CURTIN INDEPENDENT MEDIA & INFORMATION

Kate Chaney made her first speech to Parliament on 28 July 2022.

"Democracy is messy and imperfect, but it gives me hope that communities can successfully put up their own candidate in the face of the historically dominant two-party system. I, and the other community Independents who now surround me, have overcome an uneven playing field."   

"I have never felt a pull towards either political party, feeling stranded in the middle, but I feel a pull when I read the words of Menzies, who said he looked forward 'to a better distribution of wealth, to a keener sense of social justice and social responsibility'. I wonder if that might've been a party I would've been willing to join."

"The challenges we face today require [a] longer-term view than the seven generations of my family in Australia. We need to learn from the perspectives of our First Nations people, such as my friends Carol Innes and Colleen Hayward, Noongar elders who carry the local histories of not a mere seven generations but thousands. They have a collective memory of the time when Wadjemup, Rottnest Island, was joined to the mainland of my electorate more than 6,000 years ago."

See the whole speech on YouTube

or read it in Hansard