Page 4122 - Week 13 - Thursday, 2 December 2021
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office, in the last 48 hours I have received a gold-plated campaign pitch, a deep dive into policy analysis, a graph showing sector employment rates during COVID, a 7 am text to remind me to wear orange, and my own body weight in chocolate! They are marvellous.
I would also like to thank Katt Millner and Tim Liersch, who are my support candidates. They helped me get here. Tim is doing some amazing policy work for the Greens. I particularly admired his work supporting First Nations peoples. People like Tim are the reason we Greens punch above our weight when it comes to good ideas. Katt is unfortunately leaving us and heading to Melbourne, which is our loss but Victoria’s gain. Katt was 24 years old when she ran here. She is about five foot nothing, she was fairly new to Canberra, and I am really pleased to say that she outpolled several established political figures.
Hugh and Ebony set up and ran the UC Greens from scratch. All year long, they have been running fantastic events, right through lockdown. They have kept everyone connected with the world and with each other, and they have cheered us all up.
I met Dr Bosibori Bett this year. I am off to watch Bosi’s TED talk this weekend and attend about a thousand award ceremonies for all the awards she has been nominated for. Bosi is a powerhouse of ideas. She helped me start a new series called My Culture, My Canberra to hear some of the different voices in our city. I cannot wait to see what she is going to come up with next year.
Bosi, Dr Jane Chimungeni-Brassington, Natasa Sojic, Skye Predavec and Dr Tjanara Goreng Goreng were my first speakers in My Culture, My Canberra. Thank you so much for sharing your stories with us. We are so full of talent here in Canberra, and we have so many people who really want to make the world a better place.
There are a lot of good people at the Belconnen Community Council, but I want to make special mention of Glen and Maree. They are amazingly dedicated volunteers and they are working so hard for their communities and are involved in so many different projects.
I was really sad to see Harriet Elvin step down from the CFC. Harriet mentored me and she mentored countless other women. It has clearly worked, because we are all doing pretty well. When Harriet finished, she tasked me with helping other women, so I am now mentoring two women as well. I am nowhere near as professional about it as Harriet was. I cannot imagine I have much to impart. But I think that sometimes all the help a talented woman needs is to be told that she belongs, and I am able to do that. To any woman who is listening, I say: you belong here and you belong in here.
There are a lot of ecowarriors in Canberra, but I would especially like to honour Helen, Kat, Ian and Kate, who do an amazing job campaigning for the environment and wrangling volunteers. I particularly enjoyed the fundraising trivia night Helen ran during lockdown. I do not want to suggest that there was any misconduct involved—I certainly do not want to overburden our already busy Integrity Commissioner!—but on the night of the trivia contest the Minister for the Environment and the minister for water and emissions reduction stacked their teams with a lot of professional advisers
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