Perth Voice Interactive

Too much loving for Facebook in MP’s post

A GAY MP has been censored by Facebook after sharing an image of LGBTQI+ couples embracing.

Maylands MP Lisa Baker was highlighting International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia & Transphobia on May 17 with a poster which was headlined “Celebrate the power of love” and had a caption stating the day was “a worldwide celebration of sexual and gender diversities”.

Ms Baker added a comment that: “Today we recognise and celebrate” but Facebook blurred the entire poster.

Clicking on it yielded a warning the blur was covering “sensitive content. This photo may show violent or graphic content”. 

A further warning said while the photo didn’t break Facebook’s rules, either its automated technology or someone on its review team had decided it counted as “graphic content” and should be covered “so people can choose whether to see it”.

This category included “animal abuse, death, wounds, someone’s life being threatened [and] suicide and self-harm”. 

Eventually clicking through the warnings did reveal the innocuous poster to adult users, but Facebook rendered it completely invisible to anyone under 18. 

Ms Baker tells us Facebook’s censoring was “unbelievable”.

“I can’t believe that Facebook has done that,” she said, adding the youth demographic who were completely blocked from viewing it were often most in need of support and recognition.

“[It’s] a harmless cartoon of hugging and just being close, nothing untoward about any aspect of it… and I thought it was fantastically inclusive.”

She said the message she’d wanted to get across was “to celebrate LGBTIQ+ people in our community and recognise the work that’s still needed to be done to stamp out discrimination”, calling on people to become a visible ally who speaks up against homophobia, biphobia, interphobia, and transphobia. 

While the poster was deemed unacceptable, links to first-person footage filmed by a white supremacist mass shooter in Buffalo, New York, have been shared countless thousands of times on Facebook since the May 14 massacre of 10 people.

When some users tried to report the links to Facebook, they received messages saying “the post was reviewed, and though it doesn’t go against one of our specific community standards… we understand that it may still be offensive or distasteful to you” and it suggested unfriending or blocking the person who’d posted it.

Facebook’s since started deleting and blocking some of the links, but footage of the murders was still easily found four days later as we went to press.

by DAVID BELL

A LACK of footpaths, fast road speeds, and super-wide intersections are preventing students from walking to school according to Transition Town Bayswater.

The community organisation ran walk and talk events over the past two weekends to map out ways to make safer routes to Maylands Peninsula Primary school.

TTB volunteer Charlotte Dudley says the key problems flagged included the traffic being too fast in the area, narrow or non-existent footpaths, a lack 

of trees for shade, and wide intersections that kids found hard to cross.

Fast drivers

“We’ve heard loud and clear that kids in Maylands want to walk, ride and scoot to school but they told us there are too many fast drivers who are not looking out for them,” Ms Dudley says.

“Parents told us they would love to be freed from taxi driver duties but want to feel confident that the local streets are safe enough for their kids to walk and ride.

“Our streets belong to everyone and there’s a lot the City of Bayswater can do to make the streets safer and more inviting for children to walk or bike to school. 

“Rolling out footpaths and planting more street trees invites people to walk more, while narrowing intersections will calm driving and make it easier and safer for children to cross the street.”

TTB is packaging up the feedback to put to Bayswater council, which is currently consulting on the “Safe Routes to School” project until May 20 to figure out what safety upgrades to prioritise.

The WA transport department’s 2021 report into the declining rate of walking and cycling to schools found the rate of kids walking to school dropped as low as 20 per cent in Perth. The national average is 25 per cent, down from 75 per cent in the 1970s. The drop’s been fuelled by a lack of pedestrian routes, bad traffic and more cars, safety concerns, and parents’ work constraints preventing them from walking or riding with younger kids.

The department’s Safe Routes program is tackling suburbs one at a time to try to shift the trend, as driving makes for worse health, more costs from cars on the road and travel time, and more crashes.

by DAVID BELL

THE Bayswater bridge continues to haunt motorists, but this time there was no fault by the motorist when a panel from the replacement bridge’s construction fell and hit a car on Monday. 

Two people were in the car and one was taken to hospital suffering shock.

The new bridge is being built above the old one and will have a clearance of 4.8m, up from the 3.8m that gets crashed into about 10 times a year when people overestimate its clearance.

Crashes were so frequent that local techy Simon Vin set up a site howmanydayssincebayswater bridgehasbeenhit.com to keep track of all the incidents.

He’s reported the most recent bridge-on-car incident but since it wasn’t the original bridge, the official counter remains at “15 days” as we go to print, marking the most recent May 3 occasion when a truck wedged under there.

BAYSWATER’S trees are dying at an alarming rate and only 20 per cent are being replaced due to a controversial policy shift. 

