News / Council
Push to continue flying Palestinian flag is quashed
Mayor uses casting vote to overturn previous council policy
Mark Phillips
THE Palestinian flag will no longer fly outside the Merri-bek City Council offices after a push to again raise it fell short on Wednesday night.
The flag was taken down at the beginning of a temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas on January 20 – a move which some councillors asserted contravened a policy introduced a year ago.
Councillor Sue Bolton said the decision to take down the flag was made by unelected council staff and should not have happened while the truce remains so fragile.
During a dramatic and feisty council debate, Mayor Helen Davidson used her casting vote to oppose a resolution to continue flying the flag until there is a permanent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
Davidson said that while she supported a ceasefire in Gaza, “[it] is not the role of councils to provide commentary on international matters”. She said the ongoing debate over whether the council should support the people of Gaza had been divisive.
Bolton said a council resolution from March last year was unequivocal that the Palestinian flag should continue to be flown on the fourth flag pole at the Coburg building until there was a permanent ceasefire.
That resolution, which was passed unanimously by the six councillors who were present for the vote on March 13, strengthened the council’s first resolution in November 2023 to fly the Palestinian flag for six months in solidarity with the people of Gaza.
At that time, Merri-bek was the first council in Victoria and one of the earliest in Australia to take such action, but subsequently more have followed suit.
With a large number of pro-Palestine supporters watching in the public gallery, Bolton told Wednesday’s council meeting that to preserve the integrity of the March 2024 resolution, the Palestinian flag must continue flying until there is a permanent ceasefire.
In a media release issued on January 20, the council said the announcement of a ceasefire meant it could revert to its normal community flag schedule which includes a number of community and national flags at different times of the year.
Council staff had interpreted the three-stage ceasefire announced in January as permanent “after considering the information available via official announcements, media and other commentary”.
But Bolton said council staff had pre-emptively lowered the flag on January 20 and the ceasefire that began the day before was anything but permanent.
The ceasefire has a fixed deadline of 42 days, during which negotiations will begin for a permanent ceasefire.
While tens of thousands of Gazans have begun returning to their destroyed homes and prisoner swaps have occurred, negotiations towards a permanent ceasefire have ben complicated by US President Donald Trump’s recent declaration that all 2.1 million Gazans should be relocated to allow the US to take over and redevelop their homelands as “the Riviera of the Middle East”.
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“This is definitely not permanent and we want it to be permanent,” Bolton said.
“So pulling down the flag now and removing that solidarity with our Palestinian citizens who live in Merri-bek and other people who have been affected by what’s happening in Gaza is exactly the wrong thing to do.
“My motion is about abiding by a unanimous decision which we took in March last year – and the flag was removed by an unelected council officer.”
Bolton’s motion was backed by Councillor Adam Pulford, who was Mayor when the resolution to fly the flag until a permanent ceasefire was passed last year.
He said the decision to lower the Palestinian flag was premature when “the ceasefire is barely holding together”.
“We should have waited until the second phase of the ceasefire was reached before we took down the flag,” Pulford said, while acknowledging there were also many Merri-bek residents who supported removing the Palestinian flag from the civic centre.
Bolton’s motion received five votes to two with three councillors abstaining, forcing Davidson to use her casting vote to break the deadlock, drawing cries of “shame” from the public gallery.
Deputy Mayor Helen Politis – who voted against continuing to fly the Palestinian flag – proposed an alternative action to raise the international white banner of peace to show the council stood for peace and unity everywhere until the community flag schedule was reviewed next month.
But Bolton said Politis’ motion was meaningless.
“By replacing the Palestinian flag with a so-called peace flag, we’re turning away and ignoring the fact that a genocide is happening,” she said.
Politis’ motion was defeated by a vote of five to four, with one abstention, meaning neither flag will fly outside the council offices.
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