CO2 with trash. Someone might tell her it has at least a minor role in producing oxygen.
Sorry we spoke and the Mayor is fed up
Here is a resident speaking clearly and succinctly against Council’s Net Zero plan which is closely followed by our Mayor’s tantrum:
”I am speaking against the net zero plan because I couldn’t find any evidence for the claims made in it”.
The Mayor in response to the above address:
”Let me be unusually less than mild-mannered tonight”.
The bulk of Mayor Greenhill’s petulance was directed at the two residents who dared challenge Council’s climate change net-zero anti-planning. His indulgent way of thanking people who agree with a Council motion while offering curt dismissal of those who don’t, is also noteworthy. None of this is speculative. It is based on simple observation.
It was acknowledged on the night that 28% of people who responded to Council’s Net Zero plan opposed it. This is a tricky Council with its own Agnotology Department so these figures may be rubbery enough to fit out the Toll fleet. Hard to know. But let’s not hold him up. Our Mayor doesn’t like to be held up OR interrupted when he is speaking, which he usually is.
You will now be clear that he is fffffed up. To get the pronunciation right, you need a long and heavily emphasised ffffff with an edup flick at the end. You might practise it.
Our Mayor is ffffed up with so many things. He is fffffed up with
“an organised attempt by an organised group to undermine the Council’s position on climate change”.
The very fact he has mentioned the number of public submissions to the plan suggests the volume of those opposing it was unusually large. This is something I will be pursuing.
He is
“[F]ed up with climate deniers coming in here and pretending they speak for everyone”.
How stupid would a person have to be to be a climate denier. That would be like denying sand. Of course climate is real. That is another agnotological trope. What the dispute is about is the degree and the direction of any number of indicators used to make convenient claims.
This is a discussion that he and the people he serves won’t allow us to have. Why is that? If you don’t know, why are you not asking? Have your senses been so dulled down that you have lost all curiosity?
He is
“fffffedup with science, almost uniform science, being denied”
and with people with poisonous and venomous ideologies. He burbles that it is very rare for scientists to come together on an issue as they do now over climate. Not so rare, boss. We had an astounding coming together of professionals despite their firm contradiction by inconvenient facts throughout Covid. This required Agnotology of the highest order to hold the line.
Who knew that science had a uniform? You know, THE SCIENCE that Tony Fauci represented, that forced us to have unnecessary medical procedures, that took our jobs, made us wear useless masks, locked us down and was a massive cause of mental illness. If you can’t see any of this, you are still suffering from it.
Mark continues by talking about people putting
“[his] children at risk for some sort of ideological proposition”.
If he really had concern for children, he wouldn’t be indulging a couple of his fellow Councillors and fostering Council policies that proselytise in favour of transgenderism, queer culture and inclusion.
He is
“fffffed up with conspiracy theorists inventing their secret world orders”:
Does he mean like this one:
”In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill”.
and further down the same page:
”the real enemy is humanity itself”. 8
Were Alexander King and The Club of Rome people joking? The Club is the organisation that also produced the book: “Limits to Growth” 9 on which the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) initial work was based.
In 2022, one of the key authors of that book shared his vision for the future. Meet the lovely Dennis Meadows.
Mayor Greenhill concluded this gratuitous public spray at a large section of the community by telling us how popular and in step he is with community values. Who’d have guessed?
A dangerous community
How does a politician end up in this position? We could find out by asking his regional state and federal Labor colleagues who perform a similar role but on a higher pay scale and with more prestige.
None of the three takes well to criticism but it is the proximity of local council to the community that makes earning your pay more difficult. The Mayor’s colleagues have the advantage of simply ignoring us.
Their public appearances are more easily staged and managed. We are most thankful for the invention of the digital camera. Otherwise the cost of film for this trio’s publicity shoots would have us all working overtime.
Only the Mayor faces the monthly Tuesday night vulnerability that comes from public exposure and unwelcome scrutiny. I might add that despite his scaremongering to convey the opposite, attendees at Council have been extraordinarily restrained despite his provocation.10
In his defence, it can’t be easy for an ambitious politician waiting 20 years in off-Broadway local Council and finding himself sitting behind a couple of women who are unlikely to move on soon. Does this contribute to his apparent resentment of the public? There are rumours of a possible parachuting into Penrith. So RIFF be warned.
Aside from being fffffed up with us, the Mayor made some remarkable claims. He told us Council would soon be Net Zero. This will require some magical accounting and quite possibly a few fulltime staffers from the Agnotology Department. He also promises this will precede his plans to NET ZERO the lives of Blue Mountains residents’.
Set just back from the Great Western Highway, in Katoomba, our Council sits like a mid-sized town with its many staff, some with cars, all with phones, lighting, furniture, computers, software, training programs, travel commitments, coffee machine et al.
And then there are the many agencies such as the ballooning Belong which seems to belong everywhere with its Wellbeing11 and Resilience programs.
Can our Mayor be this ignorant? I doubt it
We now have numerous examples of Mayor Greenhill sneering about conspiracy theories and pretending he doesn’t know the World Economic Forum (WEF). This is despite the pact the WEF signed a compact with the United Nations in 2019 and the Council’s very clear commitment to the UN’s daffy Sustainable Development Goals. If such ignorance were true, it must signify incompetence or, more seriously, negligence.
The fact is a company he works for has a very clear commitment to the World Economic Forum / United Nations global compact agenda. 1213 14 15 16 17 While acknowledging these links relate to the international arm of this major French construction company, it must have some implications for the local operation.
Can he continue to convince enough people that a small number of dangerous lunatics with extremist views, who turn up at Council meetings, are a serious threat to the community and the nation?
The divisive nature of this policy and the fracturing it causes to community is a cost he and his senior political colleagues seem eager to bear.
Meanwhile, it is the rapidly growing number of “extremists’” job to continue to ask questions and to highlight the Mayor’s increasingly erratic behaviour. It is our job to point to the many inexplicable policy decisions that are being made daily and quite clearly against the public interest no matter how much it annoys the political class.
Finally, the role of technology as a faithful servant has been transformed over the last fifty years into that of a troublesome master. We haven’t seen the worst of this yet. It is not something that has “just happened” and this evil transformation is only half complete.
The Mayor likes to say “Let me be clear”, despite the fact the people stopping him are yet to be found. So “let ME be clear”. These unwanted transformations are not inevitable. They are the work of people. We must ensure that people implementing them at the local level are held to account.
See you at the next Council meeting.
Agnotology - the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt.
see more at: We Rule You If We Can Fool You
First Global Stocktake High Level Committee
Countries that don’t have the “fiscal space” to meet their greenhouse gas reductions will be able to borrow to meet them. Gatherings of the world biggest financiers are organised to help.
Limits to Growth, 1972
Battle for the Blue Mountains - the ABC interview where the Mayor gratuitously attached attendees at a Council meeting
See Kate Mason: “What is the Treasurer’s Chalmers Wellbeing Obsession”
WEF and BCG highlight how construction is crucial to fight climate change, and what major players: Laing O'Rourke, Holcim and Bouygues are doing about it
Masterpiece of writing .. this fellas off his chops I’m amazed he can fit through the door with that over inflated ego of his
Boy oh boy. These tyrants are the same everywhere. This was very, very familiar. Thanks for standing up at the local level.