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Most Australians think their local council is there to fix the roads, collect the bins and keep the rates reasonable.<\/p>\n
What many do not know is that hundreds of Australian councils have signed up to an international organisation called ICLEI, Local Governments for Sustainability, which was founded at the United Nations in New York and exists specifically to take UN climate and sustainability agreements and implement them at the local level through your council.<\/p>\n
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is on their own website.<\/p>\n
ICLEI describes its purpose as providing practical advice for connecting international agreements and targets with initiatives and actions at local levels. In plain English that means taking decisions made in UN conference rooms and turning them into council policy in your town.<\/p>\n
Over 200 Australian local governments are signed up to this network. Your elected councillor may have voted for it. More likely the council CEO recommended it and the councillors went along without fully understanding where the agenda originated.<\/p>\n
State and federal governments have made it even easier by embedding UN sustainable development goals into planning legislation that overrides local objections entirely when it suits them.<\/p>\n
The Parkes incinerator is the perfect example of how this works in practice.<\/p>\n
The NSW state government amended its own planning laws in 2022 to ban energy from waste incinerators from being built anywhere in greater Sydney. Then it designated four regional areas including Parkes where they could be built instead. Sydney's waste problem gets solved. Regional communities carry the cost.<\/p>\n
The proposal is for hundreds of thousands of tonnes of Sydney's waste to be transported 580 kilometres to Parkes to be incinerated. A farmer could be removed from land his family has held for generations to make way for it.<\/p>\n
The Parkes Shire Council officially declared its opposition in February after three years of asking the state health department, the EPA and the chief scientist for basic answers about human health risks. Those answers were never provided. Mayor Neil Westcott said the community felt abandoned and betrayed by a government that had failed to meaningfully engage with them.<\/p>\n
The project is opposed by the council, the federal MP, the state MP and the traditional owners. It does not matter. The state government's Independent Planning Commission can still decide it is in the state's interest and override every single one of them.<\/p>\n
But it is not just the big projects that affect ordinary Australians. It happens every day at the most basic level.<\/p>\n
If you want to build a shed on your own land you might find your application knocked back or heavily modified for reasons that have nothing to do with your neighbours or your local area and everything to do with international agreements your council is obliged to follow.<\/p>\n
If your property is near a wetland your development can be refused or heavily restricted under the Ramsar Convention which is an international treaty. Your council does not have the discretion to override it. If your proposal triggers the federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act your council cannot approve it regardless of how reasonable it is because federal approval is required first. Councils also routinely knock back applications in areas deemed high risk from rising sea levels or flooding based on sustainability policies that flow directly from international climate frameworks. Heritage restrictions can stop you in your tracks on your own property. Non-compliance with zoning laws that were written to reflect these same international frameworks can see your application refused before it even gets to a discussion. Safety requirements around fire and structural standards add another layer. And if you ever did any work without a permit years ago that can be held against you when you apply for something completely unrelated today.<\/p>\n
So the bloke who wants to put up a shed, the farmer who wants to build a new set of yards, the family who wants to extend their home near a creek, all of them can find themselves caught in a web of international obligations that nobody ever voted for and nobody at the local level has the power to override.<\/p>\n
That is the system. The UN sets the sustainability agenda. The federal and state governments write it into law. The council gets bypassed when it objects to the big projects and becomes the enforcement arm for the small ones. The ratepayer funds all of it and carries all of the consequences.<\/p>\n
And at no point along that chain did anyone ask you.<\/p>\n
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Most Australians think their local council is there to fix the roads, collect the bins and keep the rates reasonable. What many do not know is that hundreds of Australian councils have signed up to an international organisation called ICLEI, Local Governments for Sustainability, which was founded at the United Nations in New […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terraaustralisstatesassembly.net\/tweed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terraaustralisstatesassembly.net\/tweed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terraaustralisstatesassembly.net\/tweed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terraaustralisstatesassembly.net\/tweed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terraaustralisstatesassembly.net\/tweed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2124"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/terraaustralisstatesassembly.net\/tweed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2126,"href":"https:\/\/terraaustralisstatesassembly.net\/tweed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2124\/revisions\/2126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terraaustralisstatesassembly.net\/tweed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terraaustralisstatesassembly.net\/tweed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terraaustralisstatesassembly.net\/tweed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}