Federal Election 2022: WA Greens veteran Giz Watson says Greens ready to negotiate with ALP in hung Parliament

WA Greens stalwart Giz Watson says the Greens stand ready to negotiate with Labor in the event of a hung Parliament. After casting her vote in her home city of Albany on Saturday, the Greens WA candidate for O’Connor said the election would be “agonisingly close”, but she expected a narrow Labor victory or hung Parliament. “I think that the balance is in favour of the Labor Party and we’re ready to negotiate with them as soon as they’re ready to negotiate with us,” Ms Watson said. Australia last faced a hung Parliament in 2010, when Labor leader Julia Gillard secured the support of the Greens and three independents to form a minority government. “It is a good thing for democracy,” Ms Watson said. “There’s many a country in the world where it’s standard to have multiple voices, where people have to sit around the table and talk about it,” Ms Watson said. “I have worked in a hung Parliament for three of the terms out of four that I was in State Parliament and the sky didn’t fall. We actually produced some very progressive changes — changes to the voting system, ending old-growth logging, gay law reform — all of those things happened because the Greens were in the balance of power. “It’s worth remembering that the only time that our carbon footprint has gone down in Australia was when the Gillard Government came to an agreement with the Greens, with Christine Milne, and the carbon output started to drop.” Ms Watson is one of nine candidates in the vast electorate of O’Connor, a conservative stronghold which is expected to be retained by Liberal incumbent Rick Wilson. The electorate covers more than 1.1 million sqkm — from the south coast centres of Albany, Denmark and Esperance, to the Goldfields capital Kalgoorlie, and the agricultural heartland of the Great Southern and southern Wheatbelt. The Greens have been contesting the seat since 1990, with their best result coming in 2016, when Ms Watson gained 10.37 per cent of the primary vote. This is the second time Ms Watson has run for O’Connor and she is optimistic about a strong showing. “We’ve obviously had people down at the pre-polling which is a good litmus test for the mood and we were steadily running out of how-to-votes, but I guess that might have been true for everybody,” she said. “It’s great to see new people getting involved and that’s probably been a feature of this campaign for me. “Albany is changing, as I think I said to the paper right at the beginning. People have chosen Albany because it’s such an amazing place and they want to see it looked after. “I think that’s part of the support that we’re gaining.” Regardless of the outcome, the former leader of the Greens in WA does not plan on leaving politics. “There’s always work to be done and once you’ve got the bug for what needs to be done for us to have a livable, sustainable system — I’m not giving up anytime soon,” she said. Ms Watson, a veteran environmental activist, said it was “surreal” that climate action had rarely cracked a mention in a 2022 Federal election campaign. She said the major parties were compromised by the donations they received from the oil and gas industry, and there needed to be systemic change to create a level playing field in Australian politics. “Not just for the Greens, but for any other group that wants to contest an election,” she said. “They can’t compete with Clive Palmer or the donors who donate to the Liberal and Labor Party. “So we say cap the amount that is spent on an election and cap the amount of donations.” While climate change might not have been top of the agenda for the major political parties, she said the message was getting through to the people on the street. “One of the features for us in this campaign, a lot of women of my age and around about that age are saying, ‘I’m doing this for my kids and my grandkids’,” she said.