Sherrilyn Church from Rise Up Australia is not a local – she lives 150 kilometres from Brisbane at Crow’s Nest, where she grows citrus. She is actively involved in a charity in Kenya employing local health workers to provide free health care to the needy.
She says she threw her lot in with the RUA because, ‘we are not politicians, we are ordinary everyday Australians who have left our fireplaces and comfortable retirements like Generals, because the country is at war. The enemy is coming through the back door’.
The war, she says, is ‘with the Islamisation of the planet,’ adding that, ‘It is not the Muslim people themselves I have a problem with, but Sharia law.’
A former member of the Katter Australia Party, Sherrilyn wants to see a good living for dairy farmers, no more live animal trade, and no coal seam gas mining, which she says is destroying underground water and aquifers.
Marriage equality she describes as ‘an attack on the very foundations of Australia. Every child should have a mother and a father’.
Climate Change, according to Sherrilyn, ‘is a big scam’.
‘It was hotter in Middle Ages than it is today. I am totally in agreement with Lord Monckton, who is a brilliant scientist: the planet can handle everything we throw at it if we don’t pull down trees and pollute our rivers’.
‘I’m no scientist,’ she said, ‘but a lot of companies will go out of business if we impose the carbon tax on them.’
Church is pleased to have the number one position on the ballot paper and thinks this will bode well for her. She said the party deliberated carefully and gave their first preference to Family First and second to the LNP.