With the holy tide of Easter upon us I ask where does Jesus Christ (monitoring Canberra's life and morals from on high) stand on Canberra's current public housing controversies?
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Where do the Saviour and his most august local representatives the Catholic Archbishop and the Anglican Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn stand in the current, much-reported dispute between certain burghers of Weston Creek and the ACT government?
![Weston Creek residents fighting against a public housing proposal in the area. Photo: Rohan Thomson Weston Creek residents fighting against a public housing proposal in the area. Photo: Rohan Thomson](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/d8e4aaab-4d61-4943-8993-d2ea0a3b7d9d/r0_0_2000_1331_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
The government wants to put a sprinkling of public housing townhouses and apartments among the privately-owned homes of Monash, Holder, Chapman, Mawson and Wright. This is outraging many local burghers and we know a lot about their outrage because The Canberra Times (misguidedly in my opinion) is always courting these miserabilist NIMBYs, reporting (sometimes even on the front page, and with photographs!) their every whinge and seethe.
I ask these probing questions in part to sermonise that any reading of the New Testament answers my questions. Jesus is bound to be on the side of public housing and its battling clients. He is surely appalled by the NIMBY Pharisees who fight to keep alleged riff-raff out of their classy neighbourhoods.
But I also ask the questions because it mystifies that Canberra's Christian clergy never pipe up when these disputes occur. In my 40 years in Canberra I have known and reported on dozens of these sorts of issues without ever knowing a Christian clergyman or clergywoman pipe up to enrich the conversation of the city.
Where are thou, thou dog-collared, when these matters arise? Why don't you wag a potentially influential and disapproving Christian finger at the catastrophising burghers who shrill that to allow human scum into their neighbourhoods will be the end of civilisation as burghers know it?
What is it that Canberra's Christian clergy actually do? Are they just in it for the robes, mitres and croziers? What are they for, if not to speak up, thundering, when things are done and said in our city that must sadden and anger the founder of their faith?
There seems to be an abundance of public housing in Pyongyang, capital of the suddenly extremely newsworthy socialist paradise North Korea.
Pyongyang looks very like Canberra and especially like Tuggeranong and Gungahlin in the YouTube video Exploring With Kim Jong Suk. I have been looking at such entertainments lately with North Korea so much in the news. Trump and his fawning, unquestioning allies (like Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten) may be getting us ready to accept the "just" killing of lots of North Koreans. After all North Koreans are so weirdly un-American and inhuman. They all have three heads.
Funnily enough the (perhaps unrepresentative) Pyongyangers one sees in Exploring With Kim Jong Suk mostly only have one head each. Kim attached a camera to his bicycle and then cycled to and fro in Pyongyang, taking an informal, amateurish look at people and places.
The Pyongyangers in Kim's naïve little film (at the end of which he cycles home to his welcoming public housing unit) home look just like you and me. And so, as is always the case when I am instructed to hate people because they are my "enemy" I will continue to think of the ordinary people of North Korea as my brothers and sisters. I will grieve when and if "my side" pulverizes them.
What can Canberra do about this? I propose that we approach Pyongyang's movers and shakers and ask if our two cities can become Sister Cities or at least Friendship Cities. We already have a few such metropolitan sisters and friends.
These Canberra relationships are defined, I read, as "an overarching symbol of friendship that encourage and assist groups in government, business, culture and community to make contact with each other and build relationships …" They can "pave the way for cooperation and mutual respect" and "can enhance economic, humanitarian and sporting links".
So much of North Korea's leaders' and people's perceived belligerence comes from the paranoia that comes from being for ever menaced and demonised by the rest of us. Kindly Canberra could raise an alternative voice and extend an alternative, welcoming hand. Soon, actual North Koreans would come to Canberra and we, taking them into our homes and escorting them to Raiders' games, to Floriade, to Tidbinbilla to see the platypuses at play, would notice that they are alarmingly like us and devilishly hard to hate.