CASH-STRAPPED locals needing help with power bills will no longer be able to call on Stirling council’s financial counselling service. Council executives say they have no choice but to close the 31-year-old service following state government cuts that slashed funding from $278,000 to $111,000 a year. With two full-time staff and part-timers already stretched, reducing…

LOOK closely: those tiny lines in Joel Knox’s journal are sentences. Each page, all 500 of them, holds a visual and written record of Knox’s most philosophical thoughts over the past five years. Soon, the book will be turned into a 3D video game. Knox is one of up to 15 game developers using Level…

CORRECTION: We got Terry-towelled last week. In a Bayswater Brief we meant to run a photo of Bayswater councillor Terry Kenyon, but the Voice gnomes fished out from the files a photo of Stirling councillor Terry Tyzack instead. Apologies to the two Terrys (who are, as it happens, both also former mayors of their respective…

THE Greens are getting in early in their campaign for Perth, following Alannah MacTiernan’s decision to retire, and are the first of the three major parties to pre-select a candidate for the seat. They’ve resurrected Tim Clifford who’d previously run for Stirling and are looking to build on their previous 10 per cent result in…

WHO would steal from a good looking man? Local craftsman Andrew Christie, who runs the unique furniture business A Good Looking Man and who built a lot of the cool unorthodox parklets around Vincent, had a drydocked boat set up in the Pleasure Garden as a curio but visitors have been nicking bits from it…

PHOTOGRAPHIC evidence has emerged that garbage piled up on a Vincent Street block came from a building owned by Perth lord mayor Lisa Scaffidi and her husband, Joe. Mr and Ms Scaffidi part-own the vacant block at 285 Vincent Street and were fined by Vincent council for using it as an unofficial and unauthorised tipsite.…

A VOICE reader’s tongue-in-cheek inquiry to Perth city council about camping on Heirisson Island reveals the capital seems at a loss at how to deal with the remaining 60-odd protest campers. The reader had forwarded his sarky inquiry having noticed the campers on the island, and asking the PCC how he could go about pitching…

NEGLECTING any heritage building to a point beyond repair should be a crime and landowners should be penalised for it, a community leader says. Mount Lawley Society patron Barrie Baker says it’s not enough for the Barnett government to protect heritage-listed buildings against “demolition by neglect” — a process where owners purposefully allow character properties…

VINCENT and Cambridge councils may share a boundary, but they’re worlds apart when it comes to verges. Vincent mayor John Carey was quick to highlight his council’s popular “adopt a verge” program when news hit about Cambridge council literally bulldozing a Wembley resident’s lush verge garden. The reasons given for clearing the 250sqm verge of…

HUNDREDS are threatening to bring a “thing” to parliament house at noon next Tuesday, February 23, to urge the Barnett government to abandon its vague anti-protest laws. Three-hundred people have pledged to attend and another 600 are following a Facebook group opposed to laws which make it an offence to carry a “thing” with the…