Introducing: The Fifth Columnist
Our newest correspondent ponders the politics of the e-scooter ban
At The Paris End, we receive many pitches from would-be contributors. We almost invariably say no. But this particular reply guy was so persistent, and so unusual, that we decided to make an exception. He claims to be friends with a talking pigeon, with whom he converses about the state of the city. He is an elder Millennial, a Neo-Gramscian, and an (almost) lifelong Melbournian. She is 21 (three in pigeon years), an accelerationist, and has lived here only a short while. He has almost completed his PhD in Media Studies. She has a stake in a lithium mine and a medium-scale drop shipping business. He calls himself the Fifth Columnist. She calls herself Pigeon. The following is his account of one of their recent debates.
The electricity in my apartment had gone off, again, so I let myself into the communal kitchen to make coffee. As usual, the bench top was strewn with shards of instant noodles, the sink clogged with unidentifiable goo. There was a group of young-looking girls huddled around one of the microwaves who went silent as I walked in, then began whispering and giggling behind their hands. “Good morning,” I said. They ignored me. I prepared the Bialetti, and while waiting for it to boil, gazed idly out the window.
That’s one thing the UniLodge has going for it—a spectacular view over the city. The sun had risen halfway up the sky, its golden yolk cracked by a high rise bisecting the centre of my view and streaming across the dome of the State Library. I shielded my eyes, half-blinded, then heard a tapping on the glass. A pigeon flapped outside. She looked me right in the eye, then, turning mid-air, hitched up her pert tail feathers and unleashed a torrent of white shit that splattered on the glass. The girls in the kitchen shrieked.
Sigh. I was being summoned. On a bench outside the Library entrance, just beside the giant chess set, Pigeon and I settled in for our daily tête-à-tête, me with my mug of black coffee and pouch of Champion Ruby, she with her Cherry Ice vape and the end of someone’s discarded boba.
“How’s your communal veggie patch going?” she asked.
I blushed. She well knows there’s been teething problems with the communal veggie patch.
“Fine,” I said tersely. “And how’s the Shangri-La?”
Pigeon roosts on the gleaming golden sky bridge that connects the two towers of the new luxury Shangri-La development by the Carlton Gardens. She ignored my question. Something else had caught her interest. She was jerking her small head around in alarm.
“Ohhhh my God. They’re gone.”
“What’s gone?”
“The scooters. They’re really gone.”
I began rolling a cigarette.
“Thank God for that,” I said. “One less corporation interfering in public infrastructure.”
She narrowed her tiny eyes.
“Pretty sure I saw you riding a Lime just the other night.”
I thought back guiltily to last Friday. I had left the pub in a hurry after bumping into Kaitlin. I was wasted, almost too far gone to pass the ludicrous drunk test, and swayed back home on an e-scooter.
“It must have been some other brown-haired white man in his late thirties.”
“Early forties, surely.”
That ride was an exception, I told her. In general, I prefer to walk at a human pace, in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. Also, I never paid Kaitlin for my half of the car, so, yeah.
“Well, in general I fly around and shit on things,” said Pigeon. “But I also adore e-scooters. And so should you. They’re as close to gliding as your pathetic species will ever come.”
As usual, I felt that Pigeon’s perspective was limited by a paucity of lived experience. She had only arrived in the city two years earlier. She never told me where from exactly, and whenever I asked, she’d throw her wing over her beak dramatically and say: “You wouldn’t understand. We had to flee with nothing but the diamonds in our suitcase.”
“You might not know this,” I said to Pigeon, who was now cleaning her plumage in a puddle, “but there were other failed experiments before Lime and Neuron.”
“Here we go,” she said.
I patiently explained how back in 2017, a Singaporean company called oBike introduced mustard yellow e-bikes to the city, and that they were swiftly rejected by the hoi polloi (I’m trying to reclaim this phrase) like an unwanted limb. We threw them off bridges. We sunk them in the Yarra. We hauled them up trees. I fondly recalled the time my friend Dave adhered one to the Adam Lindsay Gordon memorial near Parliament House, as I stood there laughing and applauding.
