Page 1553 - Week 05 - Thursday, 2 June 2022
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vacuum her office, as a night cleaner in the CPA building, as I scraped together enough to keep my family going to stand in the 2012 election.
Ms Davidson, it might be hard to know if you are happy or sad, at times, across the chamber from here, but you got the cabinet over the line on Coolo park—the only Greens member to stand up to Labor publicly in a generation in this place! Long may Coolo park stay as a cool oasis for our little part of the world. I propose—and this is a serious statement—that it should be renamed the Gina Coulthard memorial park, after she lost her life to cancer during the pandemic, an illness that cannot have been helped by the distress she and her neighbours lived through, fighting to keep their bedroom windows free of car fumes in their little piece of suburbia. Well done, Emma. Now get the same result on Coombs peninsula! This government is too greedy for every inch of land for profit, and you, and I and many in this city know it.
I am sorry, Mr Davis, that the fact that you were once in nappies was used against you in this place. Not our finest moment in opposition, but you have surely brought colour to our days—every colour of the rainbow. Do not forget that you started out blue, and we gave you the first experience in a political office at a young age, as we have done for so many. So we cannot be all that bad!
Ms Clay, with the ever-thoughtful critique, I am sorry that I do not share in your panic for the end times, but I know you practise what you preach, and I respect you for that. But I am optimistic by nature, and I just cannot let that go.
Mr Braddock, a man after my own heart—a Green who knows that the end times are not nigh. Kermit the frog once said, “It’s not easy being green,” and I think some of the astounding backflips you have had to engage in here must still be hurting today. You have followed in the steps of Mr Rattenbury, who has become positively Gumby-like in his ability to bend, stretch and flip principled positions when the need to retain power calls for it.
Now to my own team. Ms Lee, I have been proud to serve as your deputy. People underestimate you, and you have more capacity and grit than all the men in this game put together. I wish you the best in the uphill fight that opposition faces in this place. You will succeed in your own way.
Mr Hanson: ah, what can I say, Jezza? A trained military fighter has seen and worked in the danger zone more than most people here would care to imagine; he has seen things none of us will ever have to face, to fight for our freedoms, like the freedom to come and disagree in here. If he is occasionally a bit harsh, and thoroughly masculine in his approach, he is well trained in the infantry, after all. It only took me four years here before we were able to be more like friends than trench enemies. But I got there in the end. I know he would visit me in hospital if I were dying and when no-one else might. Thanks, Jezza; you will miss me out there in the wilds of Murrumbidgee.
Ms Lawder: never one to get too excited, Nicole, the stateswoman of our shadow cabinet, famously once stood up for all the women in the shadow cabinet, completely changing the discussion, when she said, “I don’t know about the other women here,
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