Not even Labor Premier Chris Minns believes Sydney City Council when they used ‘climate change’ as an excuse to ban enormously popular events from city parks.

Food markets, music festivals … councillors have voted to continue the 2022 ban in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.

What happens to the businesses involved? The city workers looking for a bit of happiness in the endless drudgery of the modern era? An empty shoulder shrug.

The ban began as a temporary measure in 2022 after the Night Noodle Market – a real highlight for Sydney – left the park muddy.

Oh, the horror. Mud. In a park.

The sensible lesson to take from the experience it to have an alternate site in reserve in case of wet weather.

Easy. Problem solved.

Markets and sporting events navigate muddy grass all the time.

The most ridiculous part of this story is not that the council roped in the lazy, baseless, and bizarre reasoning of climate change, but that the ban is not for everyone.

Climate change has not interfered with Indigenous ‘Invasion Day’ and LGBTQ+ events which were granted an exemption.

It’s no wonder everyone is giving the council a side-eye.

In a declaration very few believe, the councillors claimed that ‘climate change’ was ‘accelerating severe weather events … increasing rainfall in the lead-up to and during outdoor commercial events’. This rain would then cause ‘significant damage to large sections of the parks’.

Or as normal, rational people might observe, sometimes it’s wet in Sydney and things get muddy. Life moves on. Grass grows back. It’s not the apocalypse the council is making it out to be.

If you vaguely remember the council panicking about water shortages in their 2021-2025 environmental strategy, you’d be correct.

‘The world is heating up and it’s happening fast in Australia,’ the climate-obsessed council declared.

‘Key operational measures include phasing out natural gas from our operations and using alternate water sources to keep our parks green.’

This includes expensive promises to significantly reduce water use … in a city that apparently has too much water to host events at the park.

I skimmed through their climate waffle document which did nothing but endlessly pander to green and diverse goals with very little interest in the average rate payer. The amount of public money wasted on council vanity projects is too much to consider.

As for the climate, having worked in the centre of Sydney for 20 years, wild weather is perfectly normal. There were entire seasons where the summer storms rumbled through with hail, lightning, and flash flooding. By 5:30 it was replaced by blue sky. The only evidence of the wild weather were the ‘buses replace trains’ signage from CityRail (or CityFail as the locals call it). Where was the ‘End is Nigh!!!’ moaning back then?

To that point, why does the weather single out non-Woke events? Why does rain target noodle nights? Where is ‘the science’ for sparing Invasion Day and Mardi Gras? Or is that more of a political science than climate science?

‘I think they should be fair dinkum about it. If they don’t want to have community festivals, just come out and say it,’ said NSW Premier, Chris Minns, calling the whole thing a ‘massive stitch-up’. ‘We need to be sensible here.’

It’s not often I side with Minns, but here we are.

One minute ‘climate change’ means it’s never going to rain again and we’re pouring taxpayer money into desalination plants to top up Sydney’s drinking water and the next second it’s raining too much and the council is worried the grass will suffer.

If Sydney City Council is going to ban anything, they should start with those damn e-bikes that litter the sidewalks and run into people. People use their discarded, graffitied corpses as bins and every time the wind blows (climate change?) they tumble over and obstruct pedestrians. Their often inexperienced riders break every traffic law and disregard rules about footpaths. The other day I saw a pair of morons riding the wrong way up Macquarie Street straight into traffic exiting the expressway. In a sleepy cafe strip, one nearly collided with the elderly man right in front of a council parking inspector booking some poor mug for overstaying his car spot. If we survive those, we get to endure the fleet of motorised food delivery bike riders who are even more dangerous. Bring on the carbon doomsday. It’ll be a reprieve from all this green nonsense that’s transforming Sydney from a civilised Western city into some sort of lawless third-world mess adorned with progressive banners and nanny-state surveillance. What was it Anthony Albanese promoted this morning? Progressive patriotism. That’s his new thing. He added that Labor’s destiny is to try to be ‘the natural party of government’ which sounds like the same religion adopted by Clover Moore’s seemingly eternal rule.

Besides, Minns has a point about the public perception of green spaces being ruined by the Sydney ‘fun police’.

‘We want to get vibrancy back into Sydney. We’re a big, international city and we should be able to host big events in the CBD.’ He adds, ‘By any objective measure, my government has made big efforts – major strides – to open up more space in the CBD. We’re not going to continue with those kinds of changes if, in the end, they’re going to be locked up and sealed, and people will be stopped from accessing open space. That’s exactly why we want more parks, so we can have more community festivals – not less.’

That’s how the people of New South Wales feel about being locked out of Mt Warning on the basis of race. If Minns feels so strongly about shared open spaces, let’s see him overturn the idiotic decision of his predecessor, Perrottet.

By far the biggest problem facing Sydney is mass migration. There are too many people here and the environment is suffering. You’ll never hear the council complain about that because it wouldn’t fit with their coveted status as a C40 City.

‘Sydney is not just for the residents that live in Sydney. If you’re going to be the mayor of that community, you have to think about the millions of [other people who use the city]. It’s a big responsibility. It can’t just be for the few people who live around those parks.’

If the council can’t manage a bit of grass maintenance, then it should not be managing the city. As someone who lives in their progressive Utopia, the number of souls may be growing exponentially, but the city itself is crumbling beneath the weight of unsustainable progress.

Flat White is written by Alexandra Marshall. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.