Statement on New England

“The Greens have a great candidate for the seat New England in Mercurius Goldstein. Mercurius and I have been working closely together on the campaign to protect land, water and communities from coal and coal seam gas.

“Tony Windsor is a titan of Australian politics and champion for the people of New England and the bush more widely.  I wish him well in the election and I hope that Barnaby Joyce loses his seat because Barnaby has been absolutely hopeless in defending agriculture from coal mining and CSG.

“I will certainly be an attack dog going after Barnaby Joyce’s duplicity on issues such as the proposed Shenhua Watermark coal mine and coal seam gas.  While the idea of running for New England and going head to head with Barnaby was attractive, I will not be a candidate for the seat of New England at this election.

“Coal mining and coal seam gas on key agricultural lands is a matter of national significance, as well as a key issue for the voters of New England.  We should not be mining our food bowl, or threatening our precious water resources.  The Greens are the only political party who acknowledge the reality that coal is in structural decline and we need a managed transition to clean energy and sustainable agriculture.

“I’m very happy in the NSW Legislative Council and in my role as Resources, Energy, Water and Agriculture spokesperson for the NSW Greens.

Mercurius Goldstein, Greens candidate for New England said:

“Local New England Greens members preselected and endorsed me as their candidate for New England in August of last year and the announcement was made at AgQuip 2015 in Gunnedah.

“New England voters will be attracted to the long term stable future the Greens offer in sustainable agriculture, protecting the Great Artesian Basin from coal and CSG, and securing Gonski funding for our rural schools.

“Among Greens in NSW, preselection decisions do not rest with a central party or MPs. It is a local New England members’ decision, and they endorsed me to stand for New England based on my performance in the NSW 2015 election.”

One comment

  • The Greens are, according to some numbskull who may be standing for the NE seat, extreme Left. I like to tell people that Hitler was a Green, and that Shaw who was green also was a Stalinist

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s