Surfers in the coastal Australian town of Byron Bay yesterday staged a “paddle out” protest as locals rally against a planned Netflix reality show some have said could attract hordes of “vacuous” Instagram tourists to their beachside paradise.
Local media images showed dozens of people who formed a symbol for “no” in the ocean to demonstrate their opposition to the Netflix original series Byron Baes, a pun on the informal term for “babe.”
In a statement announcing the show on April 7, the streaming giant said the “docu-soap” would follow Instagrammers without the filter of social media, promising “fights, flings and heartbreak.”
Photo: AP
Netflix said the show was “our love letter to Byron Bay,” saying the town was not just the backyard of Hollywood stars like Chris Hemsworth and Zac Efron, but also “the playground of more celebrity-adjacent-adjacent influencers than you can poke a selfie-stick at.”
However, many residents of the popular tourist town, about eight hours north of Sydney, believe the series would be harmful to the local community, which is dealing with the fallout of its rapidly rising popularity.
An online petition calling on local councils not to grant filming permits to the producers in the “exploited paradise” has attracted almost 8,000 signatures, while some businesses are refusing to allow filming on their premises.
“They are proposing to drag our name through the mud and make millions of dollars without offering anything back to the community and completely misrepresenting who we are, and it’s totally wrong,” Byron Bay cafe owner Ben Gordon told Channel Nine.
Byron Bay Mayor Simon Richardson said community opposition to the show was strong, telling Australian Broadcasting Corp that “you’d be struggling to find one person” who supported the Netflix plan.
Richardson said the region was already attracting 2.5 million visitors a year and did not need the kind of tourists who “might be turned on by a vacuous vision of who we are.”
“What we need now is a moment for our community to take stock, try to find support with the state government to get low-cost housing, to get support for our rough sleepers, etcetera,” he said. “We don’t want an intensification and a heating up of our tourism economy right now.”
Byron Bay is home to about 10,000 people and in the past few years has attracted a string of Hollywood stars to its shores.
Already high house prices have surged with an influx of new residents during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving some locals unable to afford accommodation.
Netflix said in a statement it had chosen Byron Bay for its “unique attributes as a melting pot of entrepreneurialism, lifestyle and health practices, and the sometimes uneasy coming together of the traditional ‘old Byron’ and the alternative ‘new,’ all of which we’ll address in the series.”
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion