TRACEE HUTCHISON – CAMPAIGN SPEECH – SUNDAY MARCH 15TH – RYE CIVIC HALL
Thank you Luce - and the beautiful words from people who mean so much in my life…
Susan, Rosco, Marty, Jude & Tilda – and Karli & Phil and the Independents for Mornington Peninsula for your endorsement. It means a great deal. Jillian – thank you for endorsing me and your permission to represent Bunurong Country. This place that we both feel so deeply in our murup – our spirit – and in our bones.
Thank you to my friends Maxon, Mietta and Marty for singing us in, And all of you – thank you for showing up for this place we love! And showing up for me.
It is an incredible honour for me to stand before you as the Community Independent candidate in the upcoming by-election here in my home-seat of Nepean on May 2, a by-election we shouldn’t be having.The $2million the Victorian Liberal Party is costing us would be much better spent on a new CT scanner for Rosebud Hospital.
And I want to acknowledge Sue Gilbert and others here from Save Rosebud Hospital and some of the community groups who are fundraising to buy that new CT scanner. The sporting clubs, the walking groups, the fundraising ladies, the families who donate instead of buying 80th birthday presents, and the woodworkers who make rocking horses to raffle over summer…
It’s wild isn’t it? But that’s how do things here.We fundraise with rocking horse raffles and 80th birthday presents to buy vital equipment for a public hospital. The public hospital I was born in that’s been in steady decline since the maternity ward closed in 2007, on the watch of a Federal MP who was a Minister in the Howard Liberal Government at the time, And a long-serving Liberal state MP.
There’s always a reason the funding doesn’t trickle down here to Nepean.
While we wait for the red team or the blue team to line up with the elected MP, so they can magically unlock the purse strings for the Southern Peninsula.
Except it never happens, and so we wait.
As I did a few weeks ago with a broken foot in the Emergency Department – treated with incredible care in an ED ward stretched beyond capacity looking after people in much greater need than me. None of us with any option, than to wait.
Because that’s what we do in Nepean… we wait. And we’re done with waiting, our community deserves better. Our Hospital and the people who work there looking after us, deserve better.
We are done with petitions and promises from parties that only make them when they’re not in Government.
Everyone knows we need to rebuild Rosebud Hospital. What we need is a plan – and a strategy and someone as determined as I am to bring some new thinking to the funding models required to get it done.
That’s what a strong local Independent can do, and that’s what I can deliver, free from daily talking points written in Spring Street by people who don’t live here, or political promises from parties that can’t Govern. Free to fight for what we deserve – with a voice that does cut through.
Like you, I’m pretty cranky with the blue team, and the $2million dollars they’re forcing us to spend on this by-election.
What an indictment on big-party-politics when you get no say in who you’re told to cheer for, or in the red team’s case – denied the chance to cheer anyone at all in this by-election. There’s a lot of good people in local party branches who are digging deep on their conviction right now. And I don’t blame them, I’d want to vote Independent too. Because even though they’re not running in Nepean this time, I’m no fan of the red team either, and I think it’s true that we’re toughest on the people who let us down the hardest.
And I will hold this Allan Labor Government to account. On the unfair taxes our businesses pay because of the Metro overlay. Surely we’re smart enough to find a work-around to the Metro V Regional overlays that disadvantage us… and still preserve our Green Wedge
That’s why I’ll be on my feet in State Parliament every opportunity I get, to highlight the disparity in our share of investment in basic infrastructure like roads and affordable housing, to highlight the need for the people working hardest for the folks who need it most, to get a fair share of Government funding to hold the safety net that is keeping people alive.
And I’ve seen that work up close – in recent years. Where I’ve been privileged to work and volunteer in the support centres and volunteer kitchens. My hometown is the rough sleeping capital of the state. That place of my magical childhood and summer holidays for so many Victorians, and folks from all over Australia, and the world.
Two people rough sleeping on the foreshore died over summer. It is shameful that the best we can do is rely on the generosity of philanthropy and food donors and volunteers who show up everyday for those folks. with no judgement, just a smile, a solution and a food pack to get through the worst day of their life, day after day.
Surely, we are wealthy enough as a State, and a nation, that this can’t be the standard we walk past and accept.
And I won’t.
That is why I am standing here and stepping up.
An Independent member of Parliament who can talk to that need, from seeing it up close - in the community I live in and care about deeply.
