By Matt Agorist
Across the globe, an awakening is happening in which people are realizing the power of growing your own food. Detroit, Michigan is a prime example. People have turned many areas, essentially brought to ruins through government neglect, into a food oasis. Edible landscapes are increasing throughout the world; however, when government gets involved, this self-sustainability through community gardening can often be thwarted.
The residents of Sunshine Coast, whose city council just unapologetically laid waste to a 7-year-old organically grown fruit tree forest spanning 11 streets, are finding this out the hard way.
A single complaint about a permit sent the city council into a fruit-hating tyrannical whirlspin — eventually leading to the destruction of the entire project.
As ABC reports, the Australian community has been at the center of a six-month stoush with the council after a complaint was made.
The council then ordered residents to obtain public liability insurance and a free permit in order to keep the trees on the footpaths.
The precinct has grown immensely over the years as residents volunteered their sidewalk areas for the trees to be grown. More than 200 people participated and benefited from the fruit forest.
According to some residents, they were entirely unaware there were permit and insurance requirements until the city council showed up with trucks and mulchers to chop down all the trees.
Chris White, a chef and resident within the UFS precinct said this thoughtless destruction of food was done to put in a sidewalk and put the residents in check.
“It’s a way now that they can put a concrete footpath in and it’s a show of force,” he said.
I think it’s the kids that are going to be impacted greatest here because they’ve nurtured these trees, and now they’re not here.
Through tears, White described how one of the children climbed up a tree to save its fruit before the city council chopped it down.
“She climbed inside the tree so that they couldn’t cut it down,” he said.
White then noted how the city council wouldn’t allow the residents to pick the fruit prior to destroying the trees, and they watching in sheer awe as government destroyed food.
“We didn’t have enough people on the ground to save the trees and they wouldn’t allow us to get the fruit,” White said.
According to ABC, Councillor Ted Hungerford said the felling of the trees was disappointing, but the council was left with no option after a resident had not applied for a permit, nor opted to relocate the trees to private property.
Because the city claims ownership over the property in front of people’s homes where a sidewalk would go, they were required to get permits to have fruit trees in that space — most everyone did. However, because one resident didn’t apply for a permit, the entire area was leveled.
Resident Gail Felgenhauer told ABC that the council was belligerent, bullying, and discriminatory.
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“We’ve had multiple meetings and presented multiple options and ideas for solving their imagined problems,” she said.
They have discriminated against food.
We have grown food here to share with the elderly in the area, with couples and families, and we’ve grown this for seven years.
And all of a sudden the council tries to bully us into getting permits and then there were difficulties with insurance.
Our position was that there were ornamentals [on verges] all over the Sunshine Coast area, so why discriminate against vegetables and fruit?
Ms Felgenhaur said the citrus fruit from the felled trees would have been enough to provide about 12 months worth of jam for residents, according to ABC.
“And there was a dozen or more paw paws, beautiful paw paws … that lovely resident over there who has a physical disability, he ate the paw paws regularly,” she said.
“It’s just such waste.”
Queensland One Nation leader and Member for Buderim, Steve Dickson, said the council’s action was wrong in every sense of the word, ABC reports.
“This is renowned throughout the whole world, people love this, the local community loves this,” he said.
“What message is this sending to our children?”
The residents are furious and are calling out the utter hypocrisy of the council citing safety issues when other residents can put up shrubbery and stone walls — without a permit.
Pointing out more hypocrisy of the council, Dickson noted how unsafe the area is now because of all the stumps left by the cut trees.
Not to mention if it’s all about safety, there’s big stumps hanging out of the ground, so when somebody walks along there and trips over those stumps, who’s wrong then?
Seriously, nobody has thought this through.
“Why is food the reason you have to get a permit when people can grow ornamentals and rock walls wherever they want and not get a permit? That’s the issue,” Dickson said.
