Newtown Climate Newsletter – October 2024

Hello, Warimi, welcome to our October newsletter and to gorgeous, sunny spring!

What’s been happening

It’s been a couple of months since our last newsletter. In that time the local government elections have been and gone. We wrote to all candidates for Lord Mayor and all parties contesting the Inner West Council’s Danum (Stanmore) Ward to ask them four questions about their climate policies. We received responses from most of the candidates, which we published on our website: see the City of Sydney responses here and Inner West Council responses here. In what is hopefully a good sign for local climate action, seven of the ten councillors elected to City of Sydney, and all three councillors elected to the Inner West Council’s Danum ward, are from parties that responded positively to our climate questions. We look forward to working with them to pick up the pace on local climate action, because councils hold some of the most effective levers for reducing local emissions.

One of Newtown Climate’s founding members and current committee member, Mamoon, was featured in SBS News, Yahoo Finance and the Sydney Morning Herald talking about the benefits of electrification, rooftop solar and home batteries for reducing emissions and bringing down household energy bills. Go Mamoon!

In September our committee member Amanda travelled to state parliament house along with representatives from the Newtown Enmore Business Community and the Committee for Sydney to meet with staff from the office of the NSW Minister for Roads, the Arts, Music, the Night-time Economy, Jobs and Tourism (yes that’s a long title)! They were there to discuss our vision for regular car-free days on King St and Enmore Rd, which we think would be a great way to reduce emissions, encourage more sustainable transport and get more value out of our most important streets. Most importantly, we think it would be a lot of fun! While we would like to see this happen once a week as soon as possible, similar to the car-free days that are common in South America and Europe, it looks like the best we can hope for is a monthly trial some time in the future. To help move things along, some urban geography students from the University of Sydney surveyed businesses along the South end of King Street, and reported that most businesses liked the idea.

We’re still working to bring the educational program Speaking for the Planet to Inner West schools, along with some of our neighbouring inner west climate groups. We could use some more connections to local schools, so if you’re a parent, a member of a P&C or a staff member at a local school please send us an email!

Since our last update we’ve also written submissions to the Inner West Council re its proposed EV charger locations and to the NSW upper house inquiry into e-bikes and e-scooters.

It’s time for our AGM!

As an incorporated association we have to hold an Annual General Meeting and elect a committee, which will look after Newtown Climate for the next year. Our 2024 AGM will be held on Sunday 17 November. If you’re a member of Newtown Climate you’ll receive a separate email with formal notice of the AGM. If you haven’t joined up, or need to renew for the coming year, please follow this link.

A big thanks again to our seven committee members – Amanda, Mamoon, Eddy, Grace, Ellen, James and Bianca – who have kept Newtown Climate ticking over for the past twelve months

More opportunities to get involved

We have plenty of ideas that we can take forward when we have a few more volunteers to help us out. If that’s you please join us at our next AGM, send us an email, come along to one of our Sunday morning coffee meetings (see below) or join our Whatsapp group. We love working with locals to take forward their ideas for local climate action, so if you see any good opportunities for climate action in our local area just let us know!

We mainly communicate through a WhatsApp group. Reply to this email if you’d like to be added to it. We also meet most Sunday mornings at Ariana’s Place on King Street. All welcome, but please email us (or message the WhatsApp group) in advance to make sure we’ll be there!

And as ever, a reminder that our website has a bunch of handy guides, articles and links that you might want to read or share with your friends. Let us know if you come across any excellent resources that you think we should add, or if there are questions you’d like us to answer.

That’s all for now! So, Yanu in Dharug language. See you round!