Managing director of Ebono Institute and major sponsor of The Generator, Geoff Ebbs, is running against Kevin Rudd in the seat of Griffith at the next Federal election. By the expression on their faces in this candid shot it looks like a pretty dull campaign. Read on
A great market atmosphere adds a new destination to shopping in Boundary St
Despite a number of missed deadlines and trips around the roundabout, the same players are jockeying for position to purchase and develop the Absoe site in the middle of West End.
The plan, as Westender understands it, is for the building to be redeveloped as a mixture of housing, commerce and industry in a sensitive manner consistent with West End cultural values. It will include an underground carpark open treed space and at least some of the refurbished existing buildings.
This is partly governed by the Brisbane City Council’s Riverside Neighbourhood Plan and will guide the development application submitted by the eventual owner. What that means in practice depends somewhat on who becomes the eventual buyer. David Devine had a contract over the property, missed a critical deadline but is now back in play again.
Meanwhile the onsite Artisan markets are ramping up their presence with a marquita multicultural food spectacular on dates yet to be announced. The weekend markets have slowed down a little since their big launch in December although no official change in times or approach has been forthcoming.
Local business owners along the section of Boundary Street between Mollison St and the police station watch with interest.
John Dwyer watches his favourite coup on set at the client’s
The South West Chamber of Commerce is breakfasting at the Loft again this month with marketing guru John Dwyer working up the Wow factor over breakfast at 7am on Thursday 6 February.
John’s company assists business in developing marketing programs that have that Wow factor and he will impart the secrets of his success over breakfast next week.
John was the Rocktober festival organiser in the eighties and has worked with Woolworths, News, KFC, Coca Cola and Caltex. His most treasured gig though is securing Jerry Seinfeld for the Greater Building Society’s advertising campaign.
The Chamber enjoyed breakfast at a few different venues, trying the menus, last year. Looks like the Loft might have got the nod, or be closing in on the deal so we can expect a few more business breakfasts coming our way.
Get yourself to the Loft a little before seven so you can be comfortably seated before the Wow factor whacks you for six. Members and non-members are welcome to attend.
Terri Butler and Bill Shorten campaigning in Griffith
Newcomer to the Griffith by-election, Terri Butler doesn’t have a profile in the electorate that could in any way equal that of her predecessor Kevin Rudd, and on top of that, she is up against a well-known and well-liked opponent.
On the plus side, Ms Butler is new: this can bring its own energy and freshness, and the old Labor leadership battles are no longer the ‘front and centre’ distractions they were in 2013.
While Ms Butler sees herself as the underdog in terms of financial resources, she considers she has the backing that will really count come election time.
“Though the LNP candidate has a lot more money to spend on this campaign than I do, I have more grassroots support,” she told No Fibs.
Yet in her campaign speech this week, Ms Butler warned her supporters: “Do not be fooled. We are right up against the wall in Griffith.”
In my first interview with Ms Butler, she said of herself: “I am someone that people can relate to. I’m a young mum, I’ve got a successful career, and like a lot of people in this electorate, I juggle the responsibilities of looking after my family with full-time work.”
Ms Butler said Labor’s volunteers (which some have dubbed ‘Butler’s Battlers’ as a retort to the ‘Glasson’s Gladiators’ tag), “are working on this campaign because they strongly believe in what we stand for: a fair go for the people of Griffith, and they’re working alongside me to engage with people as much as possible.”
Ms Butler said that Labor is keeping the campaign local. “We’re doing street stalls, meeting and greeting people at train, bus and ferry stops, making phone calls, speaking directly with local businesses, sending letters, and attending community meetings, among other things”.
As to the local issues, Ms Butler said people are concerned about: “The inequity in access to high-speed broadband, and concerns about Mr Turnbull’s second-rate broadband plan,
LNP backflipping on education funding”, and cited access to quality childcare and aircraft noise as other topics of concern for the electorate.
“More generally”, she said, “people are concerned that the Abbott government is not what they expected when they voted. We were promised no surprises and no excuses, but we seem to be getting plenty of both”.
“This by-election is people’s first opportunity to express an opinion about the Abbott government. From the conversations I’ve had, I don’t think people want to give the Abbott government a tick of approval,” she said.
Asked why she considers Labor is best placed to represent the interests of the people of Griffith, Ms Butler said: “We have wall-to-wall LNP governments. We don’t need yet another person agreeing with Tony Abbott and Campbell Newman. It’s important to restore some of the balance. Our community deserves a strong voice.”
Ms Butler said that the by-election is about the future. “It’s an opportunity for people to send a message to Canberra about the Abbott government’s performance, and about the type of government we expect and deserve.”
Over the past week, Ms Butler has had Labor Leader Bill Shorten at her side as they have taken to the streets. She told No Fibs: “It has been great to have had opposition leader Bill Shorten in Griffith this week. Bill has provided tremendous support to me right throughout the campaign, including campaigning with me at bus and ferry terminals across the Southside, making phone calls, meeting with local community groups and formally launching my campaign.”
Mr Shorten launched the Labor campaign on Wednesday evening with a fiery speech to a (mostly standing) whistling and hooting crowd of supporters in cramped footy clubs in Hawthorne. This was the Bill Shorten Labor people have been waiting to see.
At the conclusion of her campaign speech on Wednesday, Ms Butler said: “Everyone in this room knows that universal healthcare, a great education system, high speed broadband, and accessible affordable childcare, are, and always have been, Labor priorities, and we all know that only a Labor member will stand and fight to protect them.”
