Serious about strategy, not spin

By Cat Holloway /

You might assume it prudent for the Shoalhaven Greens to lick their wounds from last year’s brutal council elections and watch the 2025 Federal election from the sidelines as the lavishly funded Liberal and the Labor incumbent duke it out with the Climate 200 backed community independent.

But you’d be wrong.

Fisherman’s Paradise retiree and tenacious Greens convenor, Debbie Killian, is neither backing away from Greens policy nor giving up on the party’s commitment to ensuring Greens voters have a place to go on election day.

The last two years brought the Greens on the South Coast closer to the brink. In 2023, the well-known Amanda Findley, then Mayor of Shoalhaven, struck out at the State election polls. Last year the Shoalhaven Greens not only lost the Mayoral chair, but also failed to secure a single Green councillor seat following intense backlash from the Shoalhaven Independents party, who dominated.

Advance Australia’s Sandra Bourke declared the extreme right lobby group‘s intention was to “drive the Greens brand into political irrelevancy” budgeting $15m to target Greens and Teals, oppose renewable energy and support Israel via an “astro-turfing” network of now-outed fake grassroots campaigns.

Not everyone gets the uber-right Advance message though. Labor strode across the finish line well ahead of everyone else in Western Australia this month and the Greens gained their highest vote ever in the state. The Greens social-work style campaigning in Brisbane has spurred Labor to respond to very real threats from Green candidates in the previously safe Labor seat of Logan and other Brisbane city electorates.

Advance spends it’s anonymous donor money on billboards, letter drops and a social media blitz while the Greens have shoestring budgets and volunteers knocking on doors.

So to describe Gilmore Greens as the underdog is an understatement.

But, the Gilmore Federal electorate is much broader than the Shoalhaven and Debbie Killian spoke openly with Spark about how she sees this year’s Green vote playing out locally and how she is leading a determined core back onto a well-worn battleground.

SPARK: What made you decide to run in the 2025 Federal Government election? Stubbornness, courage or necessity?

DEBBIE KILLIAN: In this country you have a string of elections one after another and, being a political party that works at grassroots level, it feels like you’re always working on an election.

People will think we're not there, if we're not there, you know, Heaven forbid that all of those people who want to vote Green or who might be thinking about it, think we've lost our strength or our commitment. We certainly haven’t.

Yes,  it’s been tiring, the last couple of years. We had very high hopes of getting Amanda Findley up at the state level because she was such a good candidate. The YES vote -  NO vote - was very disappointing. But you kind of give yourself a knock on the head for that and say… everybody in the Indigenous community has been putting up with these knock-backs for a long time, so get over yourself and keep moving.

Into the local government elections where there had been a really nasty campaign for months and months against Amanda in particular and against the Greens, but we didn’t know how hard that was going to bite us.

Then Trump got in in the USA. 

But we’re a pretty good sized group of Greens in the Shoalhaven with a membership of over 100 and a pretty good active core. I had been saying to friends, I’m done with politics, I can’t do this anymore, I’m just going to stick my head in the sand for a bit.

Then, in talking to others about who would run, I kind of talked myself into it because if I had stuck my head in the sand, I would have felt worse and worse and more and more powerless. So, by making the decision to stand, it meant I was doing what I could to have a practical  influence locally and not have to think about Donald Trump.

Do you think what’s happening overseas is filtering down to Gilmore?

Oh, most certainly. Part of what happened to the Greens in the last local government election was just that…it was a concerted campaign by a number of people who don’t live locally, but who worked very hard and very effectively vilifying the Greens.

It’s interesting how thick-skinned you and other local Greens are.

It’s not personal. They might make it personal but it isn’t personal. Those idiots don’t know anything about me. When (name withheld) abused me in a council meeting in the gallery before she was a councillor, she didn’t hurt me because I have contempt for the way she behaves and I have confidence that, if I do what I think is right and show integrity, it doesn’t undermine me in any fundamental way. 

The people who are my tribe, I suppose, are the people who care about the environment, people who are in the Greens and the people who support us. So that’s where I take my strength from.

So what will your campaign look like this time?

I want to run a campaign where we don’t feel out of control running to every single thing. We know who we are, we know the resources we’ve got and what we can do. Labor and Liberal will put vast amounts of money in. Andrew Constance has been spending hand over fist since the middle of last year. Labor will be forced to match him. And we’ve got a community independent who is a good candidate with a lot of Climate 200 money.

What do we Greens run a campaign on? Something like $30,000 and that’s no secret.

