It has been the privilege of a lifetime to be your Member for Brisbane.
For the past three years, I have fought every day for our community. It’s a massive learning curve going from working in retail to being the federal representative of 180,000 people, and I am so proud of the work my team and I did.
I am proud of what our Greens team negotiated in the parliament since 2022. Extra funding to build public housing, preventing government funds going to coal and gas projects, the right to disconnect for workers, and much more.
Being an MP is what you make of it.
Our office dedicated every resource to the benefit of our community. We hired social workers and community organisers to help residents as much as humanly possible, and I donated my salary to fund our community meals program, our community pantry and our community grants program for groups and frontline services.
We changed lives too. We found temporary and permanent housing for so many Brisbane constituents, navigated the nightmare that is Centrelink and the NDIA to get people access to the pension and to the NDIS, and reunited families from war-torn countries.
There is no less need now than there was in the community in 2022 and I hope this critical work to support our community is undertaken by the new MP.
It’s not easy to upend the political consensus and economic system that has been so entrenched for the past 200 years. For three years, we subverted what the expectation for a politician and political office is.
That’s something to be proud of. But there is so much more work to do.
I want an Australia where everyone has a safe roof over their head and everyone has a future free from climate change.
I will keep fighting for these things alongside all of you and the Greens.
See you out there, Stephen.