Geoff Ebbs love for the Greens has seen him run as a federal candidate three times
In the light of the piece run on Margot Kingston’s No Fibs and reproduced here, it is important to clarify my position. The decision not to stand as the candidate for the Greens in Griffith was mine and mine alone. Andrew Bartlett called me to let me know he was considering standing, and I stood aside to allow him to stand unopposed and maximize the energy and unity in the party behind one candidate.
Jan Bowman’s piece is based on an interview made in October and reflects on the general election and the state of Australian politics. It was not conducted in the context of a by-election. The most pertinent part of her piece is the opening paragraph. A year long campaign has been a serious drain on my finances and I am currently working to rebuild them. From that point of view the last thing I need right now is another stint as a political candidate.
I had not intended to comment on this prior to the ratification of the Greens candidate on Thursday evening at 8:00pm but have judged it is better to head off any potential for damage to the Greens and make this statement to clarify my position.
Declaration of interest I am fifty percent owner of Westender and currently supporting my media habit by selling document processing solutions and office equipment.
Jan Bowman reports for Margot Kingston’s No Fibs and the Westender
Less than a month after the September Federal election, Geoff Ebbs, former Greens Candidate for Griffith, posted a Facebook message which said: “I’m about to go into financial recovery mode, post-election, and take a job selling photocopiers unless anyone has a better way to earn some decent dollars for twelve months.”
This was a prompt for me to approach Ebbs and other candidates in Griffith for their ‘life after the election’ stories.
Ebbs was the only candidate who agreed to an interview. Apart from admitting to degrees of exhaustion, most of the other candidates I approached did not want to talk in detail about the campaign experience, and were undecided about whether they would stand again in any by-election. Because of this I did not use the Ebbs interview and abandoned the story idea.
However, on Friday, November 29, Geoff Ebbs announced to his supporters that he would not be contesting the Griffith by-election for the Greens. This came as a surprise for many, myself included. Geoff had indicated in our October interview that he wanted to stand again. I returned to this earlier interview material for clues.
In 2013 the Greens polled 10.18 percent of the vote in Griffith, a 5.21 percent swing against it on 2010 results. The negative swing was not unique to Griffith. Nationally there was a swing against the Greensof 3.11 percent, in QLD as high as 4.7 percent.
Ebbs at one of the refugee rallies in King George Square Brisbane
I asked Ebbs what is was like, as a minor party candidate, not to have won, and in his case, not to have achieved an increase for the Greens.
“People invest trust in you; you promise to represent them, expectations are built up, and it is a huge disappointment when you don’t succeed,” he said, then likened the experience to the post-adrenaline slump at the end of the run of a stage play.
“I was walking with one of my daughters after the election and came around a corner and saw a poster of myself, it was like a jolt to the back of the brain.”
Why did he put himself through it, when he knew he would not win the seat?
“You decide to run because you believe in the cause, but the only way to build the energy to actually campaign is to willingly delude yourself. It’s a form of ‘candidate’s disease’,” he said. “To inspire your followers, you have to believe you will win.”
Ebbs said the protest vote against the two old parties in September was the vote that many Greens had been waiting decades for, but it went to the minor conservative parties, and added this has been a huge topic of discussion within the party.
He believed the analysis falls into three camps: those who think the Greens were too conservative; those who think it was too extreme and “didn’t try hard enough to become a normal political party”; and those who think it was just a “bloody minded rabble”.
Also, criticisms of Christine Milne had been the same as criticisms of the party.
“She is either too extreme or not extreme enough. Some people just don’t like a female leader,” he said.
“If you are engaged with the electorate, you will know exactly where you stand, and the electorate will know exactly where you stand as a party, and I don’t think that clarity exists. It’s not any individual’s fault … but it’s about the whole movement. It’s about the Greens as a party, it’s about the Left, it’s about the environmental movement.
“Both major parties put in a huge effort to isolate and run down the Greens. We expected that: first they ignore you, then they attack you, then they get angry with you, then you win. Well we are well into the stage of making them angry.”
Asked if he would stand again, Ebbs said: “Should KRudd resign and there is a by-election, I would certainly stand again.”
Ebbs said there had been a personal Rudd factor in this electorate. “It didn’t swing to the conservatives as much as the rest of the nation, but the results of a by-election will depend on whether Bill (Glasson) decides to run. If there are two new candidates, probably the ALP would prevail.”
Ebbs gave up work during the election. “You can approach campaigning with whatever level of intensity you like, but there is always financial drain. The Greens is not a wealthy party. Palmer paid his candidates a wage.”
He is now working selling photocopiers, and, at only 55, considers he is over the hill as far as employment goes.
