Cumberland City Clown Show

Earlier this week two opposing groups faced off outside of Merrylands council chambers as councillors of Cumberland City (think, Auburn, Granville, Fairfield etc) discussed if they should reverse a ban on a book. Yes, a book. 

Dozens of grown men screaming about protecting their kids from what must be a truly controversial book.

Now you may be thinking, wow, this book must be some heavy shit! Maybe some hardcore porn? A terrorism guide book? The untold secret to why Sydney nightlife is so trash? No. The book was “Same Sex Parents” by Holly Duhig. The childrens picture book is an informative explanation to homosexual relationships and family building, that’s it. Seriously, you can google it now. I looked at a few pages online because I was sure I was missing something about this and it’s literally just explaining things to children from heterosexual families that might be confused about stuff, like surrogate mothers

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So why was Cumberland city council looking like something out of Trump's America this week?  Meet Cumberland City councillor Steve Christou. This guy could potentially be one of the biggest attention-whores in Western Sydney’s history, he’s so obvious in his intentions, he wants to be the face of right-wing populism in Sydney, luckily he’s got the charisma of a rock. A quick look at his Tiktok account and you can be met with the complete wall to wall discography of the MAGA (Trump) issues. They are trying to make the kids gay (Don’t worry he won’t have the balls to tell you who ‘they’ is and for some reason his supporters don’t mind) , or, Aboriginal welcome to country is going to start a race war in Australia. The MAGA issues are great because they are almost never actually issues, they’re just really good ways to tap into the fears of the Suburban world that never really interacts with people outside of their suburbs. The thing is though, Steve Christou SUCKS at this. He sucks at talking, he’s clearly not the brightest guy and he’s not even up to date with the current right wing scare campaigns. Trying to convince your electorate that they’re trying to make the kids gay is so 2023, and it doesn’t work. De Santis ran his entire republican campaign on this cause and it failed abysmally in the States. Even Americans, who are terrible at reading if a politician is in-authentic or not, knew it was in-authentic and he crashed out.

Christou does the brave thing and justifies his attempt to ban the book by saying it was just the overwhelming amount of distress he was receiving from his electorate - who would also maybe benefit from reading the children’s book. If anyone criticizes him in the media he takes to socials to round up his supporters to try and cancel them. Christou is truly a free speech warrior.

He’s frantically thrown his support at any populist non-issue that he can find in a sad attempt at mimicking America’s far right movement. Best believe this boy went HARD against woolies for not selling Australian flags on Australia day, not the price gouging and duoploly, no, the Aussie flags. He hates Welcome to country for some reason and really wants to get rid of it. And of course, he’s not homophobic, he just wants homosexuality to be completely invisible in Australian society. Luckily, most Aussies are aware that these campaigns are all just distractions to avoid talking about an ever growing cost of living crisis, the end of home ownership for most people and growing wealth inequality. Doubly as lucky, is that Australian right-wingers are nowhere near as entertaining and good at captivating an audience compared to their American counterparts, but this doesn’t mean freak shows like this shouldn’t worry us.

Christou has tapped into a growing anti-LGBT sentiment that has been growing for the last few years within circles of Sydney’s best and brightest. Covid lockdowns saw huge radicalization and conspiracy theories, especially in the parts of Sydney that were unfairly hit with lockdowns the hardest. That era, where people in the city could freely go about their lives but people out West were under lockdown really didn’t help with the whole “inner city elites are trying to oppress us” thing.

The anti-inner city, anti-globalist sentiment out West has also been fertile ground for anti-LGBT ideas from a group that thought by now hundreds of millions of people would be dead from the vaccine and that vaccine passports would be the only form of ID that worked in 2024. Most of us would be painfully embarrassed by making such bold predictions that didn’t come true but this subsection of society either forgets or chooses not to talk about their failed predictions and would rather move on to another hot topic.

This is obviously not to say that this is the view of the majority of people in Cumberland Council, it’s not even a minority, it’s a few hundred dudes that only learnt about conspiracy theories a few years ago and their online media literacy is so low that you could literally convince them that airplanes are powered by black magic.

Since covid has come and gone, this subsection of people (Which aren’t exclusive to Western Sydney but tend to have a more visible presence there because of Western Sydney’s small business culture, meaning people can more easily say hateful things without the fear of being fired - And the effects of covid lockdown conspiracies), has decided to shift their focus to the gay conspiracy, since the covid one didn’t really work out. 

With people like Spanian boldly announcing that many gay people are actually secretly pedophiles to his audience of half a million, and Christian Orthodox groups marching down King St on Friday nights intimidating anyone that comes across them, it’s clear that this is starting to become an issue in Sydney, a city with a proud gay history.

All this is strange to people like me that grew up in the Inner West. We grew up with children of gay couples and most of them turned out far more well adjusted than those of us who came from straight couples. It’s strange to us that in 2024 there would be a serious group of people so worried about a picture book, when we were going to Mardi Gras markets at Victoria park in 2004. This is often a mistake people in the Inner West/Inner city bubble can make, especially when they aren’t really into politics or current events. That’s what people like Christou want - to go unnoticed long enough to build a fan base of hate disguised as family values. We’ve all seen how easy it has been to trick Americans into walking into reactionary politics. Christou is a coward and can’t really stand on anything he preaches and will just retreat to the “I’m just doing what my community wants” argument. He is a meme of a person.

This absolute clown-show of a week for Cumberland council and their eventual reversal of the book ban is proof that Australia is not immune from these American, far right conspiracies materializing into real life politics. 

Fortunately, for the rest of his life Steve Christou cannot call himself an advocate for free speech without being a complete hypocrite. Book banning is bad and will never have any place in Sydney.

Sucked in Steve Christou you failed.