Tell me about yourself.

I was born and raised in Wagga. Apart from two years in Griffith working as a psychologist, I’ve been here all my life.

I used to play for the Turvey Park Bulldogs. I used to play a lot of basketball.

After school, I went to CSU and got my first job as a psychologist at Junee Correctional Centre and I have been working in the area ever since.

Probably in the last five to 10 years, I have had a real focus on suicide prevention.

Outside of work, I am a father of a 10-year-old daughter. She’s amazing and that’s probably the most important job I have. That’s probably a cliche, but that’s just the way it goes.

How long have you been on Wagga City Council?

I got elected, almost to the day, two years ago. I ran in 2012, but didn’t quite get on and it’s now been two years.

Why did you decide to run for council?

I guess I’ve been putting my hand up for a couple of elections to be able to serve the community I was born and raised in. When I think about what Wagga’s given me – from sports to education to friends, the family events and all that stuff – it’s an opportunity to give back a little bit with that.

I remember I was sitting on the couch many years ago now getting annoyed at –  it must have been – Tony Abbott on the TV, and going ‘well, if I’m not participating, I don’t get to complain’ and I had a couple of friends who were getting involved politically as well, so I decided to follow suit and got involved with the local branch and have been keen to put my hand up to be the candidate for a number of things.

Why the Labor party? What appealed to you about that particular party?

Well, I guess over the years watching the Conservatives not quite connect with what I thought was important, the social justice stuff. Certainly health care is a major one for me. Work Choices and the stuff that came up during Howard’s last year, that was enormously influential.

Politics wasn’t such an enormous thing in my 20s, but it certainly came to me at the end of my 20s, early 30s and I began to be more involved and pay more attention to it.

I think there was just sort of a natural pull. It wasn’t that I sat down and thought ‘which party suits me politically’ or ‘which party gains me in Wagga’.

This is just the one that I think is just about health, about education and workers, it’s about the lower and middle class.

If you’re not pulling up those who are falling behind, what’s the point of other people getting ahead?

But what’s that look like in real life? What does that look like on the ground? It’s one thing to say those things.

We saw more recently about the cuts to penalty rates, the impact that then has on the local economy. People don’t have money in their pockets to be able to spend, and again we are giving – and this is federal stuff –handouts to the banks.

But we cut the pay to the people working retail.

I guess, when I see those things I don’t know how to belong to any other party apart from the Labor Party.

You’ve been campaigning for a few weeks now, what are people telling you? What’s important to people in Wagga?

What has been interesting is that we can often talk about the big messages and the like, and people certainly do talk about those things, but at the end of the day, people just want their lives to just be made a little bit easier.

You go knock on doors and people just talk about their kids’ schools, the teaching staff there, are they being supported, and if they’ve got the right equipment.

People talk about the cost of living, which is going up. They’re not talking big pie in the sky stuff. They’re just talking about how to get through the week without having to worry too much about it, whether it’s electricity bills, the prices of other things.

A lot of people, especially older people, were talking about jobs and job security for young people. That comes up quite a lot: That people, especially in their 20s and 30s, leave to look for a job elsewhere.

So people talk about how we stop that. Wagga is growing, and probably getting a little better at that, but it’s more of an issue in the smaller surrounding areas: Tumut, Lockhart, The Rock.

It’s a real mix. Certainly, cost of living comes up. 

What other things would you like to focus on?

There’s a lot of plans for Wagga over 20 or 30 years and what I’ve got frustrated at, being here all my life, is that often the things we get are enough for that point in time. They’re not enough for after the 20 or 30 years time.

What I want to see is people thinking long term about Wagga. Not just ‘they’ve made enough noise, we better give them something’. When we look at working hand in glove with council, who will do a lot of the planning, and we are talking about getting to 100,000 in Wagga, we are those jobs going to come from? How is it going to be managed?

We need interconnectedness between cities, like Griffith, Albury, Canberra. Often these cities are left to compete instead of working collectively together. Part of that is connecting them through public transport, through jobs, health services as well.

I guess what’s I’m looking at is someone who is not going to look at the next month or the next year – although that’s important in people’s lives – but where does Wagga need to go in the next 20 or 30 years and how do you adapt to those changes as well?