FROM THE MODERATOR'S DESK

Welcome, dear readers, to the new Shire of York official unofficial website.   Please make yourselves comfortably at home.  I hope you will come here many times to keep abreast of the exciting, illuminating, intoxicating, wondrous, marvellous, magnificent but mostly totally weird events and circumstances surrounding the exercise of local government in our quaint neck of the beautiful Avon Valley.

Many of you will have been bemused as I was by the sudden disappearance of the previous official unofficial site.  Mysteriously, it vanished overnight about a week ago, leaving its many thousands of devotees shocked and distraught.   The message ‘WTF has happened to our blog?’ winged its way via text and email across the globe.  Some senior members of the Shire’s staff were so upset they were offered counselling—at ratepayers’ expense, we’re pleased to say.

I hope the old blog will in due course break free from whatever digital dungeon it is currently chained up in.  Meanwhile, my fellow ‘passionate extremists’ and I—we call ourselves the York Consortium—have pledged ourselves to the task of creating and maintaining this new blog, so that nobody needs to remain in the dark about how the Shire administration plans to go on systematically impoverishing and demoralising the ratepayers of York as it has done with such panache for so many years.

In the pages of this blog, you will meet all your favourite characters from the old one, like James Best, our karma chameleon, who is writing himself out of the script effective the end of June; Graeme Simpson, Acting CEO, better known as ‘Four-Grand-a-Week Graeme’, timeserver par excellence and suspected departmental stooge; Tyhscha Cochrane, Deputy CEO, recently reappointed for a further five years to a job for which she is massively underqualified and of which the Shire has been farming out the hard bits to expensive lawyers and consultants;  Ray Hooper, long departed but still a shadowy presence over York channelled daily by the Deputy CEO; former Shire Presidents Tony (‘We’re a cohesive team behind you Ray’) Boyle and Pat (‘Minority Report’) Hooper; and others, like Brad Jolly, David Morris and Minister Tony ‘Tip Top’ Simpson, who stand out as the principal architects of our present discontents.  Enjoy!

We, the Consortium, really do want to know what you think.  We believe in more-or-less untrammelled freedom of speech.  However, while we expect strong opinions and harsh words at times, we would prefer not to publish abusive tirades peppered with obscenities, which lower the tone and diminish the force of your contribution.  To sum up, we don’t mind mean, but keep it clean.

And remember: no matter what our bureaucratic betters want you to believe, you have a democratic right to criticise them as roundly as you please.