IN his third election campaign, Greens candidate Iain Fyfe believes the party is still “a force to be reckoned with”.
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He had secured 8.42 per cent of the vote on Saturday night, with prepolling and postals to be confirmed.
It’s a slight decrease on the 2011 pre-redistribution result.
Mr Fyfe spent Saturday campaigning in his home town of Gundaroo, where he says the issue of poles and wires was the question on everyone’s lips.
“The Greens have been around a long time and we continue making good progress all the time,” he said.
“In terms of Goulburn it looks like we’ve done pretty well. We’ve campaigned strongly on things like privatisation and renewable energy, and we’ve also had good things to say about hospitals and health. Its basically been about getting the funds required to build reliable infrastructure without selling the poles and wires.”
He described the campaign between Liberal candidate Pru Goward and Labor’s Dr Ursula Stephens as a ‘close tussle’. He believed that this had taken the attention away from the ‘bigger picture’ issues such as renewable energy and climate change.
“And to an extent things like coal and coal seam gas, things that will impact our children’s future,” he said.
“We would have liked to have seen more emphasis on that, but that’s fine and we’ll keep hammering away at those things.”
He also felt that the issue of wind and solar farms had been covered in too much of a negative sense throughout the campaign.
“I brought that more around to be a topic of planning rather than the actual technologies themselves,” he said.
“We still need to look at wind (and solar in particular) and in a way that’s changing with technology advances, but we need to involve the community, that’s the key thing and the Greens are really trying to bring this down to a community level so everybody participates. We don’t have ‘winners and losers, we have a community benefiting from renewable energy, and that includes wind power.”