Last month, Victoria’s 60th Parliament drew to a close. A Parliament punctuated by three premiers, four opposition leaders and two Legalise Cannabis MPs causing trouble.
As unexpected as my election was, I always intended to be a one-term MP – here for a good time, not a long time – but I would qualify that by saying that my idea of a good time is fighting the good fight and making trouble, and I will be done with that when I am dead.
It’s been a pleasure being one of your MPs for Western Metropolitan Region. An electorate of great cultural diversity and richness, of extraordinary growth and challenges. But we are all united by one glorious label: we are Westies.
The highlight of my tenure has well and truly been rolling up my sleeves and working with communities to organise and fight back against inappropriate developments threatening their quality of life.
I was fortunate to work with the Little River community to block Pacific National’s vast multimodal freight terminal, which would have impacted wetlands recognised as internationally significant under the Ramsar Convention in 1983 and is home to more bird species than Kakadu.
We also worked with residents of Sunbury and Bulla, who previously got shafted with 1.5 million cubic metres of West Gate Tunnel spoil and now face a giant waste-to-energy incinerator bearing down on their homes, schools, shops and agriculture.
And now we have data centres. In my 40-plus years of campaigning, I have never seen a campaign explode like this one, and it’s good to see that the government has finally acknowledged the need for guardrails. They thought they could approve these monsters without any community pushback. Well, that didn’t work. And these potential regulations are far from satisfactory.
We say ‘the west is the best but it gets so much less’ and we have campaigned around roads, public transport, health and community services, pools and libraries. So many local issues and such great and passionate residents to have been able to work with. What an honour.
There have certainly been many parliamentary moments that I will remember with great fondness and pride. While the lack of progress on cannabis reform has been profoundly frustrating, it has been rewarding and even exhilarating to push the envelope on a range of other issues, like being part of the progressive crossbench campaign to get pill testing at Victorian festivals, as well as at a fixed site in Fitzroy. Despite the claims from the usual suspects about the dire outcomes of such a reform, all we have seen are fewer hospital presentations and a hell of a lot of relieved parents; or seeing medicinal cannabis patients finally being given the right to have their day in court when they test positive for THC but are unimpaired while driving.
It is such a basic right but, equally, such an important rejection of the stigma faced by the cannabis community.
It was also a profound honour to have been one of the deciding votes that delivered the historic Statewide Treaty here in Victoria, and I will be eternally grateful for the opportunity to have participated in that. After more than 200 years of failed policy, I hope that this will finally deliver meaningful change for our First Nations brothers and sisters, and I would like to express my deep respect to the generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activists who have struggled to redress this – our country’s greatest shame.
I won’t miss the long late-night sittings and the constant disappointment that comes with being a crossbencher with way bigger ambitions than this often-timid government.
I am now happy to hand over the baton to the next generation of Legalise Cannabis Party activists who are busting to take up the fight for the west.
I hope to see you on the barricades soon, and to quote one of my favourite books: so long and thanks for all the fish!
By David Ettershank,
Member for Western Metropolitan Region.
You can contact his office on
(03) 9317 5900 or by email on
david.ettershank@parliament.vic.gov.au
