The University of Sydney’s Queer Action Collective (QuAC) held an emergency briefing at 9 am on February 29 to condemn the support of a motion banning drag storytime in the Cumberland City Council the night before.
The briefing, led by QuAC’s convenors Tim Duff and Esther Whitehead, focused on the Council meeting events and the strong presence of Christian Lives Matter (CLM) at the meeting.
Duff opened by addressing “the facts of the matter” and contextualising the meeting for those in the Zoom call. First raised by Liberal councillor Steve Christou at a debate the previous week, the motion called for a ban on all drag storytime events at Cumberland City Council facilities, libraries, and halls. This is despite drag storytime never being held in this area, nor plans being made for upcoming events. Councillors from both the Liberal and Labor parties voted in support of the motion.
Duff then showed two videos, the first of which was a call for Cumberland City residents and CLM members to attend Wednesday night’s meeting by Joe Mekhael, an anti-vaxxer who has organised politically, according to QuAC, “around fear mongering on queer education” in schools under the campaign Leave The Kids Alone.
The second video was taken by anonymous queer activists who had attended the Council meeting in protest. Heard amidst other offensive language was the repeated heckle: “You’re not welcome in our neighbourhood, we don’t want you here.”
2023 National Union of Students (NUS) Queer Officer Damien Nguyen went into more detail about CLM’s presence at the meeting, emphasising that, “in front of the Council was a speaker system with a banner. There were around ten people outside the Council who were leafleting and waiting for the Council to happen. There were ten more people inside lining up because the entire Gallery was packed with people.”
After noting that there were two police officers present “who did not do anything except look back and forth” between the protestors, Damien reminded the Students’ Representatives Council (SRC) Councillors in the Zoom meeting of the assaults on queer activists in Belfield last year by CLM.
He also pointed out similarities between the outcome of this motion in the Cumberland City Council and the Hills Shire Council last month, where Liberal politicians put up a similar motion banning “sexualised material and drag storytime”.
The Inner West Council is the only Council in Sydney to vote in favour of continuing drag storytime events, and paying workers even if their shifts are cancelled.
Duff ended the meeting by drawing the attention of those present to QuAC’s upcoming No Cops, No Bigots snap rally at 8pm at Taylor Square on Friday, March 1. Given that these events have occurred so close to Sydney’s Mardi Gras, the snap rally’s key demands include removing “undercover or uniformed cops” from Mardi Gras, ending pinkwashing, disarming and defunding the NSW police, imploring the NSW Labor government to “immediately support the Equality Bill” and ending Indigenous deaths in custody.
Honi Soit will cover this protest and further updates regarding drag storytime around Sydney as they arrive.
An earlier edition of this article included a mistake stating that the motion at the Cumberland City Council was “passed unanimously.” This has been corrected to note that councillors from both the Liberal and Labor parties voted in support of the motion.