After destroying the food, and in spite of the backlash, the council shows no signs of backing down and promises to go after anyone who dares grow food.
They said if I don’t go through the correct channels that’s what will happen [trees will be cut down] and I’ll get a $600 fine.
Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Agorist is also the Editor at Large at the Free Thought Project. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter, Steemit, and now on Facebook. This article first appeared here at The Free Thought Project.
People should do it again, without the permits, and again and again and again. It’s a peaceful form of protest. Permits and licenses, especially on private individuals, is a form of tyranny. If walls and fences and ornamental vegetation can be constructed without license, what’s to stop the community from erecting said items as obstacles in the paths of the council members and their uniformed (uninformed) cronies? From what it looks like, there is a LOT of material that can be reclaimed all throughout Detroit, so why not reclaim the materials AND the territory and put it to good use? Since this whole “sustainability” nonsense is being pushed (at least, the reasons are nonsense and what the controllers sell it as is nonsense), these community gardens are THE ideal model of sustainable food production.
The council and their cronies, and the people that write the “laws” are really the criminals.
Peace.
It’s 11:59. It’s almost time to start shooting…….
Years past time
It’s Australia — they already took their guns way. A tyrannical government is the reason our Founding Fathers included the 2nd Amendment in our Constitution. NEVER GIVE THEM UP !!!
Petty tyrants must be doxed & their families ostracized, with full prejudice.
arseholes
No self-sufficiency allowed! You will eat what you’re told to eat.
Funny how Sustainable Development doesn’t want anyone to have a sustainable lifestyle. UN Agenda 21, actively at work in local communities, is about controlling your life, not sustainability.
it’s Government sustaining itself at the expense and freedoms of those that voted them in.
I think its a whole lot worse than that. Just wait and watch
They don’t really care if people Starve. As long as they aren’t on the Starvation List.
I really believe they are around the globe if there is a globe, have a plan to cut the food supply
Yes! Governments are capable of Mass Murder. Both at Home and Abroad.
You voted for those Parasites in Local Government. Stand strong and make them replace those Trees. If they insist on the opposite. Vote them out of Town!
“Vote them out of town”……..tarred and feathered and on a rail. heh heh
“Out of town” preferably with tar and feathers!
Do you really need a council if this is their attitude? Vote them out and do away with the council.
Just plant fruits and vegetables everywhere. They can’t destroy them all.
They will, they have nothing better to do.
Every council member who voted on this should be ousted from office. It’s too bad those involved in cutting these trees down, cooperated. With enough people in the area resisting what the council decided and refusing to comply this could have had a different outcome. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE!!!!! I agree, replant. Defy the authorities!
What happened to the Slogan; “Save The Trees!”
People with LOW IQ’s are hired by the COPS! only
Australia — it does not surprise me as this is the same country with draconian
laws mandating vaccines. They are AmeriKKKa’s little lapdog. They are usually one
of the first countries to join in AmeriKKKa’s many “coalition” wars. Time to move
Australia to the top of the BOYCOTT list.
I’m for that!
Well, what are YOU Michigan people going to do??? Eh?! I doubt writing your congressman is going to fix the matter; so, if it’s that important and it probably is, then take this as a sign;;; LEAVE! Do what you need to do, leave behind what you can, and just LEAVE- quit complaining about it, cause we all know, you’re not able, or going to do anything about it in a serious sort of way, so shut up and or LEAVE. Everyone has their limits…is this yours?
They want you to leave, abandon the property. That way they can swoop in and claim it, for pennies on the dollar. The gay community wants Belle Isle for themselves, is this what you want?
OH HELL NO! BUT WHAT CAN YOU DO??? I could make some suggestions, but I think it’s against the law. All I need ….a reason to play dirty. As for the pervs, to hell with em’! I’m looking for a place in the world to move to where the butt-lickers are endangered.
Anybody ever heard the saying “Control the food supply is control over the people”??? Theres a bigger picture behind this!!!
