BY KAREN FLETCHER
MELBOURNE — Community lawyer Amanda George, well-known for years of work against private prisons in Australia, is standing as an independent candidate in the Victorian election. She is opposing the Labor minister for police and corrective services Andre Haermeyer in the seat of Kororoit in Melbourne's western suburbs.
Kororoit, like most safe Labor seats, is home to some of the poorest people in the state. Forty per cent of its 65,000 residents were born outside of Australia, and more than 60% speak a language other than English at home. It has one of the lowest rates of high school retention in Victoria.
It currently contains two prisons, including the recently de-privatised Deer Park women's prison, and the state government is about to build a new 600-bed remand centre there.
Haermeyer is a newcomer to the area. In the lead up to the election, he abandoned a marginal seat in the relatively affluent eastern suburbs to claim the safe seat in Labor heartland. When Amanda George heard he was running in Kororoit, she says she just knew "someone had to make a stand against this 'Laura Norder' bull-shit".
George and a posse of fellow community workers quickly pulled together the "Amanda George: No More Prisons Here" campaign and hit the shopping centres and bowling greens of Kororoit with a barrage of sausage sizzles, stalls, banners, stickers and posters. George told Green Left Weekly that the response has been "very, very good. I reckon we're going to get some serious votes and I reckon we're going to cause Andre some serious grief."
"A lot of people say, 'Good on ya, love! We know we get treated like shit by the Labor Party, but we don't know what to do about it'. This campaign has finally given them an alternative."
George's well-attended campaign launch at Trades Hall on November 12 was hosted by prominent Melbourne criminal lawyer Rob Stary. Stary, an active member of the ALP for 25 years and a former president of the Macedon Ranges branch, quit the party the week before the event. He was quoted in the November 6 Melbourne Age explaining that he quit because he could "no longer tolerate the Bracks government standing idly by while the prison population spiralled". Nearly 1000 new prison cells have opened under three years of ALP rule.
Stary told GLW that he is also angry about the state ALP government's treatment of activist building workers and environmentalists in Victoria — he acts for a number of militant union and "greenie" clients in their battles with the government — because both groups have been treated "abominably" by Labor.
Socialist Alliance election campaign coordinator Margarita Windisch attended the launch with a number of alliance activists and said the George campaign was "a fantastic initiative and one that we fully support. We look forward to working with Amanda and all her supporters over the course of the campaign and we'll continue to campaign with them against this prison-building frenzy afterwards too."
From Green Left Weekly, November 27, 2002.
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