Ms Butler has a Facebook site and website and tweets as @TerriMButler
– See more at: http://nofibs.com.au/2014/01/25/griffith-grudge-match-glassons-gladiators-vs-butlers-battlers-griffithelects-reports/#sthash.cMNbqhmg.dpuf
Anne Reid of the Secular Party is an accountant who works in the Griffith suburb of West End and lives in nearby Yeronga. She was the Secular Party candidate in Griffith in 2013, polling 0.51 per cent of the vote.
She told No Fibs that her engagement with the people of Griffith “is at the grassroots level through social media, community groups and with those I meet working in West End”.
“Griffith,” she said, “has a diverse population with many different concerns. Jobs and job security are certainly on the agenda, as is climate change. However, the cause of most consternation is the rise and rise of religious influence under the current government, particularly as it plays out in education and equal rights issues.”
She said the most important issues to her personally is equity.
“Unfortunately this doesn’t mean that everyone is going to be better off from every decision that government makes when it comes to the allocation of resources, however it does mean that everyone should get a fair go.
“It really concerns me that religious interference is undermining both our education and legal systems,” Ms Reid said. “The most far reaching inequity our society has seen in recent times is the demise of our once great free, compulsory and secular public education system as it has increasingly had to compete with religious and independent schools for funding. This has now manifest itself in poor literacy and numeracy rates and slipping rankings compared with other OECD countries. Ultimately it affects us all as more people don’t have the skills to access the workforce and participate effectively in it.”
Ms Reid said she joined the Secular Party in 2012, “in despair at the state of politics in Australia. It seemed to me,” she said, “that this was the only political party that was developing polices in the long term public interest, instead of for short term political gain”.
“The Secular Party’s polices are based on the ideals of a true liberal secular democracy that recognises the virtues of meaningful work in a market-based economy on the one hand, and the notion of individual freedom (including both freedom of and freedom from religion) and the protection of human rights on the other. It is this balance that our current governments seem incapable of negotiating.”
Ms Reid said she thinks the Secular Party will increase its vote in this by-election, “because we are raising important issues that both the major parties avoid.”
The Secular Party has a website, and Ms Reid has a Facebook site but does not tweet.
– See more at: http://nofibs.com.au/2014/01/28/candidates-fronting-griffithelects-meets-two-familiar-faces/#sthash.EpVgNp4h.dpuf
Inevitably in a two-party system, the media focus will be on the ALP and LNP candidates, and to a lesser extent The Greens. This is a pity, because voters can miss some very interesting issues that are often only prompted by the minor parties.
Of the nine ‘other’ candidates, just two will be familiar from 2013: Geoff Ebbs (The Greens) and Anne Reid (the Secular Party).
It is hard to know exactly where to position The Greens. It is certainly not a minor party, with nine senators (including Larissa Waters from Queensland) and one member of the House of Representatives, but in Griffith the interest in The Greens seems to focus on the distribution of preferences as much as on its policies.
Geoff Ebbs was The Greens’ candidate for Griffith in the September 2013 election, polling 10.18 per cent of the primary vote. He is a former editor of IT publications with Australian Consolidated Press, author, blogger, and community radio presenter. He is currently a partner in the local Westender (which occasionally republishes No Fibs stories about the Griffith electorate), and lives in West End.
After a bit of a false start for this by-election, when Andrew Bartlett was initially preselected and later withdrew, Ebbs was finally endorsed by his party in December. This appeared to put the campaign onto the back foot and it will be interesting to see if The Greens are able to regain some of the ground it lost in 2013.
Of the mood in Griffith, Ebbs said voters are “angry at the loss of an egalitarian Australia and the creation of a two-speed economy in which they are the losers. They are scared that the old parties are not dealing with the major economic challenges posed by climate change, energy shortages and over-use of the world’s finite resources.”
The issue at the heart of Mr Ebbs’ concerns, and the one which motivated his entry into politics, is climate change.
“I have been writing and lobbying for change in energy policy to address climate change for over a decade”, he said.
Mr Ebbs said The Greens worked with scientists and economists to develop policies to deal with difficult challenges. “Other parties have ignored these issues and called us extremist and alarmist for making serious plans for the future. Despite this we have stuck to our long term plans and gradually the media has come to acknowledge that our solutions are not only practical and realistic, but necessary.”
Like Labor, The Greens have been campaigning strongly on Medicare and Geoff Ebbs was quoted recently on ABC television as saying that a co-payment for bulk billed GP visits “would be a disaster for the less affluent members of society.”
The Greens preferences are highly sought after by other parties. A number of commentators attributed Kevin Rudd’s win in 2013 to Greens’ preferences, however, as I was reminded recently, preferences belong to the voters, not to the parties.
This time around, The Greens announced preferences for five ‘progressive’ micro parties or independents before Labor. It will be interesting to see whether its supporters will follow suit, but you would expect a fair degree of independent thinking from Greens voters.
While Labor may be attempting to distance itself from The Greens in other parts of Australia, most notably in Tasmania, this is not the case in Griffith and Labor has listed The Greens at number two on its how-to-vote card.
Greens leader Senator Christine Milne will be adding her support to Mr Ebbs in the last week of the campaign.
Queensland Health has issued an alert about yet another measles case yesterday in Brisbane.
In West End on 22 and 23 January an adult male visited numerous stores on Boundary St, including a barber shop.
In the morning of 24 January he visited Coles Supermarket. Then the Stradbroke Barge at 5 pm.
Metro South Health (MSH) public health physician Dr Brad McCall said, “all Brisbane residents needed to be alert for symptoms, particularly those who may have come into contact with the first most recent patient on the 22nd, 23rd and 24th January, or with the other patient on the flight or at the IGA in Carina on Tuesday 21 January.”