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Are you doing this as an agitation, a protest, or are you serious about gathering votes?

We had 10% of the vote at the last election and it was our preferences that got Fiona Phillips in - and the budget was very similar.

There are a lot of people for whom the way the major parties are operating is not acceptable, particularly around the environment. And we are not just an environment party anymore.

I come from a background of social justice activism. I was a city girl. I‘ve worked with migrant refugee communities, young people, disaffected youth, homeless people, all the groups in the community who don’t’ get a fair go and are pushed to the side.

But coming down here, getting to know some local Indigenous people, getting to know the land here for the first time - living in a place where the land matters.

Then there were the fires in 2020 when we were trapped in Fisherman‘s Paradise and completely useless in fighting the fires, which was frightening.

All the people, everyone you talked to afterwards, were traumatised and very much aware that that was a climate change issue. Anyone who didn’t believe that those fires were climate change were absolutely the outliers - the real hardliners. I’ve been sad to watch that conviction dilute as our politicians have told us, kidded us, that there’s time.

So this isn’t an act of rebellion. There are a lot of people who understand how urgent the need to change to renewables is and we are the main force cohesively pushing for renewables, for a swift movement over to renewables. We made some headway in this last term of parliament and we've got clear policies. It'll be great if the teals are working with us.

I still feel very passionate about social justice, but there’s no social justice if you haven’t got a planet.

That’s an existential struggle and there’s no going away from it. If you believe that and you’ve spent your whole life fighting for what’s right, then there’s nothing left for you if you don’t keep fighting. We feel good when we fight because we feel we can make a difference. It doesnt matter how many other forces there are.

Are the young people - as the Greens website designates, the under 31s - the strongest weapon this time?

They are certainly the big target. We want to talk to everybody of course but we’ve got a lot of older people, grandparents who say I want to vote for the environment because of my grandkids. 

Young people are predominately very supportive of protecting the environment and very worried about what were leaving them. But do they trust a political party - of any sort? That’s our challenge - to convince young people that the Greens are not the same. If you vote Labor or Liberal you are voting for the same. If you vote Green then you are voting for something clearly defined but very different.

This is not like voting for an independent who might be very strong on the environment, which is great and we very much support that. But you don't know what they will do on other things because there aren’t policies.

The Greens are what we say we are, we are what it says on the tin and what we need to convince people of, is how effective we have been in the last term of parliament. We’ve had really good gains and sometimes with the help of the teals.

So if you had more money, how would you spend it to get to those young people?

I’m not sure much of the major campaign money that is being spent really gets to young people. We’re trying to do messaging that speaks to what we understand young people care about. If you’ve got more money, you can push that out into more places and on social media. 

What feeling are you getting from outside the Shoalhaven?

We’re just getting started, but we see that in Eurobodalla there’s a very strong anti-Constance feeling. Kiama too. In Shoalhaven people really don’t know Andrew Constance terribly well.

The people who are most likely to vote for Kate Dezarnaulds are annoyed Liberals. “Wet” Liberals, who can see how ridiculous the coalition policy on the environment is but who won’t vote left - Labor or Green.

I’m sure we’ll lose some Green votes to her too. People who have moved over from Labor but who are still worried about not supporting Labor because it means you get Liberal.

What do you say to the traditionally Labor voters looking elsewhere, but feeling that the Greens block things and are a menace?

We say no indeed. We’ve achieved quite a bit, like getting child dental into medicare. You don’t vote us in there to rubber-stamp Labor. You might as well vote Labor. We are clear about what our policies are and we are there to push those policies.

The achievements on housing is the one we get the most of a slapping about because we delayed by a number of months until the bill was passed. The more knowledgeable people say there would have been only minimal numbers of houses built then, and we would have had a very poor Labor bill on housing.

Instead there’s now a massive amount of increase in money there and improvement in the policy. It's the futures fund thing, where large amounts of money gets put away and keeps building to keep building. So instead of having a scattergun bang, get some houses on the ground, not helping very many people and then the money's gone. This is actually a building program.

Max Chandler-Mather spoke on the ABC 7:30 Report honestly and clearly about pushing as hard as we could and how important it was to us to get the most that we could. Sarah Ferguson leaned forward and said to him … “You're a young person with a good job. How do you feel that all of those things you said you were trying to get, you've given up and you've taken, you've accepted the bill without getting all of those things? How do you feel about that? Can you look other young people in the eye?“

And he looked down the barrel of the camera and said, “No. Every single day I feel sick that I didn't achieve those things for those people. But I do know I fought as hard as I could and I got as much as I could.”

