Cr Brooke Patterson addresses the protesters.

WHAT have Gold Coast councillors got to hide? This week the council was given a very clear message that it’s “smart city” initiatives are being watched very closely by a lot of people who are not going to be steamrolled by a bunch of compliant bureaucrats and councillors being leaned on by big-money technocrats.

When the council’s website listed 15-minute smart cities as an agenda item for its August 22nd meeting a fortnight ago, some observant members of Australia One put the word out and it went viral on local social media, eventually getting to the Gold Coast MyPlace group that has been pushing for more public attendance at city council meetings.

When the meeting day came around, the Australia One and MyPlace supporters rocked up to the council with placards making clear that they would have no part of the 15-minute city nonsense. About 150 people also packed into the council’s very public-unfriendly, glassed-in public gallery, overflowing into the foyer.

The Liberal Party backed Mayor Tom Tate opened the meeting and rambled on about attending all the usual formal events. Several other matters came up and then the council went into committee, requiring the public gallery to be vacated.

An agenda paper had earlier been distributed but nothing about 15-minute cities was on it. One local councillor Brooke Patterson came out to brave the crowd and explain a few things from the meeting. When asked about the 15-minute cities, she said it wasn’t on the agenda, and quickly left.

Cairns News was told the agenda item had also been removed from the website. The fact of the matter is that the Gold Coast City Council has been dabbling in Smart City projects for years, the major ones being its destroyer of street-side businesses and car parking, the Light Rail, the water grid and desalination plant.

A more recent project is the essential smart city element, digital connectivity and data gathering. “The Digital City Program is transforming how we live, connect and grow,” the city’s website spouts happily. “The program leads smart city initiatives across the Gold Coast, with the view of being Australia’s leading digital city. We’re delivering four inter-related work streams: data gathering, data transmission, data analysis and projects.”

Data gathering is of course at the centre of the so-called 15 minute city, and the data they prize most is us – what we do, how we move, where we go etc. This is all essential for the emerging technocratic society that locks people in Smart City digital prisons.

Technocracy News, which tracks the digital culture notes: “Traditional urban planners seek to build functional cities that work for people, whereas Smart City planners build functional cities focused on controlling people.”

Technocracy News warns that control of natural resources and people is the underlying force behind smart cities. “When David Rockefeller founded the Trilateral Commission in 1973 to create a ‘New International Economic Order’, grabbing resources became the master plan and sustainable development, aka technocracy, became the means to that end,” the website states.

“So, to prepare for taking over large swaths of rural areas, Technocrats developed two coordinated strategies: First, move people from rural to urban settings and second, keep them there…”

The website notes that China, the leading technocratic society, unveiled a plan in 2014 to summarily move 250 million farmers off their land by 2026 and into megacities that had already been constructed but sat vacant. Vacated farm land is being combined into giant factory farms operated by agricultural robots and automated tractors.

The farmers, like hundreds of millions of other Chinese, then become part of a social engineering machine that continuously surveils them, tracking where they go, what they buy and who they associate with. This all adds up to social credit scores used to limit their access to privileges such as travelling.

But only a communist government would do that, right? Wrong. The Covid plandemic taught us otherwise. Is this the type of city our councillors and bureaucrats are building? Freedom loving Queenslanders deserve an explanation from Gold Coast City Council about just what they are planning.