We do have a Housing & Homelessness Emergency here, and we need to lean in to that reality and fight for investment in affordable housing and crisis accommodation we need so desperately here.
I am so grateful I was able to buy a home in Rosebud 25 years ago, when housing was affordable, and I have held onto that house for dear life while I juggled other life and career and family commitments.The home that is my safe place, my sanctuary.
I know how difficult it is living pay cheque to pay cheque and I know what it feels like when that pay cheque isn’t there when the career you’ve given your life to turns to younger options when you reach a certain age and the world you walk in stops seeing you.
There is not a single day that I take the safety of my home for granted, because I have been part of that cohort of women – and men – who find themselves unemployed, and under-employed in the prime of their lives, and careers.
I know how precarious that is – And how debilitating that is, so I don’t take any of this for granted.
Standing here – seeking elected office to serve my community, I don’t take any of this for granted.
As a young woman I was politicised by the Franklin River campaign.I helped paint the banner of the Stop the Drop concert at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in February 1983.It was an extraordinary coalescence of music and politics and the temper of the times. I was 20 years old. And my friend Shane Howard from the Goanna Band had just returned from the Franklin where he’d met Bob & Hazel Hawke on the campaign trail, promising to save it, and a young doctor turned activist called Bob Brown. Shane came back from the people’s blockade with an anthem to sing it into the history books, and I voted to Save the Franklin.
Bob Hawke made good his promise in that 1983 election, and the Franklin River is now a World Heritage Protected Wilderness.
That campaign changed the course of my life, and it took me to TripleJ where I carried the belief that music could change the world.nd the idealist in me has kept that fire burning for over 40 years.
We have our own Franklin moment up at Arthur’s Seat right now. The Allan Labor Government has ignored the 418 public submissions and the recommendation of our own Council officers to oppose it to approve a $25 million dollar commercially-operated theme park in a publicly owned State Park.
It is wrong.
It is wrong for the landslide risk, the fire risk, the threat to habitat and wildlife, it is wrong because a publicly-owned State park belongs to the people, not a commercial business of that scale, and it is wrong because the Allan Labor Government chose to ignore us.
I’ve spent my career as a journalist holding people in power to account, and I will continue to do that as the Independent Member for Nepean, and that inappropriate development is not happening in our State Park at Arthur’s Seat. Not on my watch as the Independent member for Nepean.
The natural environment, the UNESCO listed Biosphere and RAMSAR-listed wetlands, our wildlife, our dolphins and spectacular coastlines, these are the reasons over 8 million people visit here each year, not to visit a Theme Park in our State Park.
And they are the same reasons we need to protect our natural environment from the impact of a changing climate, to mitigate the risk – and the cost – of sea level rise and coastal erosion we’re already seeing here. We ARE in a Climate Emergency – and we should be leading our response to it with community-led strategies and actions that set a benchmark for others to follow.
Some of my earliest memories are up at Arthur’s Seat, the old chairlift and watching the beam of the McCrae Lighthouse sweep out across the Bay, to skiffle-boarding in the shallows at Rosebud, and jumping off the jetty, Blue-Heaven milkshakes at Cincotta’s milkbar and hurtling around the hills of McCrae in mum’s blue mini when she was the postie.
My very first baby photo is in mum’s arms at Anthony’s Nose, this place is deep in my bones, and while my career took me all over the country and all over the world, I always knew I’d come back and I put my foot on that house in Rosebud, so I could come home.
Born in Rosebud Hospital, you won’t find a fiercer fighter to get the funding we deserve to get it rebuilt. Well, maybe Sue Gilbert is fiercer than me, but if the Liberals say there is $340 million to be found in the State budget, then I want to see it as a line item in the budget in May.
On May 2, we have an opportunity to make a decisive change in Nepean, a change that says we’re done with the two-major parties and a political system that doesn’t serve us.
We have an opportunity to put a strong, local, honest, independent voice in State Parliament. Someone who lives in the electorate and calls this place home, someone who listens, someone who shows up, and will keep showing up with everything I’ve got for the place and community I love.
We have an opportunity to elect our first community independent AND our first woman MP for Nepean.
There is no greater honour I can think of than to serve you in State Parliament as the Member for Nepean
Local. Honest. Independent.
Let’s make history herstory in Nepean!
Let’s Go Nepean!