In her own words: Amelia Hamer
A transcript of Capital Brief's interview with the Liberal candidate for Kooyong, Amelia Hamer.
The transcript of this interview with Liberal candidate for Kooyong Amelia Hamer has been edited for length, clarity and readability.
I’ve seen you described as a political “moderate”, but that could mean a whole bunch of things. What does that mean to you?
So it's interesting, I actually don't like the word ‘moderate’. A lot of people will automatically describe me as one. But the problem with that word is that it sort of suggests that you're not willing to be bold and you're not willing to say sometimes we need to make hard decisions. Like a lot of people in this area, I consider myself a sort of classical liberal, which is that I think that by and large people should be free to live their lives as they choose, to spend their money as they choose, organise their lives as they choose, marry who they choose, and be free to run their business, to take home the majority of their income. That’s to live basically without the government constantly telling them exactly what they need to be doing every time of the day. Having grown up in this community, and having lots of conversations with people, I think that's where most people sit.
Now, the other side of that is that it’s also really important that we live in a society, right? That means that we look after each other and we create a sense of community. The things that we really value are the fact that we have a social security system, a disability insurance system, the fact that we look after people, our aged care system — we have an ageing society. We need to make sure that we're going to be able to fund all those things not just today, but in 20 or 30 years’ time. That's where responsible government comes in. That's where us being fiscally responsible and saying: ‘Look. We need to make sure that we’re very, very careful about where the government allocates its money so that we can do all the things that we do’.
