On August 12, candidates from the Greens, Socialist Alliance (SA) and newly formed First Nations Political Party (FNPP) spoke to a group of 50 people at La Tropicana cafe in Fremantle.
The forum was organised by SA to highlight environmental and social policies ignored by the major parties in the federal election campaign.
The event was chaired by Fremantle councillor and Western Australian SA co-convenor Sam Wainwright
Kate Davis, Greens candidate for Fremantle, said: “The Greens have a renewable energy target of 100% by 2030.
While there is a debate within our party about the best way to achieve this, in the current political situation we support a price on carbon — provided it actually reduces emissions, unlike the Rudd government’s Emissions Trading Scheme.”
Sanna Andrew, SA candidate for Fremantle, stressed that profits from industry should go back into the community to serve human needs. “We have to transition to a publicly owned environmentally sustainable energy sector”, she said.
“Developing clean technologies will create tens of thousands of jobs.” Supporting the Greens light rail plan, she called for a community grassroots campaign to push it, and freight rail, forward.
Andrew also voiced deep concern about the explosion of mining exploration following the NT intervention and the proposed nuclear waste dump near Muckaty.
First Nations Senate candidates Marianne MacKay and Lara Menkens presented FNPP’s plan for proportional Indigenous representation in parliament.
Mackay said the intervention and Muckaty waste dump proposal were racist. She said Indigenous people were “heroes because we’ve managed to keep our culture, language and stories alive”.
Mackay criticised the stop-and-search police laws and the “name-and-shame” policy towards juvenile offenders. “We need programs and services for young people which reflect our culture and our needs”, she said.