I’m proud to be the Preston candidate for Victorian Socialists. I live in Reservoir with my partner, Louise, and our daughter. I work as a community lawyer, mostly helping tenants stand up to their landlords. Too many landlords think that safe and habitable housing is a luxury their tenants don’t deserve. I meet people every day who are struggling to find and keep decent housing, despite living in one of the world’s wealthiest societies.
I have been involved in campaigning to defend and extend public housing. As a member of the Public Housing Defence Network, I helped organise resistance to the government’s public housing privatisation plans in Darebin, and across Melbourne. We desperately need more public housing and to urgently improve the housing conditions of thousands of public tenants living in unsafe and decaying buildings. Yet all the state government has to offer is a housing plan that’s dictated by market forces and developer demands.
I am also a unionist, and have been involved in strikes for higher pay and equal pay in the community sector. I believe that change is best won by workers and ordinary people fighting for it at the grassroots level, and I am proud to have played a part in this.
I believe the corporate interests that dominate our society, including most political parties, only make life worse – whether through the destruction of community treasures like the Preston Market, the prioritisation of profit-making over basic public-health measures to combat Covid-19, or the constant erosion of working conditions and social services. Victorian Socialists will be a voice for workers and ordinary people against corporations and the politicians who kowtow to them. We’d love you to join us and get involved!