“Sounds cringe,” Pigeon said.
“It was a spontaneous act of genuine civic rebellion.”
The company didn’t care about our city and its particular character, I explained to Pigeon. We’re a tram city. We move up and down, north and south in lines. It’s all about the line. There’s a neat, egalitarian spirit to this. oBike didn’t respect it. All the company saw in the city was potential customers and the data harvested from our phones. When they found out that we weren’t interested, they just up and left. Those who had bought subscriptions couldn’t get their deposits back, and then the company redesigned the app to stop them from requesting refunds. Years on, the bikes are still rusting in the Birrarung, poisoning the eels.
“But I thought throwing them in the river was a revolutionary act?”
As usual, she was trying to derail the conversation.
“The current ban has nothing to do with principles, and everything to do with political expediency,” I said, trying to find some common ground. “It’s all about the elections.”
It’s currently Melbourne City Council election season. Pigeon looked at me blankly—she had no idea. I explained that the new private scooter contractors, Lime and Neuron, had been in trial arrangements with the City of Melbourne for the past couple of years. In a council meeting in August, councillors received a report about the scooter situation. The scooters had been extremely popular with the general public and extremely unpopular with residents, small businesses, and the Royal Melbourne Hospital (due to huge increases in reconstructive facial surgery). The report recommended introducing more safety and compliance measures, then conducting a review in mid-2025. But the current Lord Mayor, Nick Reece, moved a sudden motion to abort the trial. Just over a month later, the e-scooters were gone. It didn't take a genius to see that Reece was just playing politics, making a grand gesture as part of a broader mayoral campaign to position him as the candidate who “Gets Good Done.”
“Pretty chaotic governance,” I said. “Irresponsible. It’s all there in the minutes if you’re interested.”
“I’ll take your word for it, old man,” Pigeon replied. “Sounds like a bunch of bullshit. Who are the other candidates?”
I sighed. “You know I don’t believe in electoral politics.”
Pigeon glanced at me sideways.
“Fine, then. There are ten other Lord Mayor contenders, but most of them don’t have a chance at winning,” I said. “There’s Arron Wood, of Team Wood, who wants to reinstate the Christmas gingerbread display at Town Hall; and Jamal Hakim, of Team Hakim, who wants to make Diwali, Eid, and Hannukah public holidays. There’s Mariam Riza of the Liberals, who kind of seems like she’s just in it to boost her LinkedIn following. And some guy called Greg… Greg Bisinella, who's always in the news in the role of ‘angry East Melbourne resident.’ The only one I like is the Greens midwife, Roxane Ingleton.”
Pigeon was nodding off. I couldn’t blame her.
“Anyway, it’s the classic combo of party footsoldiers, craven egotists, and hardcore community cranks. The main thing they all have in common is an obsession with bike lanes—ripping them up, building more, changing them. Oh, and they all want to bring down photo-op-loving Nick Reece, whose achievements to date include planning to sell the Regent Theatre and doing finger hearts with businessmen at the launch of Melbourne’s new ‘Koreatown.’ I don't trust him, Pigeon.”
We sat in silence for a moment, watching a small group of people who had gathered in front of the tram stop to protest non-consensual organ harvesting. A CBD News newspaper blew past us in a gust of wind. Then it landed on the lawn in front of us, splaying open to a full-page advertisement in various shades of fiscally conservative blue.
“TEAM KOUTA: VOTE 1,” the ad said. Pigeon hopped over to look closer.
“Who’s Kouta?” she asked.
“Who’s Kouta,” I said. “Who is Kouta…” Obviously, the AFL is a textbook site for the production of hegemonic Australian masculinity, an incubator of problem gambling and systematic racism and casual misogyny, as well as a whole host of other issues. But I had to admit that, as a boy, I had worshipped at the altar of Anthony “Kouta” Koutoufides, the former captain of Carlton Football Club. His ageing face still provoked a shiver of respectful deference. Kouta the alpha—a true legend of the game. Now, he was running for mayor.
