Having served on Hornsby Shire Council and running for another term in the recent Local Government Elections, Tania Salitra is the Greens Party candidate for the state seat of Hornsby.
During her local government campaign, Tania noticed that the concerns raised by residents were the result of inadequate state representation rather than a lacklustre local council.
‘People are angry and frustrated at the lack of attention the Liberals gave… they were in power for a decade, and they sat on their hands doing nothing for the major issues people are facing,’ explains Tania. ‘It’s incompetence after incompetence, everything they touch turns into a debacle. It’s insane what they get away with.’
Aligned with the Greens for the past five years, Tania has been a lifelong environmentalist, even swearing off seafood in 1985 to help protect the marine ecosystem. She is concerned with Hornsby’s tree canopy and the state of the climate crisis.
These issues feed into, as Tania explains, realities facing Hornsby residents, as a diminishing tree canopy will only worsen with the looming threat of overdevelopment.
‘We need to protect our rural lands and leave them as the vital greenbelt that they are,’ says Tania. ‘I fought the subdivision of rural lands while I was on Council, but it was only the Greens that opposed any further subdivision in the rural lands… Doing the property developers bidding, we will see a push for what’s happened in Box Hill and Kellyville to our rural lands.’
Other prominent issues are traffic congestion, especially on New Line Road, and the lack of bus services and parking at the Cherrybrook Metro Station. During her time on Council, Tania requested the release of the Liberal $20 million traffic study of New Line Road.
‘All [the Liberals] could come up with was an announcement for $70 million of funding for one kilometre of road. People that use that road daily like myself know that’s not going to fix the problem,’ says Tania. ‘Why can’t we find what the cheaper, easier things are and get working on those while we wait for the $70 million that will probably never turn up?’
Residents of Hornsby routinely complain about the lack of public school options for their children. Believing this to be unacceptable, a top policy for Tania is halting the overfunding of private schools which has come at the expense of public schools, and advocating to improve the public system for Hornsby.
‘Hornsby is desperate for a co-educational high school,’ says Tania. ‘We had the Liberal state treasurer as our state member for a decade. It’s a travesty that nothing was done to improve our children’s ability to access quality education.’
As the Greens candidate, protecting threatened species, stopping native forest logging, and transitioning to 100 per cent clean energy are her policy positions.
‘We’ve got to get rid of coal and gas, to make sure everyone has access to solar power, to get community batteries so people can actually store renewable energy within our neighbourhoods,’ says Tania.
Tania Salitra is the Greens Party candidate.