Ferguson actually kind of sat back in her chair and said, “Well, that's the most honest answer I've heard from a politician in a very long time.” And that's how we Greens compare. That's the us and them.

So why do you think that Labor was the source of so much of the vitriol over the Greens impact on the Housing Bill?

There's two things about that. One of them is that Anthony Albanese hates the Greens with a sort of weird passion. I really do think that. My understanding is that he has been very negative with his ministers about working with the Greens.

I was very involved with Addison Road Community Centre and I have watched him over years. I assume it comes from being scared of losing his seat. It's a very ripe Green seat. Even when I came down here, people in the Labor Party I got to know said, “well, you know, we wouldn't mind the Greens if you'd just stay out of the seats that are our heartland, like the inner cities.”

Then look what he did to Tanya Plibersek when she got the Nature Conservation Bill out.

The EPA Bill brokered with the Greens and the Independent Pocock?

When she had that all set up, bang.

So because he felt that was pandering to the greens?

I can only assume that, that he thought it looked bad to be working with the Greens, because also there were some other business interests there.

I thought that was the main issue, but you're saying it's the politics as well. 

Well, I would say that all of that has had an undercurrent of the politics.

So do you have that same openness and confidence that we see in Max Chandler-Mather?

Yeah, I know what I stand for. We have those policies because we stand for them and we stand for them because we do have integrity. And integrity means being honest and straightforward. 

So there's no backing down from that Gaza position, because that has been the hook that many people hang their hat on as the reason to turn against Greens.

I have a very simple position. The action by Hamas was entirely regrettable and not something we condone on any level. But to condemn the Israeli state for the behaviour that is genocide, the behaviour of killing and hurting, cutting off the people of Gaza, is not anti Semitic. To disagree with a state, and to call them out and to say it is a disgrace is not anti-Semitic. I am not against Jewish people, Jewish faith, at all. I am against a state that behaves appallingly and cruelly to people. I will always be against that. I don't care what your faith is. 

And so the fact that an independent or any candidate isn't willing to take a stand on that, you consider that a major weakness?

Well, it's a bit of a mirror. It's a bit of an indicator as to what it is you're buying when you sell your vote to one or another. 

If you're a person who's thinking, I don't want to vote for either of the major parties - and that's our big message, if you want change, vote for it - but if people are thinking, should I go independent or should I go Green? I would say, “how certain can you be with an individual independent or with any group of independents?” You can be certain about the policies that they will articulate to you, or at least you can be fairly certain about that, but you cannot be certain about the ones they won't articulate.

I’d love to see people experimenting with different political parties provided that party is not secretive or corrupt. That’s democracy. But the dance of being everything to everyone is hard. A major part of politics is standing firm on your beliefs. It’s really easy to be honest and transparent when you are clear about your policies, as the Greens are.

Do you think it is fair to say that a community independent such as Kate Dezarnaulds is mostly appealing as a personality, whereas people are more likely to vote Green for the policies.

Possibly, but Kate Dezarnaulds got more going for her than personality.

She's saying, we're going to do politics differently. I'm gonna have fun. So, you can look at a boring old political party and then you can look at somebody going out and sort of saying, it's fun. Well, it’s no more fun when you get serious about the policies. (Laughing)

The Independents are opening up the option for people to think about their vote, not just default to the two major parties. But I question whether a disparate group of independents actually gets a better outcome in their region. It depends how co-ordinated they are and how powerful.

Is Dezarnaulds the most natural sort of collaboration for the Greens now? Or, or is it still Greens and Labor partnering? 

No, neither of them are a natural collaboration for us. But neither of them is an antithesis for us either. I can’t talk about preferences yet, we haven’t had all the discussions yet. But there's a simple thing for us: as long as Andrew Constance, the Liberal Party is last, subject to some even more horrible extreme candidate coming up. Constance would be a bad member, unreliable. This is a man who wept and cried about the environment and climate change but now wants to pull away from emissions targets. C’mon just tell the truth.

I always really hesitate at that preference deal thing. It's really because preference “deal” is just what numbers you put on the ticket, like everybody gets to choose themselves. It does matter what numbers you put on the ticket. In the federal election you've got to put everybody down. I think preferences are for people to choose individually. 

But vote Green first, because, whoever they are voting for gets paid for that number one vote. After the Federal election, you get paid back money based on how many votes you got. 

