Lucy Nicol

I’m Lucy Nicol, your Greens candidate for Mount Lawley this election.

I love the Mount Lawley area, and choose to live here due to the great schools and university as well as the hustle and bustle of Beaufort Street. I became involved in the Greens movement because I want to see more women involved in the top tiers of politics.

I’ve been a member of the City of Stirling’s Environment Advisory Group for the last three years and know that we in the Mount Lawley area are in a position to lead by example regarding environmental protection and climate change.

Mount Lawley is known for drawing crowds from all over for its activities and entertainment but with Edith Cowan University set to move to Perth city, and COVID affecting many local businesses and organisations, finding safe ways to keep the area bustling will call for serious innovation.

COVID-19 has had an enormous impact on the community. Watching your neighbours lose their jobs and watching students in your university cohort lose their work is devastating. Experiencing overloaded hospitals and seeing patients have to move states for treatment is frightening. Begging your landlord for a rent reduction as you wait in limbo to hear what support your government may offer puts a lot of strain on your heart. I’ve learnt from this experience that the government could have raised the rate of welfare payments a long time ago- preventing Australians like me from going hungry.

We must take urgent action to solve the climate crisis in order to protect our futures and the biodiversity of our planet; protecting our forests in particular is of great importance to me. I made a short documentary about our endemic and endangered Carnaby black cockatoo, their habitats are being logged and their numbers are dwindling. As much as I’ve loved seeing Black Cockatoos overhead here in Mount Lawley over the last few years, it’s also devastating to know that they are only here as they have nowhere else to go.

I’m also deeply concerned with press freedom and the public’s right to know. If information is kept from us, how can we participate in a democracy? Press freedom is the issue that underpins our democracy and every single issue that we advocate for. There is currently a major crisis regarding press freedom in Australia with journalists facing police raids and international extradition charges. If our journalists are intimidated out of doing their jobs, then there is a chilling effect on the health of our democracy and all of us as well.

I look forward to talking to the Mount Lawley community about our plan for a future for us all.