Gabrielle’s First Speech to Parliament

Gabrielle’s first speech to Parliament, given on 8 February 2022.

Transcript: I would like to start by acknowledging the custodians and true sovereigns of this land, the Wurundjeri people.

The electorate of Richmond was also built on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung land. Walking to my Fitzroy office on Gertrude Street each morning I am keenly aware of the deep significance of that location to Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people and other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Today it is one of the most upmarket, glitzy and trendy streets in the electorate, but before colonisation it was a living space for Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people, and more recently, after returning from the missions in the 1920s and returning from foster care and from institutions, it became an important spot for Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to reconnect, to organise. They established the first community-controlled organisations – the Aboriginal health centres and legal centres, the youth clubs and gymnasiums. It was and it still is an important social and political hub for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

This land’s story of frontier clashes, of massacres and of dispossession is also a story of the strength and resilience of the Wurundjeri people, who have never ceded sovereignty, despite the devastating impacts of British invasion. They have fought to protect their culture and to protect their people in the face of genocide. But the harms of colonisation remain. We see them in the laws, the policies and the racism that cause intergenerational poverty, that cause overincarceration and that cause deaths in custody. We see them in the destruction of Aboriginal cultural heritage for mines or freeways.

That is why I am proud to be in a party that continues to seek a shared understanding of this land’s truth so that we can work together towards treaty and justice.

While I am on Wurundjeri land, I pay respect to Wurundjeri elders and other First Nations elders past and present.

Before I move on, I would like to thank my predecessor. The Honourable Richard Wynne served the Richmond community for a very long time – he was elected last century – so I would like to thank him for 24 years of hard work and commitment to the people of Richmond and wish him a very happy retirement.

Daniel Andrews: He is not retired.

Gabrielle: From Parliament. I am sure he will continue to do his very hard work outside of Parliament.

The Richmond electorate is smart. It is young and it is twice as queer as everywhere else, statistically speaking. We live close together: we are 66,000 people spread over just 13 square kilometres. We are bound by the waters of the Birrarung, from Clifton Hill and Abbotsford, through Richmond, Cremorne and Burnley. We are progressive. We were among the first to declare a climate emergency and to recognise 26 January as a day of mourning and sadness. We are proud of our rich cultural, linguistic and religious diversity. People from Vietnam, from China, from Malaysia, from India, from Greece and Italy, from Somalia, from Eritrea and from Ethiopia all call Richmond home. We are home to a vibrant arts sector, the beating heart of Melbourne. Sport of course unites and divides us.

Everyone knows it, but it is objectively true: we are home to the most livable neighbourhoods, the coolest street and the second-coolest street in the world. But we also have great disparity: 10 per cent of our population live in public housing and over half of our electorate rent their home. That is almost twice the state average.

I have lived in the electorate of Richmond for 20 years, and during that time I have worked mostly as an artist,

making large-scale public artworks for museums and galleries across the world, drawing people into a conversation about how to create the world that we want to live in. In 2014 I was invited to exhibit in the Sydney Biennale. If you are unfamiliar with the biennale, think of it as the grand final of the art world; it was a big deal. I worked on a new commission for almost two years. About one month before the show was due to open, I was shipping the artwork on an 8-tonne truck on a ferry over to Cockatoo Island when I found out that the major sponsor of the Biennale, Transfield, was negotiating a multibillion-dollar contract with the Australian government to operate the detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru.

I stood at a fork in the road: do I fulfil a lifelong career ambition or do I follow my moral compass? What does that even look like? How was I supposed to respond to this? Would anything I do actually make a difference? I came together with my fellow artists. We met with representatives from the biennale and from Transfield. We spoke with refugees and advocates. After deliberations and discussions, trying to get other people to make a better decision, to make the right decision, I realised that nothing could justify my participation in a chain of associations that led directly to the incarceration and torture of innocent people seeking safety in this country, so I withdrew my work.

George Brandis, the Attorney-General, threatened to pull public funding from any other artist who refused private sponsorship on ethical grounds. Malcolm Turnbull denounced my ‘vicious ingratitude’, and that is when we knew it was working.

Over the next week nine artists withdrew their work until the chair of the biennale and director of Transfield resigned.

But he did not just resign, he took his 11 per cent share in the company with him. Under public pressure superannuation funds divested, share prices plummeted. The Transfield name was trashed, so they changed their name and they sold the company to a Spanish conglomerate, which shortly afterwards announced that they would no longer be servicing Australia’s immigration detention industry. This was a turning point for me. It made me realise that change is possible and that together we are powerful.

After that I linked arms with my neighbours to stop the east–west toll road that would rip through our community. We barricaded border force in solidarity with the men imprisoned on Manus Island. We organised petitions and boycotts, protests and rallies. We shrouded Picasso’s Weeping Woman, ending the relationship between the National Gallery of Victoria and Wilson Security. We dyed water fountains red, we stopped trucks, we crashed parties, we wrote in the sky, we occupied intersections. We disrupted and disobeyed.

We negotiated change and we held governments and companies to account.

In my final exhibition in 2019 we mapped the thousands of connections between the fossil fuels industry and the arts, sparking a nationwide divestment movement. So it would come as no surprise to this chamber that I made a deliberate decision to leave the arts. I took up a juris doctor and started working as a paralegal to support refugees and asylum seekers to navigate this cruel, bipartisan immigration system. But what good is it, I wondered, helping people navigate a system that is designed to dehumanise, demoralise and eventually destroy a person?

