The Animal Justice Party has announced their candidate for Monaro at the March state election: Queanbeyan resident Frankie Seymour.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Ms Seymour previously contested the federal seat of Eden-Monaro for the Animal Justice Party, but this is its first tilt at the state seat.
A fledgling at the last state election, the Animal Justice Party picked up one Upper House seat. The aim for this election is to gain a second seat in the Legislative Council. In this election, the party is contesting 56 of the 93 Lower House seats in the State Parliament.
The Animal Justice Party’s political platform stands on four core principles: kindness, equality, rationality and non-violence, she said.
“All our policies come back to those four values,” Ms Seymour said. “We are often asked if we have policies for other social justice issues – such as refugees, marriage equality, voluntary euthanasia – and of course we do, based on the four principles. Our focus, however, is to ask people to consider animals and animal welfare in voting.”
Our focus is to ask people to consider animals and animal welfare.
- Frankie Seymour
Ms Seymour was a public servant in Canberra for more than 30 years, in the (former) Department of Social Security and then the Department of Environment, during which time she developed a set of sustainability indicators for national environmental reporting.
She also served for 18 years on the ACT Government’s Animal Welfare Advisory Committee.
The key issues the Animal Justice Party will target in Monaro are the unregulated killing of kangaroos, unregulated clearing, including logging, of wildlife habitat, and the welfare of farm animals.
The wider state-wide platform also includes climate action, the protection of koala habitat, and non-lethal management of brumbies in the alpine areas.
One of the big problems Ms Seymour says she sees with the political system is its control by two parties and big media interests. “People have lost faith in the system and there is a lack of political education because people are becoming disengaged,” she said. “The AJP would like to see the [system] revamped.”
Ms Seymour has authored the book All Hearts on Deck, a first-hand account of the Sea Shepherd’s anti-whaling Siberian campaign in the early 1980s. She has lived in Queanbeyan for 35 years and, as an animal activist, she rescues battery hens.
