Page90 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 2 December 2020
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finish her shift at 9.30 pm; so she would leave the defrosted chops and sausages on the sink and the saucepan with the potatoes and saltwater and carrots, and Barton and I would come home and we would cook our veggies and mash them up, and we would grill the meat and we would eat our dinner in front of the TV watching Cop Shop or A Country Practice.
While I confess to having quiet moments when I think, “How on earth did I end up here,” I also think, “Why shouldn’t I be here?” I want to show that someone from a normal, average background can be elected to parliament and succeed. As for political labels like “conservative” or “progressive”, they mean nothing in my part of town. The only label you can slap on me is “battler”.
Why do we in politics put ourselves in such limiting groups and play political games behind factional walls, eyeing each other with suspicion—not to mention the greed and corruption we all too often see and read about, the ego trips, power plays and dirt sheets, the so-called political kingmakers who know how to sharpen knives but not much else? In so many ways politics has become toxic. No wonder ordinary people have had a gutful.
It concerns me that the Labor government have been in power for so long that they seem to have lost touch with the Canberra battlers. That term may seem an oxymoron to some in this place and to some people in our community, but I know that there are many out in the burbs like me: just proud, hardworking people and parents wanting to better themselves and their lives; mums and dads and partners who want their kids to have a good education, to learn good manners and values, and to have good jobs and opportunities that they did not have. Robert Menzies famously called them the forgotten people, the backbone of Australia, too often taken for granted by government and effectively powerless because they lack connections.
The quiet Canberrans, that is who we are, living outside the Canberra bubble. We often hear of the Canberra bubble, and in some ways it is true. Being a public service town does make us different. Just last month came a headline in the Canberra Times, “Public sector an economic safe haven”, referring to new ABS data showing that no sector had grown as much during COVID-19 as the public sector. Public sector wages have also increased while plummeting in almost all other sectors.
Yerrabi residents are younger than the Canberra average, and more work full-time than the norm; but most are not cocooned in the economic safe haven of the public sector. They are clerical staff, community workers, technicians, tradies, salespeople and labourers.
Let me share with you a little more about the great people I have been elected to represent. Yerrabi residents are more likely to be married and have kids and a mortgage than other Canberrans; and there are more migrants in Yerrabi too. The area boasts bigger populations of Chinese, Indians, Vietnamese and Sri Lankans—all family minded people who work hard and want to improve their communities. Yerrabi people want to get on. The electorate is my home too, and it is the place I want to be.
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