Townsville Community Voices

Hi,

I'm Jenny Stirling and I am running for Mayor of Townsville.

Background:

Born and mostly raised in Innisfail, I have lived in North Queensland all of my life. Living in that beautiful part of the state I leaned about the value of a natural environment and what it means for children to be able to enjoy a healthy lifestyle and the benefits of a culturally inclusive community. It also meant that from an early age I and my family had close encounters with many cyclones and floods and saw the impact these had on others around me. So you will understand that I was personally devastated to see the damage done to my home town when Cyclone Larry passed by and it made me aware of how vulnerable we are in Townsville.

I have also lived in Collinsville for 23 years- an underground and open cut coal mining community where I witnessed at first hand the costs to people's health and safety, the environment and the community working in that harsh industrial environment. Many years after I first came to Collinsville I was appointed the Ministry Team Leader in St. Peter's Anglican Church - a position which mean that I performed the role of Pastoral Care Coordinator; Marriage and Funeral Celebrant. I also worked with the mining unions to successfully petition the Goss government to re-open the Collinsville power station, a fact which many will find surprising. Yes very few of us then knew about climate change and I truly enjoyed the experience of seeing people from all sides of the political spectrum coming together to work for the greater good of the community.

All of those experiences have, to a large degree, shaped my view about how to work in community, about creating possibilities for change, about social justice and what it means to be effective in difficult and crisis situations. It has also given me an enormous respect for people's lived experience, for practical knowledge and for people's ability to rise above difficult and sometimes appalling personal circumstances. For the last 19 years I have owned a home here in Townsville with my parents, moving here permanently to live in 1999. I have raised four beautiful children: Allison, Peter, Warwick and Amber, which is my proudest achievement.

Education:

I am currently enrolled as a PhD student at JCU in the Faculty of Arts, Education and Social Sciences. In 2004, I completed a Bachelor of Social Work (Hons). I have recently been employed as a Chaplin for a community service organisation. In the last few years I have worked as:

• A tutor at JCU

• A consultant for a community service organisation

• President of the JCU Postgraduate Student Association

• Project Officer for Townsville City Council in Community Services

However that is only the paid work. Being a mum, I have served my time on various tuckshops, school P&C's, learning support and generally helping out with sporting associations and children's activities. Since coming to Townsville, I have been involved with welfare and community organisations such as Anglicare; Townsville Multicultural Support Group, the Womens Centre and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Human Rights Group.

In the last 9 years, along bringing up my two youngest children as a single mum, I have been a Greens candidate at local state and federal level. I am also a proud member of Townsville and Magnetic Islands ‘Aquapella' Choir and in 2006, I become a grandmother: a source of great joy and another compelling reason to be involved with the green movement.

As you can see, it is a life filled with different experiences of which politics is but a small part. This is what I bring to the role of mayor: the lived experience of ordinary people who make up most of the life of this community. But wait there's more...

In 2004, in collaboration with Theresa Millard, I developed "A Fresh Vision ": a document which sets out a future for this city based on the principles of sustainability; incorporating local knowledge, local resources and local skills & wisdom. This document has been updated in 2007 and forms the basis for the vision I will be bringing to this city as mayor. It's about making sure that the values and the identity of this city are not thrown away in the mad rush to embrace development. We should be able to have the best of both worlds: a strong economic, culturally diverse and socially integrated community. And the good news is we can if we follow the principles of sustainability which means that we meet the needs of today without compromising the ability of future generations of our children to meet their own needs.

Of course a Mayor also needs to attend to the nuts and bolts of running Council: the roads, providing water, fixing drains and dealing with issues such as waste disposal and animal welfare and then there is the staff. In Community Voices I have a team of experienced people who have the personal, engineering, business, management, community and cultural experience to complement the vast knowledge that exists in the staff employed by Council.

In this campaign I am looking forward to meeting the people from Balgal Beach down to Cungulla and out to Woodstock and everywhere in between. It would be my privilege to serve as Mayor of this beautiful city. My job, as I see it, is to keep it that way.