His energies are now on building the Greens into a broader movement, and said: “We need to be in more or less continuous campaign mode”.
“What we need to do now is articulate what a Green future will look like. For the mythical ‘ordinary voter’, a lot of whom, if they were disappointed and voted for Palmer in this election, did so because they didn’t have that clear vision of a Green future.
“If you look at a group like the Stable Population Party, which is, on the whole, ex-Greens, they are disappointed that the Greens didn’t articulate a population policy. But population policies are a political nightmare and it’s very difficult for a party the size of the Greens (with the broad range of elements that make it up), to reach an agreeable population policy … so you end up with a single issue party that stands outside the Greens.
“To succeed we have to build a broad enough church that you can include all of those views, you can’t keep splintering off the core believers because you can’t address their most passionate cause.
“It’s a mistake of the Left to assume that, ‘oh well our turn will come’. There is no reason for that to be the case. The whole of society could keep moving to the Right and this could be the distant dream of somebody’s grandfather. You only have to look to the USA to see how effectively the Left can be crushed.”
Ebbs added that as a society we face an energy descent problem.
“Last century we consumed more energy than is ever going to be available to society in the future, so life is going to get harder. As a party that recognises that as the fundamental fact driving every economic decision and every policy setting, essentially what you are trying to sell to the electorate is like an austerity measure. For our long term good, us as a society and a species, we need to calm down and stop consuming so much, and slow down our breeding program. It’s not a very palatable story, so we tend to avoid it.”
Grassroots campaigning is definitely the way of the future, Ebbs said.
“The internet has unleashed an understanding of how powerful distributed ideas are. The notion of open sourced software has led to open content programs, and the collapse of the exclusive nature of publishing companies both in print and film, has meant that new models are emerging for creative people to connect with their audiences, and the same thing is happening politically.”
Towards the end of the interview Ebbs told me he had put himself forward as a candidate for convener of the Greens in Queensland. The two candidates were to be Ebbs and the incumbent Andrew Bartlett.
Ebbs said his ‘elevator pitch’ to the membership would be that, “as a society we are at the crossroads, we either maintain the status quo or hit the wall very hard, or we manage society into a form that is sustainable in the full sense of the word.”
Ebbs did not offer any direct criticism of Andrew Bartlett, but said he considered that he (Ebbs) would be better at getting the Greens story across.
As it turned out, Bartlett won the ballot held on October 26, and retained his role as convener. Ebbs was appointed to the state management committee.
Ebbs’ recent decision not to contest the preselection as the Greens candidate for the by-election indicates a degree of disharmony within the Greens that Ebbs only alluded to when he spoke with me.
I understand that Andrew Bartlett will be the only Greens candidate for preselection. He advised me that he is not is a position to make any comment until after party endorsement of the candidate on Thursday, December 5, but he is happy to talk after that.
Now that Clive Palmer has announced that his party will not stand a candidate, the preselection processes for this by-election for both the ALP and the Greens may well prove to be as interesting as the election itself.
In the meantime, Bill Glasson has already hit the campaign trail and was seen out and about with the Prime Minister on the weekend.
– See more at: http://nofibs.com.au/2013/12/03/dumped-greens-griffith-candidate-whats-gone-wrong-jan-bowman-griffithelects-reports/#sthash.n7oIULu4.dpuf
As my facebook page Soul Sex grows beyond 200,000 so do my issues.
This morning I was greeted with another message from facebook headquarters, “If you or any of the other Page admins continue to post things that violate our Community Standards, Soul Sex may be unpublished. Please review your account and remove anything that violates our policies.”
This time the image is from Dimitry Laudin. Here is the offending post:
Facebook, I admire your endeavour to clean up your social media site, but could you please ensure the real pornography is removed, because soul-less sex really offends me.
Girls! Girls! The chooks go crazy over Charlie’s cast offs
Six residences in Spring St, West End now convert waste from the Boundary St food precinct into eggs and vegetables, building the dream of a sustainable urban environment.
“We can sit and make plans for a zero waste suburb or we can go out and do stuff … or both” says Buzolic. “Planning feels a lot better when you’re doing something as well.”
This time last year Buzolic approached Charlie and Liz’s Fruit Shop on Boundary Street to see if they were wasting their waste. And what do you know – they were.
“The good folks at Charlie and Liz’s are very community minded, always helping out with events like the Kurilpa Derby. Good deeds are the best form of advertising but they didn’t even look at it that way – if they could help then they would.”
Adrian and Jamie outside Charlies with the infamous bucketo’scraps
“Be careful what you wish for” says Buzolic “They became so effective at channelling their waste in my direction there was a point when I couldn’t cope with the volume. That’s when I had to enlist the support of my neighbours. There started to be so much compost my chickens and worms couldn’t keep up with it and it was piling up in the back yard. So I letterbox dropped the street to get some help. Now, while the Council is busily removing rubbish from our street I’m delivering it!”
