By Michael Newhouse
IF JOHN Howard is destined to go down in history as “Lazarus with a triple bypass”, then the new Victorian Greens MP, Colleen Hartland, is happy to be listed with the Prime Minister – at least for the moment.
Although they might not be the most likely pair of ideological bedfellows, Ms Hartland is, like Mr Howard once was, the political comeback star of the moment, after she stole the final Western Metropolitan seat from under Labor’s nose last week.
“Absolutely, I’m quite happy to concede that,” she said, when asked her whether she could adopt the Prime Minister’s famous Lazarus quote, in which he mocked his own chances of making a political comeback.
Last week the Victorian Electoral Commission announced Ms Hartland had unexpectedly won the final Upper House spot in Western Metropolitan by just 129 votes, following a recount that ran from Wednesday afternoon into the early hours of Thursday morning.
Ms Hartland, who has lived in Footscray for the past 20 years, was woken at 4am on Thursday to the news she had won the seat, which she had all but given up hope on 24 hours earlier.
Her win has helped the Greens to achieve a big share of the balance of power in the Legislative Council.
The Greens will hold three seats in the newly reformed Upper House, and will share the balance of power with the Nationals, who hold two seats.
“I was still not really prepared to believe it because it has been a real rollercoaster,” she said when Star visited her at work on Thursday afternoon.
Ms Hartland, who works as an elderly-tenant support worker in Williamstown, where she has worked for the past five years, was one of the first Greens councillors elected to the City of Maribyrnong, and has been a well-known environmental activist in Melbourne’s West for more than two decades.
“What it will actually mean is that all of the campaigning that I’ve been doing for the last 25 years will now move into a very different role,” she said.
That role will include a continued focus on environmental issues, as well as include an effort to increase government accountability, although Ms Hartland said further policy direction would be developed in the coming months.
“I have very specific things about the West that I will want to see, especially about toxics,” she said.
She said the party would use its three Upper House seats to negotiate with all other parties during the next four years.
“We believe that the balance of power is a huge responsibility and it’s not something to be treated lightly.
“It has to be treated with respect, so as each issue comes up we will decide how that issue will be dealt with,” Ms Hartland said.
But when Ms Hartland moves into Parliament she will probably have a better knowledge of the institution than most debutant MPs, having worked as a pantry hand in the parliamentary kitchen during the dying days of the Cain-Kirner Government in the early 1990s.
“I used to make their cups of tea and coffee and serve their lunches,” she said, adding that her political activism had made the relationship more than a little unusual.
“It was a very odd situation because I’ve always been very politically active,” Ms Hartland said with a slight smile on her face.
She said she was looking forward to seeing some of her old colleagues who were still working in the parliamentary kitchen, but said it would be a little strange being on the other side of the divide.
“I’ve worked for a lot of years as a cook and a pantry hand and a cleaner, went to uni when I was 40 and got my degree, and now I’m going in to Parliament.”
