#12 Independent Senator Tammy Tyrrell

Tammy Terrell, an Independent Senator for Tasmania, discusses her background in the employment services and training sector and her journey into politics. She emphasizes the importance of helping people and the impact of unemployment on individuals and their communities. Tammy also talks about her split from the Jackie Lambie Network and her commitment to representing the people of Tasmania as an independent. She highlights the achievements she has made in securing homes and resources for the state through her role in the Senate. Despite the split, she still maintains respect and love for Jackie Lambie and their shared priority of serving Tasmania. Welcome to the Voices of Franklin Podcast, I'm your host Steve Williams. Today I'm talking to Independent Senator for Tasmania Tammy Terrell. Tammy grew up in Northwest Tasmania and after school worked mostly in the employment services and training sector. In 2014 she started working for Senator Jackie Lambie and after eight years or so as a staffer she contested the 2022 Senate elections and was duly elected as a Senator for the Jackie Lambie Network. About three months ago or so Tammy had something of a falling out with the Jackie Lambie Network and is now an Independent Senator. Tammy Terrell very much in the style I think of Jackie Lambie, wears a hat on a sleeve and is very unpretentious. So if you like that style of politics I think you should enjoy this interview. Senator Tammy Terrell, welcome to the podcast. Morning, how are you? Very well thanks. Now you were elected to the Senate a couple of years ago on the Jackie Lambie Network platform, so you've got four more years to go and before that you worked for something like eight years with Jackie Lambie's office but presumably that's not the whole story of how you got into politics. So can you tell the listener how that happened? Basically I had no political aspirations at all, so I've worked in a lot of community engaged areas, local government, employment services, a group training company, registered training organisations. So all of my working life I've been focused on helping people get educated and get the services that they require to make their lives better. Then I stumbled upon a job with Jackie not long after she got elected for the very first time and I discovered that there's more than one way to help people and being in a political office was a very good way to make some real difference in people's lives and help them get connected. Then I stumbled into a situation where Senator Abetz was put at the bottom of the ticket and Jackie wanted to have a run at that election and see how we fared. She convinced me that it would be a great thing to do. So that's where I landed in an election campaign and this is where we are now. We're in a very good position to help people. Yes, so a lot of your previous work, I suppose you could call it in the employment services or training for employment, that kind of sphere. Yes. So with the training I was helping apprentices and trainees in dairy traineeships, police traineeships after school, all the way through to boilermaker welders, dual trade electricians. Back in those days, APPM was still kicking the pulp. So it was a really nice place to be in because kids would come in at 16, 17, not have a clue what they wanted to do with their lives, get into an apprenticeship or traineeship and you would see them blossom and grow and it was really nice. A lot of the kids that I helped get into education back then are prominent business people in Tasmania today. So you know a lot about how soul-destroying unemployment can be, not just for the individual but their whole family, their whole social network. Well, their social network can be destroyed as well. It can because if you're not working, your self-value and the money that you need to interact with people on a regular basis, because I don't know about you, but every time a mate or a friend or a family member is like, breakfast, coffee, do you want to go out for tea, do you want to go out for dinner, there's always a cost involved and it's sort of like it's really hard when you're living on minimum wage and below actually when you're on Centrelink. You don't have the money to travel to get to a coffee. You don't have the money to buy a coffee and even if a mate says to you, look it's my shower, I'll come anyway, but that doesn't make you feel good. It makes you feel like you're not an equal in value and worth because somebody's shouting you all the time. And I don't think people mean it that way. I know I don't. I do it for friends now that I know are not as well off as I am or as lucky as I am. But I've been there as well. I left an employment situation where I was not treated very well and it was either leave or be pushed out. So I chose to leave, but that actually hurt me mentally quite a bit. I had 18 months where I didn't work and my partner was working at the time as a spray painter, but he was doing lots and lots of hours to allow me to mentally heal. But I know I was stuck at home with the kids. I shouldn't say stuck, but I was at home with the kids doing all the right things. But yeah, whenever you have a job, it sort of gives you something a little bit extra. And I don't know about you, but my kids would, even now, it's like what does mum do for a living? Oh, she's a politician or she works for an admin company or she works for Central Coast Council. There's a bit of pride when you have a job, I think, that's a little bit different to anything else. