Every election time, Alexandria Residents Action Group, REDWatch and Friends of Erskineville come together to hold candidate forums. It's an important part of local democratic participation and allows voters to ask questions, get answers and find out more about the issues that concern them.
I've helped to put them on many times myself over the years, but this was my first time as a candidate, where I'm standing for Socialist Alliance.
We were asked to cover 3 top areas voted on by an online survey. They were climate change, housing affordability and a federal ICAC.
This is what I had to say:
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Firstly I want to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging.
Our First Nations people have a concept of the Dreaming. When I was 10 years old, I learned about a related idea, which the astronomer Carl Sagan called ‘Cosmos’: everything that is, was and ever will be. And he talked about how we are the local embodiment of the Cosmos grown to self-awareness, an intelligence able to understand the world around us. And because we emerged from the Cosmos, we have an obligation to use that understanding to care for it, and each other.
That’s what led me to a passion for science, to become a maths teacher, then an activist and socialist.
It was through Carl Sagan's words that I first learnt about global warming. I’ve been concerned about it ever since.
It’s funny how we now use a much weaker term, ‘climate change’. That is actually a public relations trick conjured up by George W Bush’s campaign strategist, Frank Luntz. Google it!
It was a deliberate way of making it seem less serious, something fossil fuel companies weren’t responsible for.
We’re now starting to get back control of the language. Three years ago the City of Sydney declared a climate emergency. That’s the way we must frame the problem.
We have to shift to 100% renewable energy by the end of the decade to have a decent chance of a safe result at around 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Remember, two degrees was agreed in Paris as ‘not safe’.
We must scrap the $12 billion the government provides in annual fossil fuel subsidies. It stands to reason that to counteract the effect of $12 billion in subsidies, you need another $12 billion just to cancel it out. It’s like putting an oven inside a fridge and turning both up to maximum – a total waste.
Of course, we must have no new coal or gas, no Adani, no coal seam gas. Market mechanisms are not working – carbon credits are like the negative gearing of climate action. We must have public ownership and democratic control of the energy grid.
We have to tackle transport emissions, which will soon be the second largest source of carbon pollution. The elephant in the room of course, is car dependency. Fifty years ago in his 1972 campaign speech, Gough Whitlam said, and I quote: “Australia must overcome the tyranny of the motor car, or face the destruction of its major cities as decent centres of our culture, our community, our civilisation.”
The situation now is much more serious but neither major party is taking this on. Electric cars won’t cut it. Fifty percent of a car’s lifetime emissions are embedded in its manufacture. When I say to you ‘electric vehicles’, we should of course be thinking of electric trains and electric trams, which don’t even need batteries, unlike cars.
And we need a massive shift to active transport – walking and cycling.
Fortunately, this will all be a massive cost saving. Household private expenditure on cars in the Sydney metropolitan area costs us $20 billion a year. Transport is the second largest item of household expenditure. We’d all benefit too from reduced congestion, road rage and road trauma, from clean air and more physical activity.
I’ve been pushing these things for over a decade as co-convenor of No WestCONnex, Ecotransit, Fix NSW Transport and as president of Friends of Erskineville, where we recently won a campaign for lifts and a southern entrance at the train station. I’m convinced that together we can win another campaign for an active transport bridge across the tracks at Eveleigh, which would cut 20 minutes off the walking time from here to Sydney Uni.
Let’s put a stop to corruption with a Federal corruption commission modelled on the NSW ICAC. Try to name another government department that is so popular that people happily display ‘I heart ICAC’ bumper stickers. The critics of ICAC are buffoons. You know NSW must have a good watchdog if it backfired on the very person who created it, Nick Greiner.
I would like to see the originating idea of colonial Australia – that of punishing the most downtrodden for minor crimes, to be flipped so as to punish the most powerful for their most serious ones. I think that would be poetic justice.
The housing crisis, where do we start? By recognising that housing is a human right.
There are currently 200,000 households on public housing waiting lists around the country and double that are either homeless or in unsuitable housing.
But right now, in Waterloo South, just a bit over that way, the NSW government wants to demolish 750 public homes in order to upzone it to 3000 apartments, flog it to private developers and sell over 70% on the private market. The net increase for the needy will be a pitiful 98 ‘social’ homes, managed by private community housing providers. It’s shameful.
We actually faced a similar crisis just after WW2 when the commonwealth stepped in and built 750,000 homes in a decade. We’ve got nearly 4 times the population now so at least doubling that volume is quite possible. Let’s clear the lists with a large-scale Green New Deal for Public Housing.
What would this mean? Well just a little bit in the other direction, is the Arkadia building on the corner of Euston and Sydney Park Rds. It’s Australia’s largest recycled brick building with a community garden making honey, rooftop BBQ with city skyline views, and a communal music room. And it’s built by Defence Housing Australia – public built housing.
The build cost was an average of only $400,000 per apartment, that’s one-third the price of comparable housing in the area.
Australia is set to spend $1 trillion over the next 20 years on ‘defence’. Let’s cut that by half and use the money to provide universal public housing to everyone who wants it with rents capped at 20% of income.
There is much more to discuss, hopefully in the Q&A section, or check out our website where Socialist Alliance has similar visionary policies: First Nations, women, LGBTIQ+, workers & unions, refugees, civil liberties, taxation, education, health and more.
This is all within our grasp. But can capitalism, the system of private, competitive profit-seeking, solve these problems? No. We need a new, socialist, vision, one based on, as Billy Bragg put it ‘organised compassion’, that puts people and planet before profit.
