Perth Voice Interactive

City Farm has sacked its manager and seven staff have walked after being handed new contracts with heavily reduced hours.

Cliff Morris, CEO of Men of the Trees—the organisation the farm answers to—says drastic action was needed because the East Perth site is haemorrhaging cash.

But Michael Forte, axed after managing the farm for nearly two years, says the farm was, “performing at an extremely high level and we had a good business plan in place”.

“The cafe, venue hire and produce sales were all going well,” the former New Yorker told the Voice.

“The management takeover came as a bit of a shock, and I only found out last week that I was getting let go.”

Mr Morris says the maths is simple: “Expenditure was exceeding income and we were subsiding the farm from other limbs of the MOTT.

“Once the farm is in better financial shape we would have upped the hours of staff, but we had to cut them back temporarily.

“Recently the farm made a move to become independent and self-funding, but it hasn’t really worked and it didn’t pass the financial tests we had set.”

For 19 years the urban farm has operated under the auspices of MOTT, whose board sanctioned any and all changes at the property.

In April the farm, under Mr Forte and co-manager Julie Broad, established a committee to oversee its transition to independence, with its own governing board and a new constitution.

Mr Forte says there were some “personality issues” between farm management and MOTT—refusing to elaborate—but was adamant the independent model was profitable.

Married with two kids, Mr Forte now plans to start his own organisation with ex-farm staffers, transforming gardens and vegie patches throughout Perth. He says he still derives an income from a business in NYC.

After 17 years transforming the old scrap metal yard, City Farm founders Rosanne and Thom Scott hung up their gardening gloves in 2011 to move to New Norcia. The farm has a 40-year peppercorn lease with the Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority—due for review next year. Green World Revolution has been appointed to manage the farm.

by STEPHEN POLLOCK

Valuable urban art at Perth City Farm is in danger of being lost says a local art group whose protests have—temporarily at least—halted the destruction of an 18-year-old mural.

City Farm had planned to allow a visiting European artist to paint over the work, as it was looking tired. Lady Bananas from Artists Anonymous Collective says that would be completely misreading the value of urban art.

“The farm is where graffiti art first found a heart and home in Perth, over 20 years ago,” she tells the Voice. “The artwork currently on the walls of City Farm needs to be recognised for its historical, cultural and artistic value and the importance this value has to the wider community.”

City Farm has been a spiritual home for Perth graffiti since 1995, when then-management invited artists who’d been illegally tagging the site to re-paint its barns and buildings.

Many, including DASH and KID ZOOM, are now internationally renowned and have exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria and other high-falutin’ places.

Lady Bananas is pleased City Farm—wracked in recent weeks by its own management turmoil—has halted the paint-over but wants assurances of a more lasting solution.

Cliff Morris, CEO of Men of the Trees, the organisation in charge of City Farm, says he recognises the significance of urban art and will ensure any future attempts to modify it come before the MOTT committee first.

Lady Bananas notes a 2011 farm mural, Ironlak in Wonderland, has sentimental as well as artistic value.

“Jarrad Hawkins (AXUP), who worked on that piece with the 3DB crew, sadly died in March,” she says.

“It was the first, legal large-scale mural where the crew had the chance to really showcase to the rest of Australia what they did best.

“This mural concept pushed their personal artistic skills and boundaries, and it was completed with a great sense of achievement.”

She notes a request from 3DB for it to repaint the mural if the farm ever decided it required refreshing, was rejected.

She is lobbying Perth city council to protect all historic graffiti across the city.

Human rights lawyer Julian Burnside is in Perth to propose an alternative to the major parties’ “cruel” refugee policies.

“We seem troubled by people drowning at sea trying to reach Australia,” he told the Voice. “We seem less troubled by the idea that if we’re nasty enough we can deter them from leaving their country where they’ll be slaughtered. I think it’s a pretty miserable approach.”

He says, “a safe way of getting them here if we’re concerned about people drowning at sea is to set up a processing centre in Indonesia, tell them they’ll be resettled safely in Australia and New Zealand… in six weeks, or two months, or four-and-a-half months”.

