Yes I have nominated for Greens pre-selection for the ACT election

It’s now public knowledge that I have nominated for pre-selection for the Greens party for the upcoming ACT elections.

It’s important to note though that nominating for pre-selection does not mean I am now a candidate. It means that mine is one of a few names that will be put to the Greens membership later this month, and the members will vote on who they want as their candidates. When the results are announced in March, then everyone will know who the candidates are going forward into the final months before the election. It’s a reality of the Greens that a surprising number of commentators don’t seem able to grasp—a political party where decisions are actually made by the membership rather than a faceless cadre. Perhaps they are just too used to the way the old parties work...

So despite the coverage given by the Canberra Times, no candidates have been chosen, and until today the members of the party didn’t even know who has put their hand up. In fact, they still don’t because the Times only chose to discuss me. There are two other electorates, and nominees in all of them. I would have preferred to wait out due process before talking publicly if selected. But there are some comments made in the Times and elsewhere that need to be put to rights.
A quick refresher: The ACT has three electorates. Two have five MLAs each (Brindabella and Ginninderra) and one has seven (Molonglo). Molonglo covers most of my home area in Gungahlin and is the natural for me to nominate in. And because many people don’t realise it, the ACT Government is both the state equivalent and the local council equivalent in the one legislature.

Why Greens?

Simple: the Greens’ policies are very close to what I believe as a better way for government to run, to establish better planning, transport infrastructure, a more sustainable society in the true sense of the word, and for the environment to be preserved for future generations.
Perhaps I could have stood as an independent, as I have done in the past when elected as a Councillor in a large local government in Queensland. But when there is already a party there that is working towards the same ends, why not work with that party and try to help to make it stronger?

Challenging the incumbents?

This is a particularly irksome argument put forward by a gung ho journalism mentality that can only see negatives in the things around them. It’s difficult for them to conceive that people can work together as a team for the good of the team and party and community. Again, perhaps they are so used to watching the way some people in the old parties behave that they simply can’t get their heads around a totally different modus operandi? It seems that even now, some corners of the media just don’t “get” the Greens.

It’s been interesting to read commentary from a number of learned election watchers, all predicting the demise of at least one Greens MLA, and usually Caroline le Couteur is named as that person. But all of this surmising is usually based on the past election results, plus the effect of any boundary changes. It never allows for the dynamics of the nominated candidates.

I believe that the Greens can retain their current number of seats in the Assembly. But it will need a strong flow of primary votes. That’s where I can help. I have a track record of years of community service and achievement for Gungahlin and for the wider Canberra community. I hope that if selected, this record may help me bring significant new votes to the Greens—votes that the party might not have received otherwise. And that may be what is needed to grow the Greens’ vote and retain their MLA numbers in the Assembly. It may not get me elected, but it may just make the difference in getting the existing MLAs back in office.

I have the utmost respect for the jobs that both Caroline le Couteur and Shane Rattenbury have done over the last three years. As a former elected Councillor, I value the grassroots approach they have taken to their duties. They are Greens through and through, but they are right there on the roads/rates/rubbish issues too—often with more enlightened perspectives than the MLAs from the old parties to boot.

More than any other MLAs, these two have been the ones always there at community meetings (not just at Gungahlin) and there doing the hard yards of trying to get valuable legislation through the Assembly—more often than not defeated by Labor and Liberal working together. Ironically Labor often the turns around and puts up their own version of Greens policy!

Just a one-eyed Gungahlin lobbyist?

I’m proud of the work I’ve done and the achievements I’ve helped pull off for Gungahlin over the last five and a half years with GCC.

But I also know that a large proportion of the community work I’ve done has been on behalf of the whole of the ACT. A visible outcome is the vastly improved Development Assessment public notification process at ACTPLA. Much larger signage, improved newspaper ads, and better listings of DAs and files for download on the ACTPLA website. Through participation in the Planning and Development Forum meetings every couple of months, I pursue better outcomes for all of Canberra. And anyone else attending those meetings will attest that I don’t just turn up for coffee and biscuits…

Less well known but still a matter of public record, I was asked by two ACT Ministers to represent community interests on three reference panels reviewing key legislation and policies.

Andrew Barr appointed me to his reference panel reviewing the ACT Territory Plan. Together with another community delegate and several industry representatives, this panel reviewed every line of the draft Plan (have you seen how big that sucker is??) and brought about a mountain of changes to the new Plan that was gazetted in March 2008—improvements to the planning process for all Canberrans.

Last year Andrew Barr again asked me to represent the community on a reference panel reviewing the contentious Territory Plan Draft Variations 301 and 303 – sources of major concern to residents of the established inner South and North Canberra suburbs in particular. A lot of changes were made for a new combined Draft Variation 306, but as ACTPLA was warned by several of us on the Panel, there were problems they had not addressed and in some cases had flown in the face of panel advice. It isn’t surprising then that this piece of policy still has not been resolved.

