No more yelling at TV now candidate has voiced her case for Casey
When Claire Ferres Miles asked her son Jack what he’d think about having his mother be photographed as an independent candidate in the forthcoming federal election, the 16-year-old responded with typical teenage enthusiasm for parental achievements: “I’ll just tell everyone it’s not my mum!”
Wisely, he amended this to, “Oh, actually, it’s quite impressive”.
Voices of Casey federal election candidate and ex CEO of Sustainability Victoria, Claire Ferres Miles with husband Colin Miles and their children Tom 11, Amy 13, Jack 16, Kate 18Credit:Eddie Jim
As of Friday, his mum was also officially unemployed, as she resigned from her job as chief executive of Sustainability Victoria following the legal requirement of officers of the Crown who wish to run for office.
She hopes to replace retiring House of Representatives speaker Tony Smith in the seat of Casey, on Melbourne’s eastern fringe. Ms Ferres Miles is the endorsed candidate of Voices of Casey, the local arm of the national Voices movement, a network of local political groups that back members of their communities to take on the big parties.
The loosely-connected groups sprang to life after independent Cathy McGowan won the seat of Indi in 2013, on behalf of the first “Voices of” push, known as V4i.
Their national efforts are, in part, funded by political benefactor Simon Holmes a Court’s Climate 200 organisation, but the clean energy advocate told the National Press Club on Wednesday the money came with “no strings attached”.
Casey covers the Dandenong Ranges, the Yarra Ranges and the Yarra Valley. Ms Ferres Miles, who lives in Upwey, and has never been a member of a political party, is running primarily on climate issues that have been keenly felt in the community through recent fires and storms.
She did not make her choice to enter the fray lightly.
“For the next three months, I do not have a salary, our family does not have an income – because I work full time and my husband, Colin, runs the house. That is an indication of the significance of this decision for me,” she said.
“We have five children [three daughters and two sons], so obviously they are a bit apprehensive as to how we’re going to pay the bills. But they also get it – they are actively interested in the world around them and their number-one issue is our changing climate.
“All of them also find it just incomprehensible that we treat people differently based on their gender or sexuality because for their generation there is no difference – everyone is equal and that’s where we need to get to.”
She was spurred to move from the couch to the hustings after realising she had been “screaming at the television” too frequently to ignore.
“I was watching Annabel Crabb’s [ABC TV] show, Ms Rrepresented about women in politics, and the SBS documentary, Strong Female Lead, about Julia Gillard’s tenure, and I just felt really appalled about the treatment of women in Canberra and affronted that our Parliament is the worst workplace for women in Australia,” she said.
“So many times I was yelling at the TV, which I think a lot of people have been doing, and I thought, ‘I’ve got to stop this and actually do something’.
In Victoria, Ms Ferres Miles joins high profile Voices candidates Zoe Daniel, a former ABC foreign correspondent running in the bayside electorate of Goldstein, and neurologist Monique Ryan, who is taking on Treasurer Josh Frydenberg in Kooyong.
Professor Ryan told The Age she was a member of the Labor Party before the 2017 election but quit due to her dissatisfaction with lack of action on climate change.
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