Australian Labor Party
How to Vote: The HTV lists vote 1 above the line Labor, 2 above the line Greens. No votes for our socialists. There’s also a reminder in the bottom right to take a photo of the HTV as they won’t be handed out at polling places, and a list of polling locations and pre-polls on the reverse.
Photo comments: the group campaign photo is a composite of three separate candidate pictures with a background of Rydalmere Pedestrian Bridge. I’m amused they used this bridge, as it’s definitely one of the most industrial looking one in the ward (and also an old feature of my bike rides in my teens – I’ve carried bikes over that bridge many a time).
Dr Patricia Prociv – current councillor
Website:
https://patriciaprociv.com/Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/RosehillWardParramattaLet’s start with Labor!
Patricia Prociv has a personal website that she uses both for her campaign and to talk about what’s going on in the council. I’m deeply charmed by its strong Geocities feel and hand coding, and I’ve been enjoying watching it get updated as the election got closer.
Prociv’s platform is based around a bunch of public infrastructure upgrades, increased public transport, and community consultation.
For public transport, she is agitating for a bus from Lidcombe Station to Wentworth Point and Newington. Currently the suburbs are served with buses to Olympic Park Station and Burwood Station, but a link to Lidcombe Station would prevent the need to change trains. She also wants better bus and ferry timetabling across the ward and reinstatement of some cut services.
Clean up: Currently Parramatta is on booked council clean ups only, with the ability to request 4 clean ups per year. There are also generally 2 scheduled e-waste drop off days per year, but COVID’s caused issues with them. Prociv would like to switch to 2 scheduled and 2 booked clean ups per year, which I’m not horribly opposed to. The nice thing about scheduled cleanups is that it tends to compress all the dumping to certain times of year, as people are less likely to use their booked ones then, and it’s certainly easier for apartments to access. You also find yourself playing “illegal dumping or booked cleanup” less often. She also wants river clean up of Duck River, Duck Creek and a’Becketts Creek for both household and industrial waste, and yes they all definitely could use it. All three are inflow creeks running into Parramatta River, surrounded by industrial land, and are not places where I’d be willing to touch the water. She also supports the volunteer litter cleanup of Haslams Creek and Parramatta River. Haslams Creek is an honestly great wetland that you’ve probably seen me photograph repeatedly that runs to the west of Olympic Park. These wetlands have been getting revitalisation for the past 30 years since Olympic Park was built and maintaining and improving them is always a tick my book.
Prociv supports more parks and more all age all ability playgrounds. She also specifically wants to upgrade the land under the M4 to be more useable. And this is definitely something I support - it's an excellent bike route, but the very shaded area under the motorway is largely otherwise filled with stone rubble and the motor bike training course at one end. There's plenty of scope to make it a more useable area, especially as the apartments nearby could use another closer park or sports courts area.
She wants better council communication with residents and more work with local volunteer groups, but also better access to community meeting rooms and spaces. This is an ISSUE due to construction in Parramatta proper – the current temporary library is extremely short on meeting rooms for hire and I am told hiring local council halls is both liable to get you bumped AND the facilities need some upgrades (like air conditioning. And less leaky roofs).
Current council plans she supports: Prociv supports bike-only paths and separated walking and cycling paths in busier areas. Also she supports the new Alfred St Bike Path and Pedestrian Bridge, which I am drooling over, as it runs straight from the M4 path down to the new light rail stop and Parramatta River bridge crossing, that will make accessing the north bank bike path WAY more convenient for Harris Park and Rosehill residents, while allowing north bank residents to walk directly across the bridge to a new light rail stop. Basically, this bike path is a "win my votes" project for some reason and I can't get over it. She’s also into the North Granville community upgrades (some revitalisation to the north side of Granville station, which is an extremely run down local shopping area, plus upgrades to the local park including a better dog park and new playgrounds, lighting, and facilities).
On other noisy council issues: Prociv supported the Save Willow Grove movement and opposed the Parramatta Powerhouse site plans. She voted for Phive. She’s also supported the replacement of Parramatta Pool and getting the cost paid for by State funding rather than local residents, since State were the ones who took the pool off the council for the stadium in the first place.
QR codes: Provic loves them and fills her graphics with them. There’s one on her corflute. I love that she’s leaned into the fact that everyone’s had a crash course on how QR codes work in the past two years, and put them in as well as traditional links. She’s using QR codes as contact information links on her posters. She has also devoted pages of her website to both how to access prepoll and postal voting, and to polling places within the ward, on which she’s supplied QR codes as links to access this information at the official NSWEC pages.
Prociv has also got a page on her website about drawing cartoons as a way to keep busy during COVID. Given her background in Arts Education, I love that she decided to make this suggestion for anyone on her website during a lockdown.
NB: for my own amusement, while I was initially looking over Prociv’s website for this election, her page on her running mates was using placeholder images of a Socialist Alliance How to Vote card for the NSW Senate from the 2019 federal election, and pictures of the proposed parklands at Wentworth Point as stand ins for candidate pictures. I’m tickled that Prociv was using a mock up with one of Price’s how to votes.