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, we still have governments that treat the unemployed as if it's their fault and we have this mutual obligation rigmarole and we're meant to think that they... Mutual obligation has turned into a horrible thing. Mutual obligation can be, in certain instances, okay. I had clients back in the day that I was the only reason they stepped out of the house. I was the only reason that they came into town. And that's good because people do need social interaction. And if you're unemployed for a long period of time, you turn into a hermit. You disappear within yourself. And having to come out into the real world every now and again is required because you can't do it on your own. I always say, too, that it takes a village to raise a child and to look after people within the community and it's true. If you don't have friends and family, your next door neighbour or the esmé down the road who knows exactly what's going on in the community will know if you haven't been seen for a couple of days and will send up a flare to come looking for you and make sure that you're okay. Mutual obligation has been turned into a punishment and I don't think that's what it was ever intended to be. I know my clients, I used to treat them with a lot of respect and kindness because I understood how traumatic it was to be unemployed because a lot of these people were highly intelligent, skilled people. They'd just fallen into a time where they weren't able or couldn't find the right place to be. Yeah. It's such an important subject and material and we could spend a whole half hour just talking about it and maybe we will one day. But for today, can we move on to your split a few months ago with the Jackie Lambie Network? Yep. We were told that you weren't representing the party in a way that the party would have preferred. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Well, that was the feedback I got that I needed to do better and that I wasn't representing them in the light that they wanted me to do so. But I equate it to a bit like a divorce. If somebody is unhappy in the relationship, you shouldn't keep being in that relationship just to make sure that the kids are okay. People seem to understand the divorce analogy a little bit better than most these days. But Jackie's and my priority was always to look after the people of Tasmania and we will still do so. But we're going to do it as individuals now. When the board said to me that I needed to do better, I needed to represent them in a different light, it's like, well, this is how I came into this situation and you knew who I was as a person and you knew how I travelled this road. I was doing everything I could to make sure that Tasmanians were looked after so that I couldn't see anywhere where I needed to improve or change. Because the Tammy that I am today as an independent from the Jackie Lambie Network is exactly who I was when I was representing the network, how I campaigned and how I worked with Jackie for the eight years prior. Tammy Turrell hasn't changed at all. She still puts her pants on one leg at a time. But Jackie and I will still work together. Tasmania punches above its weight with its representation in the Senate. The people that live in Tasmania per capita to other states and territories, 12 senators is huge and we have the best avenues to actually bring back with stuff like the House and Australia Future Fund. If we didn't have power in the Senate, I wouldn't have been able to secure 1,200 homes for Tasmania alone in the House and Australia Future Fund because we weren't guaranteed 100 homes. I wouldn't be able to negotiate money for resources here in Tasmania, lives and fissures on the northwest coast. They feed 75% of those that are homeless and in need in Tasmania through that program. They needed money to buy the warehouse that they work out of so they could supply services and food and transport stuff from that warehouse. I worked as a negotiator between the government and them to get them the money so they could buy it, transfer it through the state government. Yes. So these are some of your policy priorities, your interests. We'll get onto those in a sec. Sorry. Just to finish off this subject. The network. It wasn't so much that you were having policy disagreements, even though there are always policy disagreements. Between two close friends, there will always be policy disagreements and that's just a fact of life. But you were- I can honestly say that I still love Jackie like a sister and I still respect her as a politician. I don't want to see her fail because her priorities are different to mine, but our ultimate priority is always Tasmania and it always will be. Yes. Hopefully all Tasmania's senators would say the same thing. I noticed on your voting record, you and Jackie Lambie vote the same like 95% of the time. It's not as if you're voting differently. No. Yeah, it's just to finish off, it's just this perception by this board that you mentioned and perhaps Jackie Lambie herself. It's just the way people conduct their politics, I suppose, the whole PR thing. I guess that's what it can only boil down to. Campaigning, that sort of thing. Yeah. Look, I still, like I said, I fundamentally believe in what the network stands for and I will still campaign in that manner because we fought for this seat that I won on the platform that we were going to do better for Tasmanians, that we were going to be the grown-ups in the room and make hard decisions, but I will