“Look!” Pigeon said, pecking at the page. “He wants to give out free coffees on Mondays.”
It saddened me to see Kouta debase himself like this. I wanted to remember him pure, as he was on the bright green field of Princes Park in the ‘90s, bursting out of the centre square without a thought in his mind about rejuvenating Docklands. As if that graveyard of developer greed ever had a chance.
“Are you thinking about Docklands again?” Pigeon said. “I fucking love that place. Pure vision and innovation. It's amazing what humans can do.”
I ground my cigarette butt into the dirt.
“We live in a celebrity culture, Pigeon,” I said. “Footballers are the masses’ priests—their holy men. Brahmin in cleats. Yet they’re also often morons—” I corrected myself. “I mean—they suffer terrible cognitive decline due to frequent concussions on the field.”
I stared at the man pictured beside the grinning Kouta: his pick for Deputy Lord Mayor, property developer Intaj Khan. I had guested on a podcast episode about Khan’s dubious history, stacked as it was with a litany of local council corruption charges and an alleged multi-million dollar Ponzi scheme. I began explaining this to Pigeon, but she cut me off to ask about Kouta’s e-scooter policy.
“He’s one of the only candidates who wants to bring them back,” I said. “But he also wants to remove bike lanes, so…”
“Team Kouta! Team Kouta! Team Kouta!” Pigeon started squawking. “KOUTOUFIDES! He’s still kind of hot.” She emitted a chirping warble that sort of sounded like giggling. “Do you think I can get free matcha too? Not that I even need free drinks. It’s just a lol.”
Of course, I could sympathise with Pigeon’s populist nihilism. I, too, would like a free coffee each morning. And I admit, riding a Lime scooter at night after a few pints does feel liberatory. I recalled how Kaitlin and I once rode tandem together through the Carlton Cemetery on an early spring eve, the air perfumed with jasmine, the sun setting, golden, over the mossy headstones. I shook myself out of the past. The UniLodge loomed behind me. It’s only temporary…
“That’s the thing about the e-scooter,” I said. “They’re all about ‘personal experience.’ The affect they generate is one of pure individualism. When we’re riding, we feel somehow separate from our fellow citizens—weaving between them like they’re witches hats. It feels good not to care for a minute, to forget that no one beyond North Fitzroy can participate, or that the average commuter has to spend two hours in traffic heading home to outer suburbs that you, Pigeon, have probably never even heard of.”
“Boring!” she replied. “What this city needs is the full stack of transportation services. Sure, there’ll be some crushed cheekbones. Suck it up and start a GoFundMe, sweetie. That’s the price you pay for living in a truly global metropolis. Having an all-natural face is so twentieth century anyway. It’s reactionary. And you can flâneur all around town if you want to, but why impose that on everyone else? Why do you always need everything to be so under control? You want Daddy to tell you what you can and can’t do? If you can’t take the heat, go back to Daylesford.”
“I’m from Castlemaine,” I interjected.
“Comme ci, comme ça. The real issue is that there are only two e-scooter providers in this city,” Pigeon continued, hopping from foot to foot. “A duopoly if I’ve ever seen one! We need more scooters. Purple ones. Blue ones. Scooters that go up to 100kms. Total deregulation. Let a thousand contractors bloom. Let chaos reign! Let the streets be filled with blood! The future is bright green and lithium-powered! Out of my way!”
Pigeon squawed and swooped at a woman riding past on an ungainly Lime e-bike (these are still available).
“You see what I mean, Pigeon?” I said. “These things bring out the worst in us. The e-scooter is the perfect outgrowth of a neoliberal value system that sees us all as hostile actors, each passing the other by, trying to get what we can. Nothing else matters if you can get to your art opening then your wine bar in ten minutes flat.”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Pigeon said, flapping off. “RIP Lime.”