User:Rebecca/Drafts/Colleen Hartland
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Colleen Hartland (born 1959) is an Australian activist and politician. A long-time activist against the Coode Island toxic chemical storage facility and former City of Maribyrnong councillor, she was elected as a Victorian Greens member of the Victorian Legislative Council at the 2006 state election.
Hartland was born in Morwell, and left school at the age of 17 before moving to Melbourne to find work. She settled in Footscray, and gained employment as a social worker. Hartland became concerned about the handling of toxic chemicals in the area, and co-founded the Hazardous Materials Action Group (Hazmag) in the wake of the United Transport fire in 1990. The organization soon began advocating for the removal of the major chemical storage facility at Coode Island, located close to houses in the suburb, and Hartland served as the group’s main spokesperson in the subsequent campaign. The group was suddenly thrown into prominence during the following year, when an explosion at Coode Island sent tons of toxic gas into the air in the area on 21 August 1991.
Hartland was frequently quoted in the media in the wake of the Coode Island explosion, and was heavily critical of the safety procedures in use at the time; a position supported by a subsequent safety audit, which found approximately 400 breaches of regulations. She ran as an independent for the seat of Footscray at the 1992 election on a largely environmental platform, but polled only 1.6% of the vote. She remained a prominent figure in the continued campaign to move the Coode Island facility to a less risky site, which by 1993 had become a going concern for the government. She supported a plan to shift the facility to isolated former military land at Point Wilson instead of the Kennett government’s preferred site of the environmentally sensitive Point Lillias, and was involved in the successful campaign against the latter site. The subsequent decision to retain and upgrade the existing Coode Island facility, however, sparked an enraged response, with Hartland briefly threatening the government with a blockade of the facility. Though she had had a good relationship with the Labor opposition during this period, she had similar clashes with the party after they took government in 1999 and also decided to retain Coode Island, unsuccessfully fighting plans for a complete rebuild of the site in 2002. The issue lost frequency after this point, however, with campaigns against the facility largely dying down in recent years.
Hartland campaigned for a council seat on the City of Maribyrnong as a Victorian Greens candidate in 2003, and was successful, becoming one of the first Greens councilors in the state. She campaigned heavily on issues of public transport, particularly at Yarraville and Seddon, and chaired the council’s drug strategy committee, before stepping down from the council in 2005.
Hartland became increasingly active in the Victorian Greens after leaving Maribyrnong Council, and contested and won preselection for the top position on the party’s ticket in the Western Metropolitan Region for the 2006 election, where the Greens were considered an outside chance to win the seat. She subsequently served as their spokesperson on drug policy during early 2006, launching the radical proposals, which advocated for trials of medically prescribed heroin, supervised injecting rooms, expanding needle exchanges, restricting alcohol advertisements, and establishing an institute to research drug use in the state, in advance of the 2006 election campaign. She served as the Greens’ spokesperson on Aged Care, Welfare, Disability and Urban Environment during the campaign itself. Hartland ultimately found herself in an extremely close race with the fourth Labor candidate, former City of Wyndham mayor Henry Barlow, and initially looked to have been defeated when Barlow was declared the winner by 47 votes. However, the tight result led to a recount, and tighter scrutineering by the Greens saw her surpass Barlow. She was declared the winner the next day, and was sworn in as a member of the Legislative Council in mid-December 2006.
