THIS was politics ‘old school’ style.
The five candidates in the upcoming Federal election – four standing for the House of Representatives and one for the Senate – sat before an audience of about 200 people at last week’s Association of Independent Retirees’ (AIR) meet-the-candidates session.
After their names were drawn from a hat, each candidate had a seven-minute chance to spruik their policies, then face questions from the floor.
It had all the elements of a public meeting: taps on the microphone to see if it was working; calls for speakers to use the mic because they couldn’t be heard; groans of disapproval from the crowd; and applause.
This was a far cry from the choreographed campaigning seen on the Federal circuit, with announcements being made before party faithfull.
And it was very different to the media-conference style of television debates.
This was a chance for the audience to get a sense of who the candidates really were.
The sitting members for Page and Richmond, Janelle Saffin and Justine Elliot, were absent from the session, with Ms Saffin citing a prior commitment and Ms Elliott saying she had already met with AIR representatives, as their respective excuses.
The candidates, in their order of speaking, were Greens candidate for Page Jeff Johnson, Nationals Senator Fiona Nash, Greens candidate for Richmond Joe Ebono, Nationals candidate for Page Kevin Hogan and Nationals candidate for Richmond Alan Hunter.
A few expressed nerves when they saw how many people were in the room.
And there were a couple of faux pas when the Greens candidates were introduced as independents.
Jeff Johnson spoke about making the region sustainable, with an emphasis on growing and selling more food locally rather than transporting it. He also pushed a carbon tax, saying ‘costs are going up whether we put a carbon tax on or not’, and said there was potential for ‘green jobs’ in the region.
The seasoned politician, Nationals Senator Fiona Nash, opened with a shot at the Labor MPs who didn’t turn up.
She then said there was an ‘inequity’ in funding and services between the cities and regional Australia.
She pushed the proposal to set up local health boards to run hospitals, with ‘more beds and less desks’, and better protection of the country’s borders.
On the environment, she said a ‘new tax isn’t going to change the temperature of the globe’.
Joe Ebono said the major parties were spending time trying to differentiate themselves but not looking at the long-term future.
“We’re like a bus out of control and the major parties are arguing about whose turn it is to steer,” he said.
“The Greens are saying ‘slow down’.”
In that vein, he said the Global Financial Crisis was caused by ‘speculators’.
He spent the final two minutes of his time passionately arguing against Senator Nash and the ‘hard-hearted’ policy of turning away ‘the boats’.
“Turning away the boats is not the Australian way,” he said.
“They (asylum-seekers) are people,” he said.
Kevin Hogan argued against Mr Ebono’s position on the financial crisis, saying it was caused by ‘too much debt’.
He said there was much talk in the campaign on ‘appropriate spending’ but ‘you don’t hear talk about creating wealth’.
He said government should ‘let the private sector breathe’, and warned of a second Global Financial Crisis because the ‘issue is debt’.
On asylum-seekers, he said the issue was ‘queue jumping’. He said those jumping the queue ‘have money to pay someone to get on a boat’.
“Then there is less space for people who may be more worthy,” he said.
On carbon taxes, he said to be done successfully it would have to be a ‘universal scheme’ around the world.
He said Nationals voters lived in the natural environment and ‘invented sustainability before the Greens were even invented’.
Alan Hunter, with no chance for the other candidates to rebut his comments, simply spoke about himself.
He said he went into politics because, like his World War II veteran father going off to war, he wanted to ‘do something for the country’.
The questions from the floor covered a range of topics, from a comment that seniors wanted incentives to work part-time to a question of candidates if they had read the Australian Constitution in the past three months. Jeff Johnson and Kevin Hogan answered to say they had read much of it, but not recently.
Kevin Hogan and Fiona Nash proudly told the gathering they could cross the floor if they thought a Coalition policy wasn’t the best policy for their region.
However, both also frequently used the party slogan ‘a fair share’.
It was a question on the Greens’ capability to run the economy considering a Greens-dominated Byron Shire Council was ‘bankrupt’ that saw the session skip to State issues and the financial pressures on councils, and away from the Federal scene.
The final question was about what the candidates would do about the lack of public transport in the region. They all supported reopening the Casino-to-Murwillumbah railway line and extending it into Queensland.