Perth Voice Interactive

A PICTURE of a protestor dressed as the Lorax protesting wetlands destruction has been rejected from a Bayswater council photo competition for being too politically charged.

Branka Radanovich submitted the pic of rabble rouser Greg Smith dressed up as Dr Lorax with a sign saying “Help save our wetlands and Eric Singleton Bird Sanctuary” and imploring people to sign a petition against a housing development on privately owned land.

The verdict from the council: Too political.

Lobbying

CEO Francesca Lefante said via email the photo “was deemed to infringe one of the rules of the competition that states that entries may be excluded if they are deemed not to be in keeping with the spirit of the competition, or of a political nature or designed to promote the interests of other organisations and/or special interest or lobbying groups”.

Mr Radanovich was allowed to submit an alternative image of the Lorax reading to kids, deemed less politically potent. It was put in as a late addition which got at least one anti-protestor protesting.

A poster calling himself “Mike Doyle,” whose Facebook page appears to have been set up that day, complained “why has this photo been added a week after entries closed and why are Councillors [Chris] Cornish and [Catherine] Ehrhardt voting for it? Is that appropriate when it’s a council competition?” He went through clicking on a bunch of the other entries, copying and pasting a similar complaint.

It appears the “voting” he refers to was the councillors clicking the “Like” button, which many councillors do on many photos every month.

“If I see a picture I like, I will certainly ‘like’ it,” Cr Ehrhardt says. She’d also liked some of the others posted earlier, including an utterly unpolitical picture of some birds.

by DAVID BELL