“Not long after I had been practising law and teaching at the Law School I was headhunted by the then CEO of the Environmental Defenders Office who said they were setting up a branch office. EDO is a remarkable community legal institution. At the time I got involved it was just over 20 years old. I remember laughing about getting my degree and setting up and EDO in Lismore when I was studying law. It is so much to do with the birthplace of environmental protection. This vibrant community that’s actually pioneered in a way the things that EDO is. Helping communities protect the environment through law. I said, that’s what I’m going to do so we opened a branch office.
We hit the ground running and it was an incredible journey. I got exposed to what matters to the community and how to help.
Sadly after many years of doing that and showing that it was a remarkable success another really stark time came in my life of learning. We ran a case in the Hunter Valley. It was an incredibly successful case. We managed to get the approval of an enormous coal mine expansion overturned by the court. The coal mine was going to have enormous impacts on the environment and the community there. It was on the front page of the SMH.… ’Court overturned Rio Tinto’s approval’. Two day later Rio Tinto’s chief executive flew over from London and was sitting in Barry O’Farrell’s office saying ‘What the heck is this? How can a bunch of community lawyers represent a community and overturn a government decision?’ The answer to Mr executive was, that’s how our legal system works actually when you get a bunch of clever lawyers playing by the rules. They didn’t like that and there was a full scale attack on our organisation. The threats to our funding were huge. We had to reduce our services and reposition our organisation. A lot of people left EDO at that time. These were people that were feeding their families, they had mortgages. They were good Lawyers getting crap wages anyway and the fear of not having a job was enormous. EDO was a team of 20 people. My response to those sort of things though is ‘I’m sorry, I am not going to let this injustice go.’ I was so dedicated to EDO for how important is was. I buckled down with then CEO and said ‘Let’s turn this around.’
I then found myself as Principal Solicitor in Sydney so after many years of working with my community here I found myself working as a FIFO (fly in and fly out) to Sydney which is terrible carbon karma but I had a job to do that was important and at the time nobody else was putting their hand up to do it. There was no way I was going to relocate my family. During this time my relationship with my co parent ended. I met somebody else after many years of being a single mother of two children. We were the Brady Bunch. Between my partner and I we have 6 children. I call him Saint Adam. He is the most supportive, incredible person I’ve probably ever come across. When all this happened he supported me 100%. He stayed home with the kids and by then my eldest daughter was making her own way.
I was taking on mining companies, governments. I ran the case against ADANI where we challenged the Commonwealth ministers approval for the ADANI Carmichael Coal-mine in 2015 and I won that case. It was all over the newspapers everywhere. Tony Abbott and George Brandis stripped all our funding but in the meantime we were working on a survival plan for EDO. I watch full-scale the attack on our environmental laws at the Commonwealth level and at the State level. We would win and the Government would legislate to weaken the laws so the very laws we were fighting with they would then take those laws away. I was doing what I was meant to do. I am an officer of the court. I swore allegiance to that court to use the law in a proper way and then our team would crack a bottle of champagne in the boardroom and by Monday morning we would get a phone call…’Hey, NSW Parliament are about to pass some special laws that will take away your win.’ It’s not right. We need environmental laws that are free from intervention. It still made me more determined.
I then became the CEO of EDO NSW. It’s an incredibly respected institution in the sense that ex Principal Solicitors are now Judges on the bench. It knows what good laws look like and it recommends those laws and I was part of that. After a couple of years in that position a few things happened. I became a Grandmother and I realised that sort of opportunity needs to be handed on. We found a fantastic young man from the Northern Territory who had been working with remote Aboriginal communities to take on the position so EDO is in fabulous hands. His name is David Morris and EDO is going from strength to strength.
My plan of exiting EDO was 6 months. I was leaving and I got a call from one of my dear friends, Ian Cohen who was the 1st ever Greens member in Parliament NSW. He said ‘Sue I’ve heard you’re leaving EDO. I know you once told me you would never run for Parliament but I couldn’t in all conscience not call you one more time and say, Hey! What about it?’ I said, right now I’m open to anything I can put my skills, my energy, my passion and seriously my insights in to what I’d seen in terms of the way things work. If I can put that into use for the public interest then I would happily throw my hat in the ring. He said ‘Good, there’s a great opportunity. The seat of Lismore is winnable and I want you to think about it.’ I spoke to a lot of people about it and the support I got was overwhelming. It was beautiful and realising that there are hundreds and hundreds of people in this region that want to work together as part of this wonderful social fabric we have, to try and create some change and engage in the politics of hope, optimism and prosperity. It felt natural so here I am running for Parliament here and I’m really excited about it. My job is to explain to everybody…Let’s not tag each other, lets not do it. Let’s not trade our brains for an ideology. Let’s look at the merits and work together.
I’m a farmer. My partner and I are dry land rice farmers. We also cut and bale native grasses and supply mulch to the Re-gen industry. I have for many years donated my mulch to the community garden to support it. I am a part of this community. I drive a tractor on the weekend, I ride horses. Yes, I have this professional life but I’m also one of those people who rarely sits down and switches off. I’ve come to this point. The reason I am heading where I am is I’m a Farmer, I’m a Lawyer, I’m a Grandmother and I’m a strong voice. So many people have asked why I didn’t run as an Independent and why I joined the Greens. The answers is quite simple. I would much rather belong and work with a team. No team is perfect, no political party is perfect. There will always be bits about it that we don’t like but there will always be strengths. I say to anybody who is skeptical about the experiences or the stereotypical dogma that people have picked up about the Greens, I say these few things. Let’s focus on our strengths and our power and remember the bad shit people have heard about The Greens is more often than not generated by a vested interest somewhere that will hurt and those are generally The Murdoch press or a super profit. That’s where all that negative dogma has come from. I say… open your hearts, open your brains and let’s look at who we are as the Greens.
I’m not perfect, I’m far from it. I’m a woman who’s experienced mental illness first hand through my family. I’ve experienced violence in the community, I know what that looks like. I’ve been a single mother. I’ve lost people and buried them here, I’ve given birth and watched my daughter give birth in the hospital here. I’ve farmed the land, I look after koalas here and I love this region so in that sense I say I do understand the challenge of the Greens but I’m begging everyone. Do what I did, let’s look beyond it and focus on the big things. Right now the big things are the difference between 1.5 degrees rising global temperature and our civilisation as we know it. It’s our children, their children, all of the animals that can’t speak, these Eco-systems that not only do we rely on but they’re beautiful and provide so much wellbeing and worth. We’ve never been richer. Our economy is healthy, let’s make it great.
I look at the things happening around the world. I focus locally but my mind is switched on to the world. I’ve seen what’s happening at the international, national and state level. Right here in the Northern Rivers we have got it so well and we actually leverage what we have here so that it works properly for us all. Under a climate change future and scenario the Northern Rivers is scientifically one of the most resilient landscapes. We have high rainfall and we will continue to have rainfall even though we will have longer periods of dry. Our rivers will still flow, less water but they will flow and we will still have our rich soil. If we can alter our practises a little bit, we can grow our food bowl, we can feed ourselves. Food security is enormous. We need to look after our world class forests because that enhances our environment. We know this now, there’s never been a better time.”