(Election funding is payable in relation to any candidate or group who receives at least four per cent of the total first preference votes in an election. The current rate is $3.386 per eligible primary vote) 

So a vote one to the Greens supports us in keeping us going forward. And we will always be the ones who have less money because we won't take money from corporates, we won't take money from billionaires, we have limits on what we will take. We are utterly transparent about where our money comes from. You can see everything. But we won't ever have money like other parties. 

The other thing that's really important about this campaign is that we have two New South Wales senators at the moment. We have David Shoebridge and Dr Mehreen Faruqi. Mehreen is up for re-election and she is the most brave, fierce, amazing senator. You don't always get to hear as much about senators. The only time we hear about Mehreen here in Gilmore is when she's suing Pauline Hanson - and she won. But, she's a person that we in New South Wales really want for diversity, for her own personal courage and articulate approach to the world. So it’s very important to me to help support her.

So do you feel that you're better off fighting for more Green places in the Senate or trying to get Greens in the lower house?

For this area, it'll be a long time before we would be looking realistically at winning in the lower house. So, I'm here to be a Green voice and to make sure that the people who want to vote Green can. I wouldn't suggest that the Greens should be reducing their focus on the lower house. I think we can be very effective in the lower house. But we need to keep up or increase the Senate.

Last time we got 10% of the vote. It's usually similar to that. We aim to get 12% this time.

If the key progressive endgame is to stop a drift to the far right - whether you call that the Liberal Party or whether it’s just some part of the Liberal Party - is it naive for voters to think that you and Kate Dezarnaulds (Independent) and Fiona Phillips (Labor) could have a kind of constructive relationship where you share the load of getting that message out? 

It is naive, to an extent. But I won't be getting up on a podium and attacking Kate and Fiona. I might criticise, I might point out what's better about the Greens’ approach, but I won't be oppositional. Whereas, when Andrew Constance speaks nonsense, I will call it nonsense. It's a touchy thing because if Kate and I had too close a relationship over this campaign, she would get called a fake Green, and she could lose some Liberal vote.

So when we go, for example, to the Kiama meet the candidate event on Tuesday night (March 18), we'll all four be there, and I think it will probably be very obvious that my points will be focused on the policies of the Liberal Party.

If I get questions that say “Why should I vote you over Labor? Well, I'll say that Labor hasn’t done enough. Our local member, Fiona Phillips, is well known as a great local member, but she doesn't have a strong record on the environment. But I don’t want to make a fight in the community with someone who can help the community. There are plenty of people and leaders in the Labor Party locally with whom we do have close relationships. And Fiona Phillips will have sway in Government, with Gilmore being a marginal seat, to get money for local projects. She has a reputation as a hard worker. 

Still, the perception persists that a vote for Greens or Independent is somehow wasted.

Yeah, at every opportunity I get, I'm trying to say that one of the very best things about our political system is that we have this preferential voting system, so that your preferences flow down and keep going.  In Gilmore, the very strong likelihood is that those second and third preferences will make the difference.

The chance of the Greens holding the balance of power again is pretty high, right? As in the Gillard days, when there were the most constructive outcomes from that collaboration.

Yes, but that's where I think the Albanese sort of hatred thing comes and sits at the base of it all, really. The sense is that he's never going to be open to talking to the Greens and he's not that collaborative. I mean, Julia Gillard was. Well, she is a woman.

But if the Greens can't raise a lot of money and they can't rely on at least a friendly pat on the back from the other left-leaners, then it's very limiting for the Greens?

No, it puts us in a situation where one scenario is that we can be good friends, but they've got more to lose by being friends with us than we have by being friends with them. Because if they're in a minority government, one of the things that Gillard took a hacking over was, “Oh yeah, it's just a Green government by default.” The Libs and the National Party were very good at  playing that line. But quite a lot of the work that gets done in parliament is behind the scenes and sympathetic Labor people are working with us.

But people can see and people are increasingly concerned about the environment and the whole notion of: if you want change, you have to vote for it. A country as rich as ours, that doesn't do the things we should do for the people who need it, that won't put job seeker allowance up to an even remotely liveable level. So, we say tax the billionaires, tax the big corporations. Now, you know, that's not as straightforward a proposition as it sounds. But there's a lot of money, really, a lot of money and a lot of choices for doing things better. 

And why isn't it such a straightforward proposition?

People say economically, you can't just get things straight as an income tax. But there are subsidies that go to companies and industries that shouldn't get them. There’s vast amounts of money that we can cut out that is then instantly available to put to things that are decent. And one of the first ways is speeding up renewable energy. The population have shown themselves so willing where they can afford to, to do that. So the next step is to speed up the usability of EVs and to get solar onto rental accommodation. That's going to have to be subsidised and the money is there to do it if we choose. 

