NEW Victorian Greens leader Ellen Sandell has reflected on how her formative years in Mildura shaped her as a person and as a politician.
Born in Alice Springs, she moved with her family to Mildura when she was five and spent about 13 years in Sunraysia before moving to Melbourne for university.
As a student at Sacred Heart Primary School and St Joseph’s College, Ellen was an avid netballer, tennis player and member of the Electric Light Theatre.
“Everyone is thrown together and really needs to look after each other,” Ms Sandell said.
“That sense of looking after each other and having a really strong sense of neighbours and community, that set a very strong foundation for me.”
She said growing up near the river established a very strong connection to nature, country and the land.
As a teenager during the millennium drought, she witnessed the toll the event took on growers, families and the whole community.
“Knowing and realising and learning that that wasn’t just a natural event, it was fuelled by climate change, and climate change is making droughts, fires, floods worse and more frequent, really galvanised me,” she said.
“I think that governments let regional areas down by not acting on some of the big issues like climate change because it does affect the regions even more than anywhere else.”
Ellen has now spent more than half her life in Melbourne but she keeps an ear out for issues that affect the town she grew up in and where her family still lives.
“There have been some really big issues in Mildura around healthcare and the hospital, and we were very pleased to see the hospital come back into public hands after such a strong community campaign,” she said.
Health equity is an issue close to Ms Sandell’s heart after her father Peter lost his battle with melanoma and cancer in 2014, the year she was first elected to state Parliament.
“He had to come to Melbourne for so much of his treatment, and that’s such a big ask for so many people,” she said.
“I saw what it’s like to miss out, that you have to move away to get treatment … treatment that anyone should be entitled to.”
Asked about her party’s current position on whether a passenger train should return to Mildura, Ellen said it remained a longstanding equity issue.
“Everyone in regional and rural Victoria deserves to have proper access to public transport,” Ms Sandell said.
“I was in Year 9 when the (Bracks) government promised to bring back the passenger train, and I remember thinking ‘Great, if I have to go to university in Melbourne, I’ll be able to get the train’.
“Then I got to university, the train wasn’t there and then decades later, the train is still not there.
“It’s just outrageous that people don’t have the same access to public transport as people in the rest of the state.”
She said electing Western Victoria MP Sarah Mansfield as the co-deputy of the Victorian Greens was a clear sign the party had regional Victorians’ interests at heart.
“I’d encourage people to look at what the Greens are really calling for,” she said.
“What we’re calling for is action on the housing crisis so that everyone has an affordable place to live.
“We’re calling for cost-of-living relief and for actually reining in the supermarket duopoly.
“We’re talking about acting on climate change so that regional areas can thrive and survive.
“If the Greens’ policies were implemented they would disproportionately benefit regional and rural areas.”