never, ever, ever cross the line and put Mainlanders above Tasmanians and I know that sounds terrible, but at the end of the day, you can call me whatever you like from Queensland, but if I come down to Hewanville and I walk down the street, if three people say to me, you are doing an amazing job, they're the voices that I should be listening to. They are the ones that I should be taking my cues from. I stayed at this quirky little B&B down in Hewanville about a month or so back and the lady that ran the B&B, she is a living legend. She has all these kimonos and artworks, et cetera, but she gave me some really good advice about being true to myself and staying close to the people of Tasmania and not to worry about what other people think outside of Tasmania and I'm going to hold on to that because your opinion as a Tasmanian voter is the one that I should be worried about and nobody's told me I'm doing a bad job. Nobody has said, oh, you know what, you should have stayed with the Jackie Lambie Network because you were nothing without it. I'm a federal politician in Tasmania who has all the good intention to represent people from Queenstown, from Hewanville, from Richmond, anywhere within, King Island, Flinders Island. Your opinions matter to me more than anything, except for maybe the man I live with. His opinion sort of matters a bit to it. And you have your political advisors, I presume, who guide you, as well as your own instincts and your own life experience. Yeah, I do. I'm lacking in staff at the moment. I've got a few job adverts coming up, so if anybody's interested in working for an independent senator in Launceston, look my number up. We love independence. I'm with the Voices of Franklin, as you know, and the Voices movement more generally. We are people who find the major political parties now put themselves first and their own careers, not the people. That's why people, I think, like the Jackie Lambie Network. And that's why a lot of us like the new independence movement, particularly their focus on stronger democracy, which often means things like more transparency, fixing the rorts with political donations, fixing the problem with lack of freedom of information, too much lobbying. You have that whole suite of problems that diminishes our democracy, and I presume you're on the same wavelength there. Yeah. Look, I don't see a lot of lobby groups as such. Oh, that's interesting. I still do talk to lobby groups, but I don't probably do the major rounds that a lot of them do. I focus on trades and groups that come in at home. Even the Black Dog Institute, I focus on Tasmanian statistics and what programs and money I've But at the moment, vaping is a big thing in Parliament because they're wanting to ban it. I love that little personal website, and I'll direct people to your personal website in the show notes. Thank you. Yeah. I'm talking to people that are directly impacted by vaping or who work and live within our communities. I'm not talking to the majors. Yes, I have spoken to Benson & Hedges, but that was about eight months or so ago, and vaping was mentioned. But I don't necessarily care about the major profits earned by those companies. It's more about representing the people here in Tasmania. It's like there's also sheep export legislation coming up very shortly. I'm being lobbied by a lot of mainland organisations because they're going to be impacted, whereas here in Tasmania, we lost the live sheep trade years and years ago, and there was no funding packages allocated to us when we lost it. But I think a lot of people are happy to move forward and see changes happen, but they just need it explained to them in a positive light or an open and conversational light, not a dictatorship, which I feel old politics is dictatorial. Is that the word? Yeah. There's plenty of examples of that, yeah. Yeah. I'm more of a conversationist, and if you can convince me that my opinion is wrong, that's great because it means that I'm learning something. But like I said, with the sheep trade, the government has been trying to canvass me to vote for their legislation, but I'm not getting tied into that because I want to come home and talk to people about what they believe. Yeah. This is banning live sheep. Sorry to interrupt. This is banning live sheep exports, right? Live sheep exports. Yeah. Yeah, which is predominantly a WA export, even though we do profit from it nationally. But I'm not going to say, yes, I'm going to support this legislation when everybody here on the streets is saying, don't care, get rid of it. It's a bit like climate change targets. Sometimes you've got to be a little bit uncomfortable to make better choices for the future. But yeah, I'm not going to vote for something just because lobby groups tell me to. I'm going to vote for something because of what the people here on the ground are telling me. It's great to hear that you're open to changing your mind when new information becomes available. You're not ideologically stuck in some sort of rut. In my first speech I said that I want to do politics differently. I don't want to be a normal politician. And that if I'm wrong, I will say I'm wrong. Because human beings aren't always right. Yeah, that's one of the taglines of the independence movement, doing politics differently. We hate bad behaviour in politics. And we hate the adversarial system where it just becomes a game. And what can I say to beat the other side? The other thing is they waste time. I know there's two or three pieces of legislation that the coalitions