Perth Voice Interactive

ENCOURAGING households to dehydrate food scraps might be a solution to an unpleasant choice between burying mountains of trash or incinerating it.

By sucking all the moisture out of organic waste, a Korean invention called Smart Cara reduces organic waste to 10 percent of it’s volume, leaving a powdery waste product.

In Korea where regulations are a bit more lax than Australia, some people feed the waste to animals.

Small business owner Bryton Toh started selling the device from his plumbing supply store in Ascot and hopes that Smart Cara, which is all the rage in Korea, will catch on in WA.

Incinerating

Vincent council recently started looking at incinerating its waste instead of sending it to landfill, but Mr Toh reckons that even if incineration proves to be safe, it’s important to reduce the amount of rubbish being picked up by councils because transporting it has an environmental impact.

He thinks Smart Cara has one-upped composting, because it can handle high-protein waste products like bones and shells, and because it doesn’t need a backyard can be used by people in apartments.

“We want to try tell people not to send waste to landfill or burn it … if council can make some incentive for making less waste, that will be a good thing,” Mr Toh says.

“The whole idea of this is to do it at the source, because then people take responsibility for their waste.”

Some councils offer composting incentives, so Mr Toh hopes they’ll also get behind Smart Cara by subsidising the $1000 unit.

by TRILOKESH CHANMUGAM

WESTERN religion lurking in the curricula of mainstream schools is deterring Aboriginal students, says indigenous researcher Jesse J Fleay.

Based out of ECU Mt Lawley’s Kurongkurl Katitjin centre, Mr Fleay says it’s not just Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders who feel alienated by western society and decades of poor leadership in educational policy, but it can be a particular deterrent.

“It doesn’t speak to them culturally,” says the former Anglican deacon turned cosmologist.

Suffered

Mr Fleay says indigenous people suffered terribly in the name of religion, particularly in the old missions.

“You became Christian or you got cast out,” he says, adding it was a form of genocide to wipe out indigenous culture.

He says his main beef is with religious thought seeping into supposedly secular public schools.

“The bleed-in [of religion] in public schools is what annoys me the most.

“I understand there’s always going to be religious schools, but the way it bleeds into the public school curriculum, it doesn’t belong.”

Mr Fleay has no issue with religion being taught in history classes as an aspect of culture and world history, but it shouldn’t be presented as fact.

He says culture in the form of folklore and stories needs to stay in education, and traditional indigenous stories are especially useful for engaging Aboriginal students.

“They might not be 100 per cent correct, we have science now to tell us a lot of things. But hearing stories about how birds got their feathers, it’s good for children’s imaginations, it’s sharing something that their ancestors would have shared with them for years.”

Totems

Mr Fleay says learning the Noongar totem system was important to his everyday life.

A man of science now, he still found it useful to “go country” at Wave Rock near Hyden and find his totem animal.

“I went out by myself for a while, and I saw a wedge-tailed eagle… it had some sort of significance to me, it was the first thing I noticed.

“The totem system in Noongar culture is really important, it gives everyone an affinity to the land and a respect for the land.”

by DAVID BELL

WHEN a team of young film-makers set out to make a quirky documentary about Perth’s 2015 lord mayoral election, they had no idea of the storm about to erupt.

Running for a third term, incumbent Lisa Scaffidi suddenly found herself in the headlines for all the wrong reasons when a Corruption and Crime Commission report found she’d “signally failed” in her duties by not declaring freebies from companies who had dealings with the council.

Gen-Y

The film-makers had initially been focusing on the emergence of Gen-Y through candidates Mike O’Hanlon and Reece Harley, but suddenly found the intrigue around the report made great fodder for a documentary – albeit without the star candidate.

Ms Scaffidi refused to be interviewed by Periscope Pictures, blocked one of the producers on social media, and had her lawyers write to the company telling it not to film her at a mayoral debate organised by the WA Property Council.

“We really had to think outside the box and adapt quickly to the daily surprises that emerged as the events unfolded,” director Sam Bodhi Field says.

When it came to the Property Council debate, the film-makers blackened the screen where Ms Scaffidi appeared, muted her audio and replaced it with a scrolling summary of her arguments.

“Some people found it a little audacious but it was what she asked for: To not appear in the debate,” says Bodhi Field.

The shutters also went up locally, with none of Ms Scaffidi’s supporters willing to talk to the film-makers, who ended up tracking down Los Angeles celebrity dentist Dr Bill who said he was a friend of Ms Scaffidi.

“He had glowing things to say about her,” says Bodhi Field.

“The City of Perth decided that we couldn’t film the vote counting, which is a critical scene for a documentary about the election.

Spanner

“That was a bit of a spanner in the works. But luckily Council House is built like a fishbowl; we filmed everything we needed to through the windows.”

More than a year in the works and much changed from the original scope, Mr Field says they’ve got an entertaining but informative documentary.

Candidate Games screens on ABC 2 on December 7 at 9.30pm.

Disclaimer: Reporter David Bell makes a brief cameo appearance in Candidate Games

by DAVID BELL

MEDIATION between lord mayor Lisa Scaffidi and WA’s local government department has reportedly broken and she will now face a public hearing in front of the State Administrative Tribunal.

The SAT had been trying to mediate an agreement on what potential sanction Ms Scaffidi might face over failures to declare gifts and travel, but two attempts have now failed and the hearing will likely go ahead in February.

Last year the corruption and crime commission found Ms Scaffidi had breached rules by accepting prohibited gifts from companies that had dealings with councils and failing to properly declare other gifts.

Ms Scaffidi no longer speaks to the Voice but told The West Australian she was “looking forward to this matter being concluded and understood”.