Buzolic and his neighbours love the results.
“I don’t know if there is a financial benefit” says Buzolic, “but I want to live in a community where people interact. I want the local fruit and veg shop and my neighbours to get to know each other and work together to make our collective lives better.”
“The system is simple” says Jamie, who works and Charlie and Liz’s.
“Adrian brought us a new rubbish bin and I make sure all the fruit and vegetable rubbish goes in there. He comes in every day with his bucket and picks it up. But sometimes it a whole bin full so I send him away to get his truck.”
“I help out too”, says Matthew, Jamie’s offsider, “I think I’m stronger than Adrian so I lift the bin into his ute for him. We don’t want the poor old guy to do his back in.”
There are now six residences that benefit from Charlie and Liz’s generosity and there is an estimated 1000 litres of organic material a year that no longer has to be transported out of the local community.
“The eggs from my chickens are not just free range; they’re happy eggs from happy chickens. I’d like to think that the bright yellow of their yolks is the happiness shining through but I’m told that it’s the green leafy material in their diet. They’re so bright I can almost see to read by them at night time”.
Do you know of someone who is taking the initiative with a community recycling project or some other project?
Readers wanting to recycle their organic waste can visit Jane St or Paradise Park Community Gardens.
With less than 12 months to go until the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Brisbane, the Queensland Police Service (QPS) is progressing with our security preparations.
More than 30 Internationally Protected Persons will be attending the Leaders’ Summit in Brisbane, as well as 4,000 delegates, 3,000 media representatives from across Australia and the world.
Around 5,000 police officers will also be based in Brisbane during the Leaders’ Summit.
The G20 (Safety and Security) Act 2013, which was recently passed through the Queensland Parliament, will allow police increased powers to effectively protect the dignity of the G20 meetings, and providing a safe and secure environment for residents, members of the public, business owners and infrastructure within our community.
Members of the QPS G20 Group External Engagement Team have started liaising with members of the public, residents, business owners and infrastructure providers, as well as protest/issue motivated groups (PMGs/IMGs), to give information about how the declared and restricted areas under the legislation may impact them.
As the G20 Leaders’ Summit draws closer, the External Engagement Team is aiming to liaise with everyone who may be impacted by the security arrangements for the Summit.
Within the Legislation, there are 12 restricted areas which incorporate delegate meeting and accommodation venues. The restricted areas will be clearly marked, and will only be accessible to people with Commonwealth accreditation passes. It is expected that there will be some impacts in the immediate areas surrounding restricted or motorcade areas as part of the Leaders’ Summit.
The broader declared area spans from Bowen Hills to Kangaroo Point and South Brisbane and Woolloongabba. G20 powers will be applicable within this declared area for a specified period of time and within this area, people will be able to go about their business as normal with minimal impact. There will be no signage or delineation indicating that people are entering or are within the declared area.
It is expected that there will be some changes to both rail and bus services through the declared area in the week leading up to and during the Summit, however planning is still ongoing. As details are confirmed, information will be provided to people within impacted areas and the wider community.
Detailed maps of the declared and restricted areas along with a link to the legislation are available at www.police.qld.gov.au/G20
If you have any questions regarding possible G20 impacts, please email the QPS External Engagement Team at G20.info@police.qld.gov.au or call us on 07 3015 3460.
Soul partners enjoy a complete union on all levels.
Westender columnist Sidonie Bouchet has been banned from facebook – much to the disappointment of her 207,000 fans.
Her internationally popular facebook page Soul Sex has offended the faceless folk at facebook by posting a picture of a sculpture of an indigenous woman gathering roots by digging in the ground. The woman’s breasts are exposed which triggers the “naked sculpture” definition of banned content.
The official notice from facebook offered Sidonie the option of having her page deleted for ever and bans her from any activity on facebook for one month. Here is their actual wording.
“You recently posted the above post which violates Facebook policies, so you’re temporarily blocked from posting for 30 days. Would you like to remove your page?
“Nudity and Pornography – Facebook has a strict policy against the sharing of pornographic content and any explicitly sexual content where a minor is involved. We also impose limitations on the display of nudity. We aspire to respect people’s right to share content of personal importance, whether those are photos of a sculpture like Michelangelo’s David or family photos of a child breastfeeding.”
Sidonie is, of course, welcome to keep posting to the Westender.
Her article on Twin Flames – is your sexual partner your soul mate?, summarises another facebook controversy the writer found herself in recently. You can read the article on page 15 of December’s print edition, or read the full version live online.