This is rogue in your face show of power. Like the TSA this a conditioning exercise that does little but bully the public while citing the mantra of ” It’s for your own good and because we say so “.
The people that supported this grove need to hound the oath of office violators out of town.
Uncontrolled access to free food is an anathema the statist commie control freaks.
The curtain is just rising on scene one with much more to come.
It’s a police state country anyway.
It started as a Prison Colony. Why should those Inbred’s change their ways?
Out of all the places I have lived I can safely say Australia is a
country full of ignorant self important a-holes who fight only to keep
their slave mentality. Put one of the into a position of power and it
goes straight to their head….while their ‘subjects’ who may complain
will eventually all agree to go along with the authority figures.
this sort of thing had been done in the usa.
The council went after the residents and destroyed their trees, now it’s time for the residents to go after the council and destroy their political professions.
they don’t want people to feed themselves.
This is not only absolutely wrong but also absolutely criminal!
I hope that this will result in the entire council being voted out and new council members in favour of food gardens being voted in.
“What message is this sending to our children?”
Govt is toxic to everyone’s health and should not be supported. Especially this…despicable kind of govt.
Why is it that when a “city” claims to own property that no one ever requests evidence to prove their claim?
Toss them out of office next election, and change the law. The people made the mistake of meekly surrendering their weapons for confiscation by the government when their elected officials passed knee jerked legislation in response to a mass killing by some psycho.
Crime hasn’t got any better, in fact, it has gotten worse, a lot worse. Criminals kept their guns, and the good citizens are disarmed. Some people buried their weapons for possible use in the future.
The Australians missed it completely. Buried guns are the same as no guns. The people should have opposed surrender of their weapons at the very beginning with whatever means was needed, but never, never surrender your weapons. Remember the words of Charleston Heston when he took leadership of the NRA – “They’ll get my weapon when they pry it from my cold, dead hand.”
There is an old, but quite prophetic saying that if we don’t learn from history we are bound to repeat it. On living under abject tyranny we should seriously consider the advice of a great man who actually went thriygh the surrender of his liberty and lived through hellish captivity and tyranny – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: ““And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?…
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…
We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
Real modern day tyranny. America is being ran like a kingdom with rights and freedoms being granted by kings. Washington has thrown the Constitution in the trash with a trickle down affect rearing it’s ugly head in states and townships!
Since the council members have decided to eliminate a food source of the local community, vote them out of office, and boycott any store that sells them food.
The ostracize those who made the original complaint from the community… because they obviously care nothing for your needs.
I love the idea of boycotting any stores these councilmembers get food at. You can bet these store owners are in cahoots with the council members, if not directly you know they are cheering them on.
Aussies allowed their guns to be confiscated, now the only guns belong to the Council’s Polezi. There is no reason for the Council to listen to the sheeples. Vote them out, So what? the trees are gone.
Any bets that the trees stay Gone? Sheeples are sheeples after all.
Past Time to draw lines here in the USSA too, ProgreSSives are still Leftists and busy, busy, as termites.
It’s true, the Towns and Cities ONLY hire IDIOTS with low IQ’s so they DO AS THEY ARE TOLD and never ask questions.
There is a federal law the city violated by cutting down food producing trees. Some research might give the people in that town a way to sue the council there personally and corporately?
Government is a magnet for petty tyrants and psychopaths. Most sane people are just not interested in being a part of that. So, even if you think that a government job is boring, you have to run for public office with a lot of other good people, to take that government back from the corrupt. You need to start a movement to replace all of those council members. Then you can restore everything that was destroyed at the town’s expense.
Government is a magnet for petty tyrants and psychopaths. Most sane people are just not interested in being a part of that. So, even if you think that a government job is boring, you have to run for public office with a lot of other good people, to take that government back from the corrupt. You need to start a movement to replace all of those council members who ruined your town. Then you can restore everything which was destroyed at the city’s expense.