CANDIDATE Q and A – Paul Sheeran, Democratic Labour Party candidate for Robertson

What motivated you to run for the seat of Robertson?

Mainly because I’ve been in the area for 22 years, I’m pretty well acquainted with the issues of the homeless and the needy and the problems that small business suffer up here on the coast and the need to do something positive for the area in relation to small business. It’s making sure we have sufficient businesses moving into the coast to get rid of the unemployment we are suffering from. One of the big things we are trying to do at the moment is to make sure that we get some law run through that would allow for businesses to be paid within 30 days of invoice rather than businesses up here having to wait 90 days, 120 days ect before they get paid, which is a great problem for small business.

When you’ve been speaking to people are these the issues they say they have on the coast?

The hardships that they suffer is quite severe. There is a lot of red tape for small business.
Until such time that we can abolish the carbon tax, and reduce emission targets to reduce the cost of utilities to households and small business, we are not going anywhere fast up here. We’ve got to introduce some kind of legislation to cater for the payment of small business on time, and in addition we have to cater for the unemployed. One of the ways that we would try and get this done efficiently would be to make sure that contractors are employed in local projects funded by the federal, in conjunction with the state government, so that you don’t have big businesses coming up here taking over big contracts, billions of dollars worth, and finding that the local unemployed are not being trained and employed in the area.

There has been a bit of discussion in the media about your age, do you think being 78 will be beneficial and help you in this role?

The thing about age is you must remember is that I bring a lot of wisdom and knowledge and understanding on how the world works and I’m aware of the anxiousness people suffer, particularly the younger generation and their concerns for the future.

My work up to the time I started to stand for the candidacy, but before that I did a lot of work with St Vincent De Paul and when you get around and deliver food parcels and see the conditions under which a lot of these people suffer, and live under. Now that the allowances for mothers has been reduced how can anyone exist on $35 a week? Things like that have to be brought to the forefront and given sufficient coverage and proper legislation, so that people get back to having a sufficient income even when they haven’t got work. We’ve got to introduce some legislation to provide for low cost housing and reduce rental costs for these people.

All these things are obvious things to a person like me that’s spent 22 years here and seen why people have suffered.

I believe that unemployment is the greatest scourge we’ve got from the point of view of family break down and abuse, drugs, alcoholism, vandalism and also the causes of some mental health problems because people lose their sense of worth, lose their dignity. For any candidate getting in it’s helping people and solving some of the social problems that we’ve got is one of the greatest things we can do and give back to the unemployed the dignity that we need to work.
So there are a lot of issues in a person standing, my age being as I said before, the understanding of the painful situations people have suffered from.

What do you think will be your biggest challenge in winning this election?

I think the challenge is trying to win it, there’s been so many candidates standing for the seat of Robertson, the thing has become wide open. And it’s very difficult to receive all of the party votes that you’ll need to make some difference to the electorate. I don’t have the time or the patience to conduct a campaign of in-fighting and pulling down different parties or different personalities because that’s not what politics is about. The idea of the DLP is to introduce honesty and integrity and get rid of the spin and lies in parliament and even if you’ve just got one house of representatives DLP person then there is an opportunity to question the reason for the spin and lies that occur, when people ask at question time and get these non answers.

Who will you be preferencing?

Our policy is to preference those that are more closely aligned with our policies.

We haven’t got our preference list issued yet, unlike some of the others who have already issued their preference list and placed me somewhere down the bottom.

[We will be] “preferencing those more in keeping with our policies and more inclined to be pro life and understanding the nature of marriage, the nature of the wonderful occurance of motherhood , all these things come into a need for us to make sure families are well catered for and that people in need are given the opportunity to develop as a family unit.

Anything else you would like to add?

There are other policies that we do as far as the Central Coast is concerned, and I would be hoping to get funding from the Federal Government to help the state build a link between Woy Woy through to the F3 near Calga. Which would reduce the incidence of accidents and slippage on that road that comes up the back to get up to Kariong and would relieve a tremendous amount of travel time for people along the Penninsular.