have deliberately filibustered for a day and a half, sometimes two days, wasted time just because they're petulant and they feel like they've been cropped and that they weren't heard. The argument that they were putting forward was answered every single time, but they wasted hours and hours of parliamentary time and money just because they didn't get their way. This is what voters hate and it's great that we have such a big crossbench in the Senate. Now getting back to the Senate, the government doesn't have control of the Senate. That's normally the case in Australia these days. Normally they need and they do need. It's a large crossbench of about 19. But Tammy Tyrrell, most legislation, tell me if I'm wrong, will sail through the Senate because it's not controversial. This is the stuff we don't hear about. It gets bipartisan support. There is a lot of stuff that gets through the Senate as non-contra. Every Thursday used to be non-contra day, non-controversial day. That was for things that needed to get through quickly and easily to fund public service, programs, all kinds of things. But sometimes non-contra is controversial. That's why the Senate is the house of review. It's to catch the hidden secrets that sometimes are tied within. There is always the risk that you can get comfortable and not question or query legislation. But generally if the coalition and the government of the day agree, it's like it's a winner, winner, chicken dinner because you know there's both sides of parliament and the Greens as well because the Greens are tied to the government a lot. The reason a lot of government legislation gets through is that the Greens have actually done a lot of leak work and have gotten agreements. Bipartisan support is the best day ever. It makes life so much easier when everybody is looking out for the people of Australia and not for their own best interest. Every now and again I will completely disagree with stuff and I will vote against or for one of the major party pieces of legislation. And that's as it should be because if you're representing the people that you've been elected by properly, you've got to reflect a whole collective of opinions. A rainbow is not made up of just one colour. A rainbow is so many different shades and colours. And that's what I've got to listen to as well. Lots of shades, lots of different colours. So you're spending a lot of your time reading proposed legislation? Yes. I spend probably... Actually no, I spend more time out and about talking to people than I do reading. I would say 40% of the time, 30% of the time I'm reading. 60%, 70% of the time I'm doing laps of Tasmania and I'm going to meetings and organisations and social groups to get an understanding of what people are thinking in real time. So yeah, if people have got events that they would like me to go to and listen and talk to, I'm always open. One of the best meetings I went to was University of the Third Age and that was down in Johannesville. And that was a group of young, sprightly souls that had a really wide and diverse group. So we had a fisherman all the way through to a principal of a school slash lawyer. And it was really interesting. We had more in common when we actually got down to it because we cared about Tasmania. We cared about the people in our community and the collective. I love meeting people and talking to people and making sure that I understand what's going on in their communities because a lot of the stuff that I make decisions on have wide and vast ramifications, positive and negative. And if I don't talk to people, I won't understand their niche opinion or thoughts on it, which is why it's important that I'm out and about and doing laps at Tasmania as much as I possibly can. Yeah. And we know a hell of a lot of people are hurting at the moment all over Australia and perhaps even more so in Tasmania. We all know what the problems are. Cost of living, housing crisis, health crisis, hospitals jam-packed with long waiting lists, as bad as it's ever been. I think that's Australia-wide. Generally, I see a feeling in the community that things aren't heading in the right direction. They're heading in the wrong direction. And, of course, the government wants to say things about the international situation causing inflation and so on. But is that your feeling in the community that things have shifted the wrong way? I believe politicians over the last 10 to 15 years have let it slide, let it slip, that they haven't actually been proactive and forward-thinking. The things that we are suffering from today, if we had prepared for it 10 to 15 years ago, we wouldn't be in such a hole now. And it's going to take, not to be a negative Nancy, but it's going to take a very long time, 10, 15, 20 years to get out of this rut. We should have been looking at hospitals and schools and preparing better. We should have actually realised, you know what, if we don't invest in people's time and energy, we're not going to have teachers, doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, all the rest of it. If we make education expensive and hard to get into, people aren't going to do it. So I'm not trying to put the blame anywhere, but if you look at this logically, previous governments have let the ball completely drop. But in saying that, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be planning better now, but we're always going to be running behind. It's going to take a lot to catch up and then get ahead of the game. But politicians, especially the major parties, they're