Rod Pryor from Mudgee has been named the Greens candidate for the seat of Dubbo at next year's state election and said that many of the issues when he ran in 2015 as an independent are still important – not least of which the urgency of climate change.
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“I was planning to run as an independent again but an opportunity came up to join the Greens and their basic philosophy aligns with mine,” he said. “They have four main pillars – ecological sustainability, grassroots participatory democracy, social justice, peace and non-violence – and who can argue with any of those.
“A lot of people ask what would be my focus on local issues and the drought is primary, it’s right in your face at the moment and the worst in 100 years, and that ties into climate change.
“There is inevitably going to be a lot of local issues and none of them are insignificant and any representative member that’s elected is going to address them as they come up.
“The area has a really large drug problem, the Greens’ philosophy on that is ‘education rather than incarceration, Troy Grant back in 2015 promised a drug court rehab centre and we’re still waiting for it – so that’s one of the focuses to get that up and going.”
Pryor said that a Green vote at the two 2019 ballots sends a message on the need to address climate change, which he called his “primary focus”.
“Politicians and the mainstream media have known about climate change for over 30 years, they have known it’s going to be a serious and consequential issue, and they’ve done nothing about it,” he said.
“The last 10 years has been pretty pertinent, scientists like our own Will Steffen and Tim Flannery have been drumming on about the urgency for well over 10 years. And now that we’ve got this major drought suddenly it’s become sharply focused with people.
“[And] the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report which was released a few weeks ago has also got peoples’ attention. A lot of the scientists are saying that they are actually conservative in what they say and the IPCC report is scary, so if that’s conservative we can read into that it could be much worse then we have to act now, we’re at the 11th hour and 59th minute of action on climate change.
“We have an opportunity now with state and federal elections coming up to actually send a clear message to whoever gets into government that we want action on climate change.
“From my perspective I would like people to vote for me as a Green and although it’s unlikely we’ll get enough votes to form government – we’re not that unrealistic – but if they vote for a Greens candidate and then below the line it would send a clear message that they are concerned about climate change.”
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