An election is upon us!

The Southbank Residents Association (SRA) held a Meet the Candidates event to give our residents the opportunity to ask the hard questions ahead of the upcoming election on November 24. We had around 100 local Southbank and Montague precinct residents at the venue and several hundred more tuned in through Facebook Live as we tried our best to find out the likely outcomes and intentions of the party that will be leading this state for the next four years and how it will play out for our local area. We had representatives from the Liberal party (Andrew Bond), Greens (Ogy Simic) and our current member from Labor being Martin Foley. We thank all three candidates for their time. There are other candidates running as well: Jarryd Bartle from the Reason Party, Tamasin Ramsay from the Animal Justice Party and Joseph Toscano as an independent. For practicalities of time, but also knowing that preferences will very likely flow to one of the major three parties, we stuck with the three. More importantly, those three parties had engaged with Southbank Residents’ Association throughout the past four years so our committee felt we owed it to the community to hold them to account for their service over that time. Personally, by the end of the night I wasn’t really sure where Southbank stood with either of the two major parties. There is so much internal party politics, that even the candidates themselves are sometimes not even privy to what might or is likely to be the party position or policy on Southbank specific items. Neither of the two major parties inspired me with their future direction for Southbank and promises of what the future may hold. In fact, I am not sure that any of them could/did make any promises. We have seen in the past the promises of Labor to this very Southbank forum four years ago, only for that promise to be broken. While on the flipside, the Liberal Party’s announcement to roll back C270 and their apparent support for the Crown/Schiavello Queensbridge Tower development (they criticised Labor’s hypocrisy, yet failed to move their own disallowance motion) indicates to me that party politics is likely to be higher on the agenda than the interest of the residents of Southbank – sadly. Maybe this year the electorate will also be feeling the same frustrations with Labor and Liberal that there might be a change to a non-major party. After all, Albert Park is a marginal seat! Depending how the preferences flow, the Greens might be in with a real opportunity. In any case, whomever should be the successful candidate on November 24, the Southbank Residents Association will continue to work closely with the candidate to continue to get the best outcomes for our local community. May we hope the best candidate will win!   Tony Penna - President