Transcript of interview with Leanne Minsull, The Local Party candidate for the Senate in Tasmania, Lutana, 3 March 2022.
Leanne Minshull
Today we’re launching our Clive Palmer fightback billboard campaign. About three months ago, we got sick of seeing Clive Palmer everywhere on all of our billboards, on radio and television, in the newspaper. So we scoured the state and bought up the last few remaining billboards. It’s not this one here. We’ve got a couple in the north and a couple in the south, really big ones on major roads. And we’ve also got a spot on the digital billboard above the Winston Hotel.
So we’re asking anyone in Tasmania to tell us what they would like to see on the billboard. We will keep the Clive Palmer billionaire bull shot piece, and then they can write whatever message they’d like to see. And we can change that image. It goes for eight weeks, so we actually could change it once a week. So eight people have got a chance to put their message up to Clive.
We don’t think Clive is for Tasmania, we actually don’t think Clive is for anyone but Clive. Clive wants to get into Parliament, wants to buy his way in to the Federal Parliament again, so he can approve more coal mines like he did last time. And the rest of us just get to fry.
We’ve all seen or most of us would have seen the IPCC report that was put out a couple of days ago. The window for climate action is almost closed. It’s not closing, it’s almost closed. And we’ve seen the dreadful effects of you know, unheard of unanticipated, unprecedented floods in Queensland and New South Wales, people have literally lost their homes. And so this is not the time for billionaires. This is the time for community to pulling together and to fighting back for ourselves.
Tasmanian Times
How effective do you think billboards are?
Leanne Minshull
Well, billboards must have some effect otherwise Clive Palmer wouldn’t spend millions of dollars on them. And anyway, to have community expression out to other community members is a good thing. I know that there’s a lot of different ways to communicate now. You certainly wouldn’t want to run a whole campaign just on billboards. But billboards are part of the story. And we’ve been getting good interaction with people online with the billboards so far. We’ve actually raised $5,000 already just from small donations towards getting the billboards up.
Tasmanian Times
Is United Australia Party running candidates here?
Leanne Minshull
Yes, they are. So they’re running, I’m running for the Senate, and I’m trying to get the last seat. The last seat is going to be – despite what Tammy Tyrrell tells everybody (that) it’s just her or Eric, it’s actually not, the numbers tell us that – it will be the last seat will come down to competition between Eric Abetz, Clive Palmer’s candidate Diane Adams, Pauline Hanson’s candidate Steve Mav, Jacqui Lambie’s candidate Tammy Tyrrell, or me.
And out of those five, I am the only one with a track record on doing anything about climate. In fact, in the case of Jackie and Clive, they’ve both voted against every piece of climate action that’s gone through federal parliament
Tasmanian Times
The name of your party is The Local Party. Billboards are up there sort of yelling down to people on the streets, not really a good fit for your image. What other kinds of campaigning are you doing?
Leanne Minshull
No, just on the billboards, that’s why we’re going out and crowdsourcing what the billboard should say. It’s absolutely an opportunity for people on the ground to get their voice up there. It’s not just mine. Other things that we’re doing, in two weeks, we’re having a forum called Local Voices for Elwick because we think that, we’re hoping that a good local candidate emerges from that meeting who can run in the LegCo seat of Elwick.
We’ve got Pat Caplice running for the LegCo seat of Huon. You know, he’s well known there, he’s a community member. To run for the local party, you have to live in your electorate. And if you have a look at a lot of the other candidates that run for the major parties, they’re straight out of a ministerial office. Or, you know, I’m not saying that in and of itself is bad, but they quite often don’t even live in the electorate.
Tasmanian Times
You mentioned climate change. Do you think that in this federal election it is the issue and everything really needs to be seen through that lens? Or do you identify other major issues that you think are important?
Leanne Minshull
The overarching issues, I think, are climate and integrity in politics, because you can’t save the climate if you don’t have a Parliament that’s not corrupt and acting in the best interests of its people. So that’s a double edged sword or it’s a two headed beast that we have to tackle at the same time, I don’t see how we fix one without fixing the other. And then flowing from that there’s some very real issues for people that affect their day to day lives.
And that is issues like housing. Housing is a massive problem in Australia. I’ve never seen it so unaffordable; Hobart’s now the most unaffordable city. And I think one of the issues is that we’ve had a lot of money pumped into the economy to get us through the pandemic, which is a good thing. But when you’re pumping money to people who’ve already got a lot of money, they tend to do things – which are very logical, if you had that much money – you buy shares, the stock market goes up, you buy extra houses, housing supply decreases, the prices of houses go up.
I think that’s one issue. I think there’s a lot of issues. But what really annoys me is when politicians say housing is a complex issue. It’s not very complex if you’re out on the street, you don’t have anywhere to put your head down for that night. I think saying that is a cop out. I think it’s an issue that we can see too. And I think that the federal and state parliament’s need to work, you know, actually, it needs to be all levels of government, local government, state government, and national government. And we haven’t really had that approach since probably Kevin Rudd and his housing initiatives
Tasmanian Times
The Senate is the states’ house, all states are equally represented. It was the idea at time of federation that the Senate defend states’ interests. A lot of our Tasmanian senators seem preoccupied with other ideological agendas like running around beating up on trans people. Do you think senators need to get back to actually standing up on Tasmanian issues?
Leanne Minshull
Absolutely. It’s both in the constitution of the country and the constitution of our party, because if you’re elected to The Local Party, you don’t caucus with other party members, you’ve got a completely independent vote. So if in the future I was elected to the Senate in Tasmania and someone else was elected to the Senate in say New South Wales for The Local Party, a traditional party would have to caucus with each other. ‘Oh, how’s that going to affect you politically? Oh, how will that run in your state?’
We don’t have that problem in The Local Party because each votes our own. So I want to be a senator for Tasmania, and I want to represent Tasmania’s interests and I have nobody else to answer to other than the Tasmanian public. And to make sure that I’m keeping my word. I’ll hold at least two statewide citizens juries in the first year.
