Page174 - Week 01 - Thursday, 3 December 2020
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To that end, I would like to offer a personal thankyou to the Chief Minister. Chief Minister, your leadership in advocating for the rights of sexuality and gender diverse Canberrans has had a profound impact on me. Your leadership and courage, both personally and politically, make it so much easier for me, a proud gay man, to stand up in this place. You have made our city better, not only for me but for people like us. There is so much more work to be done to ensure full equality for the diversity of people in our shared rainbow family. I offer myself sincerely and genuinely to assist in those efforts.
All of these things explain a story of me and who I am. These things inform my values. But they will not entirely define my work or my contributions to this place. I believe that the unregulated excesses of capitalism have reinforced the privilege of individuals and corporations who are able to collect and hoard great wealth at the expense of everyday people and our planet. What we are building through our global green movement is a strong political response to global, economic and wealth inequality, propped up by the active destruction of our planet.
Obscene wealth and inequality are almost always acquired at the expense of our environment. The desire for inordinate wealth is the single biggest contributing factor to the climate crisis we are facing, with a small percentage of our society consuming and hoarding well beyond their needs, to the detriment of us all.
I want to make sure that the Greens share our just and equitable vision with the tradie with a cert IV certificate, the single mother living in public housing, the person who took a risk in small business, and the pensioner trying to maintain their independence. I want these people to know that the Greens are a party for them—people like my dad. My dad is someone who, by his own admission, was a Labor voter. He was a Labor voter because he is a proud working-class man—the kind of man who leaves for work before the sun rises and does not get home until the sun sets, the kind of man who needs to warm up his V8 engine in the garage at 5 am, much to the frustration of our neighbours.
I am someone who takes my work seriously, but I rarely take myself too seriously. I am by nature a jokester—a class clown, the funny man. Now seems to be the best time to apologise in advance to Madam Speaker and to warn my fellow class clowns that there is a new sheriff in town—Mr Hanson and Mr Parton, of course!
Through humility, through humour and through hard work, I want to achieve meaningful change for the 70,424 people that I now work for. I believe by breaking down this perception that politics and this place are separate from community, by humbling ourselves to our constituents, and by being genuine and authentic in our interactions with them, we can demonstrate a more collaborative way of doing politics.
While I am incredibly proud of my membership of the ACT Greens, I do not pretend that we, or that I as an individual, come to this place with all of the answers to every problem. I genuinely look forward to working with all of my colleagues across the political spectrum so that we can find common ground and solutions that place our community’s interests front and centre. In particular, I would like to extend a genuine
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