Darebin Council's undemocratic push to remove Palestinian flag

Darebin City Council is once again trying to remove the Palestinian flag, using an underhanded process to avoid community scrutiny. They have called a special council meeting to push through a new draft flag policy. Special meetings mean the public cannot attend, speak, or make submissions. This is a deliberate attempt to shut out community opposition.

The following statement was submitted to the council by Kath Larkin, Victorian Socialists’ candidate for Northcote.

Submission on Darebin City Council Draft Flag Policy

I oppose Darebin City Council’s Draft Flag Policy and the undemocratic manner in which it is being advanced. This policy is not a neutral piece of governance. It is a politically motivated attempt to constrain community expression and to prevent the Palestinian flag from being flown in response to sustained community solidarity.

The process has been fundamentally flawed. In late 2025, Council attempted to rush the discussion of flag restrictions with less than seven days’ notice, in breach of its own procedural rules. This took place in a broader political climate in which politicians and sections of the media were cynically using the horrific antisemitic attack in Bondi to attack and delegitimise a mass, multiracial and multicultural Palestine solidarity movement. That movement has consistently opposed genocide, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and war. The attempt to smear those marching against mass killing as responsible for the violence they oppose was false and dangerous, and the Council’s actions must be understood in that context.

Now, the policy is being pushed through a special council meeting that explicitly excludes public submissions, questions, and participation. This is not incidental. It is a deliberate attempt to avoid community opposition that has been clearly and repeatedly expressed whenever this issue has appeared on the Council’s agenda.

The substance of the policy reflects the same intent. Community requested and international flags are restricted to a small number of days per year, with a maximum of seven days consecutively. That is not what genuine solidarity looks like. Genocide is not a “day of observance.” The mass killing, starvation, displacement, and destruction in Gaza are ongoing, and reducing community outrage at that reality to a tightly time-boxed gesture empties solidarity of its meaning.

More than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including tens of thousands of children. Hospitals, schools, and entire neighbourhoods have been destroyed. This horror has not been distant for many Darebin residents. It has reached into families and communities here. Council has a responsibility to ensure that people affected by this catastrophe know that Darebin is a place of safety, compassion, and support.

Instead, the policy shifts power away from the community by placing decisions about community-requested flags in the hands of an unelected administrator. Expressions of solidarity supported by residents are to be approved or denied by the Chief Executive Officer, using a highly subjective and easily politically manipulated criterion. This removes political accountability and replaces it with bureaucratic gatekeeping.

It is also impossible to ignore the broader symbolism embedded in this policy. The repeated emphasis on reinforcing the supremacy of the Australian flag is not politically neutral. For many Aboriginal people, that flag represents dispossession and genocide in this country. At a time when racist and far-right forces are growing in Australia, elevating nationalism while suppressing international solidarity functions as a dog-whistle, narrowing the boundaries of acceptable dissent.

Darebin should reflect its community’s solidarity, not discipline it. This policy does the opposite and should be abandoned.

Kath Larkin,
Northcote 3070 Resident