So how do you handle, whether it’s misinformation or just opinion, that characterisation of the Greens as an extreme left counterpoint to the extreme right? You don’t seem to see yourself as extreme.

My response to someone saying that the Greens are on the extreme left is: if extreme left is a set of policies that are about looking after all of our people and, and our environment, instead of looking after people who have the infrastructure and the money to keep making themselves richer and richer at the expense of others, then call me extreme left.

I do not consider it as particularly left to be a person who cares about all of us, about working for all of us. Now, that’s not the same as communism, but it is about policies that look after people. It's about human decency and about sharing resources in ways that protect people's life and the opportunity to have a decent life and protects their liberty, their opportunity to choose.

It sounds like what my Liberal-voting father would say in the 70s.

Funny about that, yeah. My father was a “wet” Liberal too. They were socially progressive and fiscally conservative. There was that sort of fear, conservatism, backwardness, whatever it is, lack of courage around the money. 

I've always felt that environmental conservation is fundamentally a conservative, measured, rational  way of thinking and that the Greens could now potentially win some disgruntled conservative voters?

There are some people who Vote Green 1, Liberal 2. We already have won some conservative voters. That’s who the Climate 200 people are mostly targeting, but yes, we’ve been taking some of those people. Kate is a very positive candidate. She's got a lot of skill in bringing parts of the community together. And I think that is also exactly the sort of thing that the Greens do well. 

We are involved in a wide range of campaigns right across Gilmore where either we're taking the lead and community members are joining or we're in there working with community members who are initiating things. So it's exactly the same sort of thing as Kate's wanting to do and she's very good at it. And I think it’s a positive thing for Gilmore that she's standing.

But when you vote Green, you know exactly what you're getting in terms of policies, particularly around the social equity and other environmental issues like native species and biodiversity protection, coastline management and looking after communities, such as Lismore and other places now, when the impacts of climate change hit them.

It's the Greens who have the courage to actually be talking about, for example, how insurance works and how it should change. We’re having conversations about what shouldn't be developed, and how to change what has been developed. Those are big conversations that are not easy to do. We've got some policy around them but you really need a lot more players involved to develop detailed policy because we're already there.

I live next door to Lake Conjola, a little example of this. Some people of Lake Conjola are up in arms about about their situation because they've bought land that was approved for development in the swamp on the side of the lake. They don't want the lake to be allowed to do what it does naturally as a tidal flow that opens to flush and closes to back up the way it should. But the people in Conjola have their feet wet so they hate it. It’s not their fault that they got to buy land in a place where they shouldn’t have been allowed to buy. But now they don’t care about endangered plovers on the sand bank, they just want council down there with a bulldozer opening it up. That is an example of what’s happening all over the country and why we need to have a cohesive conversation, not just every village and council separately having to deal with it depending on their colour.

So, the Greens are strategists not protestors now?

The Greens have got the some of the smartest people in Parliament, honestly. People like David Shoebridge, Max Chandler-Mather, Dr Mehreen Faruqi. Jordon Steele-John from Western Australia, he's amazing. People like Sue Higginson, Cate Faehrmann, yes, incredible women. And why are they incredible people? Because, they are driven by passion. It's not driven by coming up through the party ranks and getting overtaken by ambition and branch stacking and whatever happens there, and losing sight of what your motivation was for community, That's why the Greens attract amazing people.

For more about Debbie Killian’s background, listen to her interview with Col Hesse on Triple U Community Radio.

Editor’s note:
(This Q&A was compiled from two interviews and edited for clarity and length. It is part of a Spark journalism project funded by a grant from the Local Independent News Association (LINA) who identified our region’s lack of environmental reporting and generously provided help to rectify that. Future investigations in this series will include, for example, Jervis Bay Marine Park, forestry and coastal planning. Shoalhaven is a small community. I am not a Greens party member, but (as some enjoy pointing out in an effort to discredit Spark), my husband is. We have attended Kate Dezarnaulds campaign events and Spark reported on the Gilmore Independent candidate. I look forward to profiling Labor's Fiona Phillips and the Liberals' Andrew Constance and examining their environment policies. Spark is not aligned with any commercial or political organisation, but the publication has openly progressive priorities plus a commitment to expose mis-information and provide an important counterpoint to the Shoalhaven region’s established, conservative, commercial media.