In 2010, Simon Corbell asked me to again represent the community on an expert reference panel working with the then Commissioner for Sustainability Maxine Cooper to review the highly contentious tree management policies. We found a myriad of polices spread across multiple departments and even governments, with little coordination or planning for the long game. Magnificent street trees were left to die through the drought, irrespective of the replacement costs. Ailing trees were removed without adequate consultation and with no plan or resourcing for their replacement. And all the while, planning policies did little to help the situation, allowing poor species selection, overshadowing, and likely future infrastructure damage.

Throughout my time with the Gungahlin Community Council, I have also liaised with members from the other Canberra Community Councils. During my term, in many ways GCC has led the way on use of IT and the internet to promote important issues and to build support bases. Our website redevelopment was innovative and followed by several other community councils. Our newsletter the Gungahlin Smokesignals (a.k.a. GunSmoke) was highly regarded across Gungahlin, and several others community councils have followed suit with their own much-improved newsletters—often after seeking my advice. And our very successful foray into social media, with a rapidly growing Facebook community and live blogging of meetings now being used by other groups too after seeking our advice.

Many of the issues I’ve campaigned on have had Canberra-wide implications rather than just being Gungahlin-centric. Light rail is a classic example of how I’ve lobbied for a lasting solution to Canberra’s transport future. I believe this is important because if we don’t get on top of transport needs, the pressure to continue to expand roads will break the already barely sustainable ACT Budget.

The electorate boundaries

The Times is trying to imply that my role in pursuing better electorate boundaries for Gungahlin specifically, and more generally to fix the problem of the sprawling Molonglo electorate, was self-serving. Once again the arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny.

GCC was pursuing better electorate boundaries long before I joined. I took up the campaign and carried on with it to the best of my ability, in my role as first the president and then as the GCC spokesperson. Most pundits (such as respected ABC commentator Jonathon Green) felt that the boundary revision we lobbied for last year would have cost the Greens a seat. The Greens were worried about the outcome, yet I pursued it because it was the right thing for Gungahlin. So how is it that this is argued as self-serving?

It’s been portrayed as trying to create a Gungahlin-based super-electorate, where any Gungahlin-based candidate would come to the fore. Actually we tried to establish an electorate based on all of Belconnen and Gungahlin together. And of course it would have favoured candidates based within those communities—that’s the whole idea—better representation for those communities from candidates living within them who were familiar with the issues that concerns those residents—irrespective of what party they are from.

But with clever wording, the Times turns it into something sneaky, underhanded. Words like “advantage”, “failed” and “backlash” are all carefully chosen to portray a picture that is far from the truth.

The truth is we in GCC didn’t think we had a hope of pulling off an electorate change. We were surprised it got as far as it did, incredibly appreciative of the support the campaign drew from the Gungahlin community, but not at all surprised that it fell over at the final hurdle.

But the nuance from all this that the Times has utterly failed to grasp is that the campaign was a complete success. The incredibly mundane issue of the basic undemocratic nature of the current ACT electorates was a lead news story in all ACT news outlets—including on the front page of the Times! The ACT Electoral Commission themselves stated in print that the Molonglo electorate is a problem that has to be sorted out, and recommended to the ACT Assembly that a revision of the electoral design be investigated. All political parties now realise this is an issue that residents care strongly about and want resolved. And an investigation is indeed now under way. The ACT electoral boundaries issue has been set up as a debate to be had going into the next election.

I call that real progress. Anyone who only has an eye for the short term will fail to see that GCC has always been pursuing the long game outcome of a stronger, more representative Assembly—a positive outcome for all Canberrans and all political persuasions.

Jobs in Gungahlin

I am unashamedly a supporter of Walter Burley Griffin’s concept of satellite cities surrounding the main city centre, with distributed employment bases reducing the pressure on roads and transport infrastructure. Living and working close together is a fundamentally more sustainable solution and I cannot understand those who want to pursue the centralising approach that has failed cities so utterly around the world.

So I have been pursuing jobs for Gungahlin. I also—successfully—pursued a rezoning of 40 hectares of land that was designated for town houses to Commercial zones, so that we’d have somewhere left to build office blocks when the time came. The Times chooses to state that I have “failed” to gain a Federal Government office relocation—again a clever selection of words designed to add to the picture they have been painting. They fail to acknowledge the others who have preceded me—such as Garry Humphries who “failed” to get Gungahlin offices even though he was in the Federal Government itself for 11 years!

And the Times fails to acknowledge that we have succeeded in convincing the ACT Government to provide the catalyst for future office development by agreeing to relocate 500 jobs to Gungahlin. Or that nine development companies expressed interest in developing these office in Gungahlin.

And lastly, the short-term memories at the Times also forget that the Federal Defence Department did indeed—among much fanfare including in the Times itself—relocate a call centre and some 300 jobs to Gungahlin, now based in Mitchell.


So with those points sorted for the record, I’d prefer now to sit back and wait for the members to have their say. If I’m selected, then we can talk about policy issues.