Paul NoackPaul Noack is the second Labor on the ticket. Normally I’d say this means his likelihood of being elected is extremely low, however without the Liberals running, he’s at least worth considering seriously. He is a retired AWU official and also recently retired as a “Fire Fighter Organiser” which sounds like it’s from the RFS? In any case, he’s got definite strong organiser and networking experience between the two roles.
Noack lists his interests as community parks and green spaces and better public transport for Wentworth Point, sustainable development and increased community consultation.
Noack lives at Wentworth Point and is campaigning on that point. Rosehill Ward is a ward split by a number of geographical boundaries (Parramatta River and Rosehill Gardens Racecourse), leading to three-ish population clusters with different priorities. You have the Harris Park/South Parramatta section to the west with its proximity to the CBD and strong Indian and Maronite Catholic communities, the Rydalmere/Ermington section north of the river which still has industrial sections and a lot of older family housing, and the Silverwater/Newington/Wentworth Point end, which is largely all new-build in the past 20 years, HEAVILY medium to high density, populated with young professionals and definitely the Japanese/Korean end of the ward. (Newington is the suburb that was built as the athletes village for the Sydney Olympics, for my out of town friends).
Rosehill could use someone living around Wentworth Point electorate in some ways, as it’s definitely an area that is still getting infrastructure in place. One of the achievements last council was getting a better access bridge from Wentworth Point over to Rhodes shops for residents. There’s also a proposed new High School for Wentworth Point beside the very shiny new Primary School. I went past the land on the weekend on my bike, and at the moment it’s a very fenced off weedy peninsula. Labor’s proposal is that the remainder of the peninsula, once the high school is in place, should be public parkland rather than completely devoted to school ovals. From my perspective, that’s probably a smart move: while Newington Nature Reserve is just opposite, the whole area of it is definitely more devoted to walking and cycling paths and an excellent playground on the other side of the Armoury that is quite a hike to get to from Wentworth Point proper. Some more little kid playgrounds and a public oval would actually be a valuable addition for local residents – even though the Point is just beyond the Olympic Park and Bicentennial Park complex, there is not really many spaces for say, family cricket or soccer games, or to take under 5s to play. There are AMAZING facilities right next door but most of them aren’t set up for casual sports use. A lot of the park land in the area is actually wetlands and bird habitat with winding paths through more than your local sports oval.
Now I love Bicentennial Park and the bike tracks through Newington dearly and spent a lot of lockdown in them, but Wentworth Point could definitely use another park that feels like a local place to take the kids to run around from the apartment towers nearby.
Picking through what is public on his social media, he supports the Aus Republican movement.
Now, most of the Wentworth Point policies are currently supported and put forward by Dr Prociv, but having a Councillor from what is a rather edge section of the ward that has a growing population certainly would be good for hyper local reasons.
Sinead SimpkinsFacebook:
https://www.facebook.com/sineadsimpkins4rosehillward/Sinead Simpkins lives in Rydalmere, meaning Labor are running a candidate from each chunk of the ward. Simpkins is 27 years old and currently works in Early Childhood Education. She was hard hit by the COVID job market: she basically had just finished up a Masters at the end of 2018 and then lost her new job as a legal assistant in the first wave of 2020 job losses (
SMH article here) and has direct experience with Centrelink, robodebt, the current rental markets and all the fun there of trying to break into work when no one is hiring young people.
She’s officially Labor Left and very Young Labor, with degrees that are definitely aimed at a future in politics. A scroll through her personal facebook is a lot of campaigning on social issues, climate activism and votes for herself and friends for various youth political gigs. She also appears to have links to ParraParents, which makes sense as a ECE educator in the area – ParraParents is very into local parks, play areas for kids and activities for children.
Her personal interests for local council revolve around public transport: particularly better bus and ferry services, as Rydalmere is dependent on these until the new light rail finishes. Rydalmere and Ermington do need these, as they’re fenced in on one side by Victoria Road and the other by the river. It’s very much an area you need to get out of before you can transfer to faster public transport links. She’s also interested in Sustainable Development and more Environmentally Sustainable Initiatives. She’d also like better dog parks in the area (and has a very cute dog herself!) She still plays hockey in a local league.
I like Simpkins quite a bit. She makes the point that she’s one of the few young candidates running in the ward, and the council at the moment is quite retiree heavy. However, she is also third on the ballot and clearly here to get some campaigning experience from the branch.
Overall opinion:
I expect Labor to do very well this election, in no small part because of the withdrawal of all Liberal candidates. Patricia Prociv seems to have used her time usefully during her last term. I think between Paul Noack and Sinead Simpkins I have a minor preference for Simpkins, in that I honestly think another younger councillor with direct experience of unemployment and renting is never a bad thing in a council, but with full knowledge this run is mostly training.
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