Greens newcomer Nick Ward to fight for Sydney at state election
Image: Greens candidate for Sydney Nick Ward (left) with Newtown MP Jenny Leong (right). Photo: Supplied.
By JOHN MOYLE
Even though the state seat of Sydney has been held by a popular independent for the past 11 years, The Greens have preselected political newcomer Nick Ward to contest the seat with a raft of well thought out policies.
The last time that NSW went to the polls was in 2019 and the then Greens candidate, Jonathan Harmer, polled 9.5 per cent against Alex Greenwich’s 47.3 per cent of the primary vote. Ward came to politics in the early nineties around gay law reform and discrimination legislation in Queensland before moving into the travel business for STA and later technology.
Before joining The Greens Ward looked at running as an independent, or for Labor.
“To be able to be part of government at some point it is more realistic with The Greens than as an independent, and I believe that Labor is too imbedded in an old system,” Nick Ward, Greens candidate, Sydney said.
“The Greens’s policies have been very well thought through and researched and they are evidence based policies.”
Reform and action around climate change has long been The Green’s central policy and they align with Ward’s political beliefs.
“We are strongly against any new coal, oil or gas based projects, and while everyone is saying that we need to do more, the difficulty is that we have gone so slowly when it comes to a net zero environment and we don’t have the transmission storage infrastructure,” Ward said.
“From The Greens perspective we know that there are well researched plans about how we can quickly build the transmission infrastructure that would allow us to use the generation capacity that we already have so that we don’t need new fossil fuel projects.”
Relating that to the seat of Sydney, Ward added “Our seat needs some active work where we can turn around some of the active emissions and poor environmental fingerprints.
“We have buildings that are not green and there are no real plans for requirements to start transitioning to things such as double glazing, instead we rely on air conditioning to cool buildings.”
He will also be calling for more EV charging stations, particularly in apartment blocks.
Ward says that any Greens’ policy for Sydney will also be in partnership with other Greens who are in parliament and include representatives for country, regional towns and cities across the state.
“There are also opportunities to being able to do some big projects such as wind outside the seat of Sydney,” Ward said.
The housing crisis happened in plain sight many years ago but has been systematically ignored by both major political parties over decades.
“We need to be stronger on minimum proportions of developments with affordable and social housing,” Ward said.
“Our social housing stock has dropped dramatically and when it comes to affordable housing developers have been given the green light to be able to go ahead with projects without the bar being very high.”
Gambling and pokies at election forefront
This election, gambling, and poker machines in pubs and clubs in particular, has turned into being a bigger election issue than successive public transport failures.
Once again, The Greens were ahead of the pack, having long ago addressed the issue.
“It is not just the addiction of the people who are playing the pokies, it is also the addiction of the venues and the governments to the money that is being streamed out of that,” Ward said.
“We would not countenance going easy on drugs because there is a lot of money to be made, and we should have the same approach to gambling.”
On a local issue Ward sees the proposal to turn the Metro Theatre in Potts Point into a boutique hotel as being one that will have a negative impact on the area, citing Melbourne’s lost Empire Theatre as an example.
