Why I Started Barney Party Australia
I grew up in Leeton, a country town in the Riverina region of NSW. If you've lived somewhere like this, you've probably seen the pattern. People leave for the cities, and once they go, the shops close. Then the schools. Then the hospital.
Leeton's hospital is a good example. The jobs on offer here pay noticeably less than the same role in Sydney or Melbourne, so there's little reason for a doctor or teacher to choose Leeton over the city when the city pays more and has more of everything. The result is a hospital with no full-time resident doctors, just local GPs covering on-call. Surgical wards have sat empty because there's no one to staff them. At one point a ward was even found to be 11cm below the legal standard required to operate.
Regional and rural Australia generates something like 30% of the country's GDP. You wouldn't know it from what comes back to us. No growth, no incentive for new doctors or teachers, and the towns just keep shrinking.
For a long time I figured that was just how it was. Then Helen Dalton won the state seat here and started raising these issues in NSW Parliament, the first time in years I'd seen someone from this area actually get a platform. Things were being talked about that hadn't been for a long time.
That's part of why I started the Barney Party. My name's Simon Barnhill, and "Barney" has been my nickname for years. It's also Aussie slang for an argument, which is the joke. Australian politics is one long barney, people yelling past each other over basic legislation while nothing actually gets fixed. We're the Barney Party, and we're not here for the barneys. Just here to get on with the job.
I'm not trying to be a career politician. For now I'm a PDHPE teacher at Griffith High School, and I want to keep living as an everyday Australian and build up more experience before going further into politics myself. If there are people in other electorates who believe in what we're doing and want to run under the Barney Party, I'd be glad to back them.
- Honest, transparent government
- Policies that help everyday Australians
- Support for regional and rural communities
- A voice for people who've been ignored
