Matthew De Angelis

At time of print, no. I guess I’m just waiting for that special someone.

I’ve put a lot of time into this part of our story: speaking with staffers, private operators and communities, and building my own register to track what’s actually happening.

My view has shifted. There are legitimate concerns, useful facts and some fairly large misconceptions on both sides. Once the shouting settles, the questions get more interesting.

Yes, I support a moratorium where proper scrutiny and community consultation haven’t kept pace. People deserve time to understand what’s proposed and a meaningful say in decisions they’ll live with.

One part I’m examining is the planning pathway: which data centres can bypass a council decision and seek state approval, what qualifies them, and whether those settings helped accelerate the concentration we’re seeing. That needs to be established from the records, and I’m still working through them.

Why these locations? Access to substantial power infrastructure is a big part of the answer. Latency, fibre, land and customers matter too. You can’t assess the location without understanding the electricity connection.

Water use varies with the cooling system. Some facilities can also support the grid through batteries or demand management. Neither point gives the industry a free pass. Show us what each facility will consume, what it will contribute and what it will do when the system is under pressure.

And before anyone calls me a plant: the environment and the community’s quality of life come first. So do enforceable commitments, lasting local benefits and real career opportunities. Sometimes the obvious question is still the right one: could you put the bloody thing further from people’s homes?

I’m open to nuclear, and to testing regional alternatives, including northern and central Australia. Those options need a proper assessment of power, water, connectivity, environmental impact and community consent.

Then there’s “sovereignty”. Australian soil alone doesn’t settle it. Who owns the facility? Who controls the data? Who are the customers, including any foreign state interests? Which laws apply, and where are the profits taxed? Those are questions worth answering before we mistake a postcode for a guarantee.

I consider this equal parts a challenge and a personal insult. I once offered first-party data to a community organisation that will remain nameless. Their enthusiasm for using it was also difficult to locate.

My approach is to improve the commute partly by changing where people need to commute to.

One of my day-one initiatives is about finding overlooked capability in our suburbs: people whose skills might look unrelated on paper but together could make a viable business, product or service. Find the fit, test the market, run the numbers, then help navigate grants and other pathways where there’s a case. A young team with an odd collection of talents might have something commercially useful between them. They deserve the chance to find out. Get more worthwhile work happening locally, and fewer people need the same city-bound service at the same miserable hour. A few might even catch the 9:45.

I also have documented concerns about e-bus reliability, timetables that don’t suit shift workers and various other enthusiasts, the layers of contracting, and how dependent Victoria becomes on the companies running the service. I’m reading those arrangements alongside what the overseas parent company tells its investors, because I want to know how the returns it celebrates line up with what passengers and taxpayers receive.

There are plenty of threads to pull. FOI has taken me part of the way. In Parliament, I’d keep pressing for the records and answers needed to follow them further.

Ya boy has been doing the homework. I’d quite like to bring it into the room.

I don’t own a particulate matter monitor, and I’m not going to pretend I know how to design an industrial filtration system. You’re electing an MP, not a replacement for every specialist we need.

My job would be to get independent advice, establish where the pollution is coming from, and back the measures that will actually reduce people’s exposure. Then press for funding, enforcement and public reporting so we can all see whether it’s working.

As a crossbencher, I’d work with whoever can help deliver that. Cleaner air doesn’t need a party affiliation.

I’m coming in to be a focused presence, not to pick a fight. Working with people is how things get done. If someone crosses a line and refuses to step back, I’ll stand my ground. But arriving determined to fight and be heard is a good way to spend four years explaining why you achieved nothing.

The question is whether the air gets cleaner. That’s what I’d want to be judged on.

I’ll keep this simple. If a good proposal stacks up, can be funded and can actually be delivered, my hand goes straight up. I don’t care whose logo is on it.

The other part is finding the gaps. That’s at the core of my investigative work: gaps in reporting, gaps between services, gaps between what an agency thinks is happening and what people are actually experiencing.

By the time someone is in a terrible situation, there may have been earlier gaps nobody recognised or filled. A warning that went nowhere. A referral with nothing at the other end. Information that never reached someone who could act.

Housing, family violence, car theft: different problems, but I keep asking the same things. Where are the gaps, what falls through them, and what would it take to close them?

That’s where I’d put the work, alongside backing good legislation. Find the gaps early enough and we have a better chance of stopping people reaching crisis in the first place.

It’s 2026. I’d much rather relitigate the real war: who was the better Tommy, Green Ranger or White Ranger?

My answer: my Ranger, my choice.

What counts as crime? Anything from littering at Maccas to fly-kicking Nonna because she forgot the cannoli, and clearly a lot in between.

Crime can sit downstream of one failure and upstream of the next. Something failed someone, somewhere, and an offence can then set off another chain of harm. That isn’t an argument about personal responsibility. It’s an observation about how events connect over time.

Say a burglar needs money to keep playing the pokies, keep sippy the drinky, keep puffy the meffy. Punishing the burglary alone doesn’t switch off the compulsion driving it.

With pokies, that means de-tuning the machines at the exact point where behavioural psychology meets game design: the features built to keep someone playing, chasing and coming back. If we’re serious about breaking the cycle, addiction by design belongs in the frame. I’ve set out the broad strokes in my reply to the Alliance for Gambling Reform.

The other approach is to stare at a problem long enough that it rewards your attention. Stolen and cloned number plates are a central enabler of a lot of crime. Remove their value and you break the chain. I’m working on plates that can’t be cloned or counterfeited, with the materials engineered, supervised and prototyped here in the district first. Make that tool unobtainable and you shift a great deal of cost and inconvenience back onto the people committing the crime, with knock-on effects well beyond the car itself.

That work has started. More at deangelis.com.au closer to election day.