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News.com.au
01-08-2025
- Politics
- News.com.au
‘Can you just shut up?': Cumberland Council meeting descends into screaming match
An extraordinary screaming match has erupted at a western Sydney council meeting after a local member told his female colleague to 'shut up when I'm talking'. Labor Mayor Ola Hamed was forced to call a 15-minute adjournment during Cumberland City Council's meeting on Thursday night after the shocking row exploded between Ahmed Ouf and Diane Colman, who leapt to her feet and screamed, 'You cannot speak to me like that!' Cr Ouf, an independent, was speaking in support of a motion about the city's 2026 Easter Extravaganza nearly two hours into the meeting, when he hit out at apparent interjections from the Labor councillor. 'Can you just shut up when I'm talking, OK?' Cr Ouf snapped. 'I beg your pardon, Councillor,' Mayor Hamed interjected. 'When I'm talking this is my time, not your time,' Cr Ouf told Cr Colman. 'When I talk, you shut up, OK?' 'Oh, point of order, Mayor, point of order!' Cr Colman called out. Cr Ouf asked, 'Why is she talking while I'm talking? Why is she taking from my time?' Cr Colman yelled back across the chamber, 'How dare you!' Cr Ouf hit back, 'You just keep your mouth shut while I'm talking. I never, ever spoke when you were talking or having time.' At that point Cr Colman leapt to her feet and exploded. 'You cannot speak to me like that!' she screamed. 'You show respect! You show respect!' Cr Ouf yelled back. 'You show me some respect!' Cr Colman went on. 'How dare you speak to me like that! How dare you!' Cr Ouf said he was 'not intimidated, not 100 of you'. Cr Colman screamed again, 'How dare you? Who you think you're speaking to?' Cr Ouf told her, 'Then show respect so you can be respected. When I'm talking, you stay shut.' Mayor Hamed then called an adjournment. Libertarian Councillor Steve Christou, who shared a viral clip of the blow-up on social media, has sided with Cr Ouf. He claimed Cr Colman 'was interjecting during his speech'. 'Mind you, no one was interjecting Cr Colman all night,' he told 'I've previously had run-ins before with Cr Colman interjecting [during] my speeches. Yes, Ahmed told her to shut up in frustration, but Cr Colman had a meltdown of epic proportions. It continued after the camera went off. Quite frankly it created a very unhealthy and unsafe workplace environment, not just for councillors but for the poor staff who had to witness this behaviour and work through it.' Cr Christou said it was unclear exactly what the alleged interjections were about. 'She was making some kind of remarks, they were a bit inaudible,' he said. 'She claims she was trying to correct him on something he had stated. He was speaking on the Easter motion but then he turned his attention to Falun Dafa and whether we should acknowledge it in Cumberland or not. I think he was questioned on 'why are you raising Falun Dafa'. But she was interjecting, speaking while he was speaking. In all honesty you can't just stir something up and instigate an issue and then claim misogyny.' Cr Christou said in 'any other workplace there would have been disciplinary action and instant dismissal'. 'This needs to be looked into, you can't rug pull it, someone has to speak up,' he said. 'I've previously raised concerns about behaviours. At some point, just because you're in the public sphere doesn't mean you get a free pass to do what you want. No other workplace would tolerate this type of behaviour.' Cr Christou said Cumberland ratepayers 'deserve better', particularly after a 7.1 per cent rate hike last month.
Daily Mail
27-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Outspoken councillor slams Labor for 'ghetto conditions' in his western Sydney electorate - but not everybody is on his side
A Sydney councillor who slammed his colleagues for allowing 'third world ghetto conditions' to proliferate within their electorate has come under fire for blaming the wrong people. Cumberland City councillor Steve Christou accused his Labor-led council of failing to crack down on what he described as 'unhygienic, unsanitary' conditions in Merrylands, 25km west of the city. He aired the issue in a video shared to social media on Monday, in which he filmed a litter-strewn footpath outside a low-lying block of flats within walking distance of the council building on Memorial Avenue. 'Merrylands and Cumberland City Council should not be a ghetto under ghetto conditions, unfortunately this is what it's turning like consistently under the Labor mayorship,' he said. 'We will keep exposing these truths until some action is taken and holding them to account.' But, instead of a Labor pile-on, the councillor found himself in the firing line. 'It is the residents. Not the council's fault,' one woman wrote. 'Are you delusional? It's not the council, it's the residents,' another said. Asked what he made of the backlash, Christou insisted the council had a role to play in allowing the bad behaviour to go unpunished. 'Look, no doubt at the moment, it's a resident issue,' he told Daily Mail Australia. 'However, it's a resident issue because council isn't doing anything about it and taking enforcement action and representing the community like they, you know, like they want to.' In the video, Christou described the scene as being akin to 'absolute third world ghetto conditions', adding: 'The area looks like a dump'. It comes as part of a broader campaign wrought by the libertarian councillor against what he sees as a failure to enforce basic conditions of cleanliness in the area. Two weeks ago, he received an email from a local woman whose found her two-year-old son kicking an abandoned syringe outside his kindergarten. 'In my 37 years of being a local in the Merrylands community, I have never seen or [been] exposed to a use[d] syringe,' she wrote. 'I'm utterly [sickened] that my young boy who isn't even three years of age asked me what is that and actually stepped on it. 'Merrylands was a beautiful area growing up and now it looks like a third world country.' Mr Christou served as the mayor of the Cumberland Council from 2017 to 2022 in which time, he was made aware of the potential fines in place for dumping offences. In his time as a councillor, he said he had not once seen the maximum penalty enforced against an illegal dumper. 'Once you start cracking down and catching out a few offenders, you'll find that the rest of the community that are dumping will pull their heads in, because nobody wants to be fined,' he said. Earlier this month, the council proposed to raise council rates by $1.50 per week. The proposal document is currently on exhibition. Christou, the only council member to vote against the proposed rate hike, said he believed the council had failed to demonstrate the work needed to justify the increase in the minds of residents. 'They want to raise rates... and if they were actually going out and implementing a program to kind of stop [illegal dumping] from happening, and carrying out their road works, and we didn't have craters and potholes and overgrown grass and all this list of issues that needed to be fixed, I would support it,' he said. 'But I don't support it because they're not doing anything about it, and any money I feel they're going to get off offer a rate rise, they're just going to spend on other issues that aren't important to the you know, to the residents and the public.' Cumberland City Council has been contacted by Daily Mail Australia.
