Confessions of a Candidate #1

Suzanne Kathleen Pritchard, 43, and I love Lake Macquarie. I swim and think in the Lake’s cooling waters and walk and wonder in the surrounding hills. The Lake Macquarie electorate is 1,062 km2 , and that’s a lot of lake and a fair few hills. There are also about 64,320 people, spread out in little patches of paradise dotted between the mountains and the sea. The officials call it provincial, it feels more like community.

I love my City of Lake Macquarie too, even though it has no city centre, and people drive past it on the way to the north coast and the wine country of the Hunter Valley. The City is unique, it is a bushland city with a mining-manufacturing history in a changing climate of technology and evidence that the world is changing too.

I’m just starting out on a rather interesting relationship with the State Electorate of Lake Macquarie, all new boundaries and needless to say, I’m excited. In every relationship it’s important to work through the issues and Lake Mac has its fair share. The Lake Mac electorate is big… and size makes a difference to how much bang you get for your buck when it comes to supplying infrastructure, whether it’s water or somewhere to walk, a local school or health services close to home.

It makes a difference when the electorate spans two Local Government Areas. In Wyong it takes in a large chunk of the catchment for the Central Coast’s water supply and in Lake Macquarie it includes the proposed sites for several new coal extraction initiatives and all of the Lake. The concerns about natural resources and their sustainable management is a major issue in the electorate.

I decided to be a candidate so I could offer the people of Lake Macquarie a choice. A choice to do things a little differently or to think of different ways to do the same things more sustainably. It’s the choice between letting Sydney politics drive the agenda for our region and ensuring that the local communities still have a say about the place they choose to call home.

Being a candidate is being able to present a different paradigm for people to ponder, a different way of thinking about the same old problems. While many solutions may have already been found, at present there is no political power to put them in place. The current political mindset is not making a difference in the timeframe that’s necessary to make a real difference to the final outcomes that our families and children will have to live with.

A Green voice in government is vital if different solutions are to be found. The core Greens ethics of grassroots democracy, economic justice & social equality, ecological sustainability and peace, non-violence & disarmament provide a different way of viewing our place in the world and what we do with it.

Over the next month or two I’ll be getting to know the electorate a little more personally and this blog is one way I hope to share this journey with you.