The Greens Candidate for Robertson, Shelly McGrath, said the community needs to “stand hard” against projects like PEP-11 in the lead up to the Federal Election.
The newly appointed candidate said she was frustrated with the Federal Government for their “ongoing failure to act on climate change”.
“I decided to stand following years of frustration … the ongoing failures to act on climate change and to seriously address underlying causes of social justice issues such as the housing crisis [and] First Nations deaths in custody,” McGrath said.
“There’s a real disjoint on what the community wants and what is happening at a political level.
McGrath said that the recent International Panel for Climate Change report made it really clear that “the time for discussing this stuff has passed”.
“We only have to look at what’s happened with the floods and the terrible ecological crises we are seeing that we have to stand hard against these projects which we know are damaging.
“We [need to] focus on what we can be doing on adaptability and responding to the crises we already have, not investing in projects that are going to make things worse.”
McGrath, an academic at the University of Newcastle and Co-Convenor of the Amnesty International Central Coast branch, said she is passionate about social justice issues and would represent Robertson with a greater role for First Nations peoples in mind.
“We’ve been hearing the same rhetoric for years and years without much action for everyday people,” McGrath said.
“We have to address the housing crisis – we’ve almost been led to believe that housing is a right, it’s not a privilege, and we know that secure housing is the most critical foundation required for people to basically function, so we have to do more.
“We have a huge youth population, so we need to be doing more to support young people and to forge pathways for people to actually do what they want to do so the key to this is fairer access to education … free education at that higher level, but also free childcare.
“We are living on unseeded lands and that’s not only an issue that needs to be resolved at a national level with treaty and political sovereignty, but also at a local level.
“As communities, we are losing out by not inviting First Nations peoples into broader social and political domains and leadership.”
Maisy Rae
Perhaps the author of this article means ‘unceded’ when quoting Ms. McGrath in the second to last paragraph.
It is well the Greens have candidates standing in the area, any alternative to the Coalition/labour dichotomy is welcome.