Tuesday 16th November, 7.15pm to 8.45pm, covering these suburbs in the Sutherland Shire: Engadine, Heathcote, Loftus, Waterfall, Woronora Heights, Yarrawarrah and parts of Kirrawee and Sutherland.
Councillor Diedree Steinwall addresses the audience.

Residents of Ward D tuned in online and turned out in person to meet all ten candidates for the upcoming council election. You can view the entire proceedings here (1hr 30min):

Many thanks to all sitting Councillors and aspiring candidates who made themselves available to take questions during the event and afterwards.

And that’s why we did this. Democracy works best when people show up. Politics is just a name for how power works in our society. That affects all of us, and our church congregation cares about our community.

It’s now 2021, and a growing proportion of the population have lost trust with our democracy and are not happy, but feel powerless. Encouraging people to discuss what we want our community to look like in the future is one way of sharing power and helping build a better, more resilient society.

Budgets are moral documents. Policies matter. The spending decisions our leaders make do affect people, particularly the most vulnerable. We have an opportunity at all levels of government to get involved, to lift our vision, to reject the old notion that we can’t do any better, that we have to settle for the same old, same old. It’s easy to just write off politics as something nasty from which we should keep a polite distance, but then nothing changes.

You can’t have a democracy without politicians and it is at a local level they are most like ourselves, in fact they are our neighbours who need our support when they do great things, and won’t know what we value unless we tell them. We couldn’t cover all your questions in one evening, so let’s do this again sometime before the next election.