Awarded the Order of Australia in 2009 “for service as a human rights advocate” he says the 5000 to 10,000 asylum seekers currently in Indonesia could easily be absorbed by Australia.

Mr Burnside concedes this would result in many more then making their way to Indonesia to receive similar treatment, adding his plan requires working with Indonesia to deal with the influx.

But he points out people don’t leave their homes lightly, and 90 per cent of asylum seekers are found to be genuine refugees fleeing trouble.

He’s convinced the numbers should be manageable.

Mr Burnside says instead of paying $300,000 per person per year to multinational companies like Serco to detain people, asylum seekers could be temporarily relocated to country towns while their applications were processed.

They’d be given a right to work but, even in worst-case scenarios, says even if they stayed on the dole their cash would help revive struggling regional economies.

“That would end up costing us about $30,000 per person per year”—a tenth of the current cost.
We would be saving $2.5 billion a year on what we’d otherwise spend brutalising them with the incredible cost of holding them in detention in remote locations and on Christmas Island.”

Mr Burnside will speak at a Greens’ organised refugee forum today, Saturday August 31, alongside senator Scott Ludlam, the Uniting Church’s Rosemary Hudson Miller, refugee advocate Phil Chilton and comedian Sami Shah.

It is at the WA Italian Club, 6–8pm. Entry is free but RSVP felicity.ruby@aph.gov.au

by DAVID BELL

A young activist has taken her own life a week before a marriage equality rally she’d helped organise.

Equal Love WA co-convenor Amber Maxwell, 20, died Saturday August 24 at 5.44pm, shortly after attending a refugee rights rally. The transgender woman had been at the forefront of the local LGBTI rights campaign and was known for fiery speeches on the megaphone.

On July 31 the Red Flag socialist newspaper published an account of discrimination she’d experienced in Perth, describing her rejection from crisis accommodation which refused to house her with other women, saying they only wanted “real girls”, and a lack of psychiatrists in WA who deal with transgender patients.

At the time of her death she was living in a youth hostel in Baldivis.

“Life as a transgender or gender-diverse person is often characterised by difficulty and discrimination,” she wrote. “Family rejection, homelessness, depression, attempted suicide—these are a regular part of our existence.” She wrote the equal marriage campaign was a “ray of hope” in her life and a “source of inspiration”.

Following her death, sister Jodie told activists on Facebook, “I know how much Amber worked on [the rally] and wanted it to be a success. So please… everyone keep fighting for the things she believed in.”

Fellow Equal Love WA co-convenor Sam Cavallaro told the Voice, “she was a passionate activist and campaigner. She was an inspirational speaker and you could hear the fire in her voice.”

Mr Cavallaro says there’s now a deep “sense of tragedy and loss”. The rally will go ahead Saturday August 31 at 1pm at Stirling Gardens (corner of Barrack Street and St Georges Terrace).

A 6WD amphibious vehicle will be used to fight mozzies plaguing Maylands foreshore.

Bayswater city council will shell out $30,920 to buy and ship the all-terrain vehicle from Queensland. The model has been used successfully for nearly 20 years in Queensland to reach otherwise inaccessible breeding areas.

The council allocated $166,970 in its 2013/14 budget to fight mozzies after the WA government broke a pre-election pledge made by Maylands Liberal candidate Sylvan Albert.

by STEPHEN POLLOCK

Installing full-scale models of trams in the Hay Street Mall has paid off for Perth city council, with emails flooding in.

The PCC opposes the Barnett government’s plan to run trams through the mall and so does 93 per cent of the public, according to the emails. The PCC reckons light rail should go down St Georges Terrace instead. Lord mayor Lisa Scaffidi says the trams’ impact on the narrow mall is too“extreme”.

She points out 1769 people attended Melbourne emergency departments as a result of tram accidents between 2001 and 2008, with 107 classified as “major traumas”. Nine died.