Becoming a politician was never part of the plan for me, but I saw a problem. I was always calling from the sidelines, trying to get someone else in a position of power to make the right decision, when I could clearly see that the politicians we were trying to influence had already been bought. They had been bought by their corporate interests, they had been bought by their wealthy donors, and this democracy is rigged in their favour. But I realised something. I realised that these seats are not reserved for them; these seats are for all of us. And so in 2020 I put my hand up for local government and was elected mayor of the first ever Greens-majority government in the world – a majority young, majority women, culturally diverse council of which I am so proud, because it leads change in so many ways.

We showed Victoria what real climate action looks like,

transitioning our community centres off gas and installing the first-ever inner-urban community battery. We got serious about LGBTIQA+ equality with our first strategy, and we reformed our discriminatory public drinking laws. We supported the arts, our local businesses and public housing residents during the pandemic like never before. But the problems our community faces cannot be solved at a local government level alone. The systemic changes we need are being held back by state and federal parties more concerned about holding on to electoral power than about creating a truly equal climate-safe future.

Every day that future is slipping through our hands, because every day for the people of Richmond life is getting harder.

More and more people are experiencing housing stress and homelessness for the very first time. They are slipping onto the public housing waiting list, which is 120,000 people strong, and growing. I have seen how this state government is abandoning our public housing residents, with the lowest funding of public housing anywhere in the country.

We hear from people who bear the brunt of that every day, and they are desperate for help.

I am talking about Rosalie – a single mother forced to lift her disabled 10-year-old son up steps every day to get in and out of the house, trapped in a holding cell of transitional housing for 10 years. I am talking about Aunty Tracey, who is living in an apartment block where tenants were forced to live for years with raw sewage spilling out onto their doorstep, spilling up through their shower drains – for years. You literally had to step over it to get to the children’s swings. I am talking about Aisha – a child struggling to breathe night after night as the black mould on her bedroom ceiling spreads. These stories are so common that they have been normalised and internalised. Make no mistake, none of this is their fault.

This is a deliberate failure of successive governments who see housing as an investment opportunity for property developers rather than a human right, and because of this we are walking, eyes wide open, into a deepening housing crisis.

As the calls for maintenance and the desperate need for public housing grow, this government is giving away public housing land to private developers. They are giving away public housing land to private developers. Playgrounds, community gardens, basketball courts: they are giving that land to private property developers – the one place that public housing residents forced to live without air conditioning and without balconies can go during heatwaves that are getting longer and hotter. Meanwhile, 800 metres down the road at the Fitzroy Gasworks site, they are selling off 3 hectares of public remediated land – remediated with taxpayers funding – to private developers, when they could be building public housing as they promised in 2018.

They are neglecting the people of Richmond, and that is why I am here.

Decades of government delay, of underfunding and of the hollowing out of our public institutions has affected not just the people of Richmond but the whole of Victoria.

They are building housing, but it is affordable only by name, because no-one can afford it. They are building schools, but our teachers are run into the ground. They are building hospitals, but our nurses and ambos have hit a wall. They are building a blockbuster gallery, with some lovely spaces for their corporate donors, but our artists cannot keep their heads above water. They are striving for gender equality, but on the ground they harass, intimidate and bully young women politicians. They are promising renewables, but at the same time they are drilling for gas. They are drilling for gas in a climate crisis. They say we cannot afford more public housing and they cannot afford to lift the public sector wage cap; meanwhile, they funnel money into logging, into prisons, into horseracing and into the fossil fuels industry.

The people of my electorate have told me they are struggling. They are struggling, and they are terrified because we are so unprepared for what is coming. We know that there is no social justice without ecological justice. Floods, fires, heatwaves, droughts, food insecurity, displacement of people and infrastructure under strain – we all know that we are not doing enough. It is coming sooner than we thought and it is worse than expected, and yet this government is drilling for gas in our oceans. They are extending the life of our coal-fired stations. They are still logging our native forests – pouring fuel on the fire.

We are terrified, but I am hopeful, because I have seen that the urgent change that we need is possible, and we know that together we are powerful.

I am hopeful because half a million Victorians voted for positive change in the last election. The Greens team in this Parliament has doubled from four to eight. Inside and outside of Parliament we are part of a powerful movement of change that is growing to meet the scale of the problems we face. As your representative in this Parliament, I will fight for First Nations justice, for climate justice, for housing equality, to cap rents and give renters real rights and to build and maintain public housing. I will fight against bigotry and discrimination in all its forms. I will fight for the rights of people with disabilities and for a living wage for artists. I will fight for the organisations that connect us, care for us and educate us.

Thank you to those who voted for change and to those of you who have already been part of transformative change in Richmond. To my incredible campaign team, volunteers and supporters; my fellow artists and co-conspirators; my Greens colleagues; my dear family and friends; and everyone with whom I have stood on the picket line: your strength sparks change, and every day I will amplify your calls inside this Parliament.

I would like to finish by inviting the people of Richmond to join me in demanding a better future for all of us. I am very humbly your vehicle for change, your voice inside these chambers. I am at your service.