very keen to blame each other. He said, she said, and it's like, it shits me to tears, excuse my language. It really does because I'm like, pull your head out of your bottom and let's just stop blaming each other. We've just wasted an hour doing that when we could have actually moved an hour forward and been on our way to a resolution to try and fix some of this stuff. As a parent, if I allowed my children to do what politicians do, God knows where we would be and God knows where they would be because they'd be just digging themselves deeper and deeper into a hole. Yeah. Very rare to hear a politician, particularly one from a major party, admit a mistake and say, yes, we got this wrong 10 years ago or whatever because of their short term thinking. And I would say because of their over-reliance on the market to take care of things. Whereas in the past, now the distant past, we had governments being much more interventionist in creating healthy markets. Yeah. It just frustrates me because I can see so much potential, especially with like here in Tasmania business-wise. If you look at eco-friendly business plans that have been sitting on a shelf over the last five years just waiting to get off and running. Just to mention how much closer we would be to our climate targets, how much better off we would be with power and energy and housing. We're our own worst enemy a lot of the time in the governments that we elect and the people that are chosen to be our politicians. Nobody wants to be a politician anymore either. Please don't take this the wrong way. I'm not crying into my milk. But it's not an easy job because everybody believes that you're in there for the pension. We don't get pensions anymore, not since 2004. They got voted out. There's only five people in the federal parliament who will get a pension as of now. People call you fat. They call you dumb. They call you stupid. They believe that you earn too much money but that you need to be available 24-7. When I came into politics I asked my family's permission to do this. Luckily they said yes. But even they didn't realise how little time I'm going to spend with them. I'm not saying this because I want your sympathy. At the end of the day I took this job for six years and six years is what I'm going to give you 125% on. But my son rang me this morning as an example at 7.34 or something ridiculous. I haven't had a chance to call him back yet because I was doing a radio interview. I've been in the office doing meetings and going through emails and chatting and hopefully I will get to him sometime in the next hour. But there's no guarantee on that either. I haven't done birthdays, Mother's Day, that kind of thing in the last two years as such because I care about the job that I do and I don't want to rip the people of Tasmania off by dropping the ball. I hear what you're saying loud and clear, Tammy Terrell, about it's not a glamorous job and politicians are regarded down with used car salesmen and on the public trust. And lawyers. Lawyers, well. But it's tricky though. If you look at the people that are on the tickets in each election, there are good people that want to get into this game. But if you don't want to be controlled by a major party, you have to be an independent. But then you're competing against major party money and major party propaganda. Labour, Liberal and the Greens, they can afford to actually buy billboards and hold them for months and months and months. They can afford to put page spreads in local community papers and newspapers. They can afford to roam the state and wrap cars and get corkscrews on every street corner you can think of. Corkscrews are the signs that you see out in Vote 1, just for people who don't know. Whereas an independent, you don't have that financial resource. You don't have the luxury of the databases built over years and years and years. You're relying on your family and friends. So anybody who decides to run as an independent candidate here in Tasmania, if they reach out to me, I don't have a lot of resources. But I will always help someone with a leg up to have a crack because it is the best job, but it's also the worst job. And I understand the time and energy that goes into it to actually have a crack and then lose, even though I didn't lose. But I want more people like me that give a crap about our communities to get into this. Now, it's not a level playing field, as you say. Very hard for independents and almost impossible in the Senate for reasons we won't go into. Tammy Turrell, we've only got a minute or so left. Is there anything else you'd like to say to the people of Tasmania? Support your independent politicians. Hold your major parties to account. Don't let them get away with bullshitty answers. They need to do better. And when they say, oh no, no, no, no, we can't because of process, to hell with that. Change needs to happen in state and federal parliament. We need infrastructure. We need education. We need houses. Don't let the not in my backyard and not in yours mentality hold our communities back and hold people like you and I, Stephen, back from doing good things. Change is hard. Change can hurt people and cause a lot of grief. But you know what? Change can also bring beautiful things into the world and it can put programs and systems in place that will help all of us moving forward. Well, that's a great place to finish, Tammy Turrell. Thank you so much for joining us on the Voices of Franklin podcast. Thank you so much for having us. We appreciate it. Thank you.