This financial year 132 street trees died from heat, thirst, age or poor soil. Under Bayswater’s old verge tree policy, dead trees were automatically replaced unless a homeowner objected, but many verges remain bare after the council added an opt-in clause last year.

Common-sense

Mayor Filomena Piffaretti described getting opt-in consent from surrounding landowners as “common-sense”, saying it gave them more say over their verge.

It was backed by councillors Catherine Ehrhardt, Josh Eveson, Assunta Meleca, Steven Ostaszewskyj and Michelle Sutherland, while Crs Dan Bull, Giorgia Johnson, Sally Palmer, and Elli Petersen-Pik dissented.

Cr Petersen-Pik warned at the time it would make increasing Bayswater’s tree canopy impossible (“Tree protection pruned,” Voice, January 11, 2022). 

Decades of research shows people are less likely to participate in opt-in initiatives, no matter how benign – from organ donation to superannuation. 

A Bayswater staff report this week says the new policy “has affected the number of dead trees being replaced. Currently, only 20 per cent of removed trees in the 2021/2022 summer period have been listed for replacement this winter, which is a significant reduction from the 83 per cent of replacement trees listed for the same period in 2020/2021.”

Cr Petersen-Pik says it’s not surprising. 

“This is a massive and unprecedented drop” in replacement rates, he said.

“I am now again deeply concerned about the ramifications arising from the policy changes. 

“We will all suffer the consequences in the years to come. It takes many years and a lot of care for a tree to reach maturity, a challenge only compounded by changes to our climate.”

He pointed to a mature Maylands verge tree which had shaded kids walking to school until being removed a few months ago.

Failed

Cr Petersen-Pik says staff tried contacting the landowner, but “all attempts have failed so a tree cannot be planted there”.

Councillors will decide whether to revert to the old policy at the May 24 meeting. Council staff also suggested spending an extra $30,000 on watering.

The tree health report was requested by Cr Petersen-Pik after he and other residents noticed a surge in tree mortality.

by DAVID BELL

THE first generation of Kings Park Special bottlebrushes are dying off.

A cultivated variety of Callistemon developed through breeding, the KPS was an early success story in plant development for Kings Park and Botanic Garden. 

The original seedling was of “unknown origin”, cultivated into its current form by the park’s first nurseryman Ernst Wittwer, a Swiss horticulturalist who’d trained at Kew Gardens.

The species was registered in 1980, and in the following decade countless KPS Callistemons were planted across Perth’s verges and have since become popular in cities around Australia for their bright colours and attracting birds and insects. 

But it appears the first cohort are growing too old to withstand water stress and heat.

In 2019 and 2020 KPS Callistemons made up the vast bulk of trees that died on Vincent council’s verges. 

They’re known to be sensitive to drops in the water table, while an arboricultural assessment couldn’t find any specific disease or bug affecting them (“Mystery ailment knocks off trees,” Voice, November 16, 2019). 

This summer the KPS also made up the majority of trees dying off in Bayswater, with a report showing 53 of the 134 dead verge trees were Callistemons. They only make up 10 per cent of Bayswater’s verge trees, but are overrepresented with 40 per cent of this summer’s casualties.

Bayswater’s parks and gardens staff write in the report there’s various possible causes like heat, disturbance from development, and water stress. Trees are more susceptible to these factors when newly planted or when they grow too old to tolerate harsher conditions. 

“Callistemon Kings Park Special rarely lives beyond 40 years of age,” the report says.

Vincent has phased out planting KPS Callistemons, mostly replacing the dead ones with melaleucas. Bayswater’s also removed them from its current tree planting guidelines in favour of species like some of the shorter eucalyptus species and some exotics like Swan Hill olives, crepe myrtles and Chinese pistachio trees. 

by DAVID BELL

LONGSTANDING plans to build a nationally-significant Aboriginal Cultural Centre in Perth got a positive sign this week with federal Labor pledging $50 million towards it they win office.

The Morrison government pitched in $2 million for planning the centre as part of the Perth City Deal, and the McGowan state government committed $52m towards it at the 2021 state election.

Federal Perth MP Patrick Gorman has been advocating for an ACC in Perth and welcomed the funding pledge.

“The Aboriginal Cultural Centre will be the Sydney Opera House of the West Coast. It will be the place everyone wants to visit when they come to Perth,” he said in the announcement.

“For the people of Perth, the centre will be a source of pride and occupy a place of prominence on the banks of the Derbarl Yerrigan.”

A location is yet to be decided. 

A Whadjuk-led steering committee held its first meeting in April to tour potential sites, and the location will likely be along the foreshore as the centre aims to “commemorate the ongoing connections to the Derbarl Yerrigan” (Swan River). 

The committee is due to meet again in June.