2025-03-27
Meet the Candidate
Q&A With Tara Burnett, Greens Candidate for Cooper
Tara is a public school teacher, unionist and renter who is running in the federal electorate of Cooper. If successful, she will make history as the first trans MP in any parliament in Australia. She is proud to call Cooper home, with an incredible arts scene and strong queer community, and she is campaigning to ensure everyone has access to what they need. Tara shares more about her time in the Greens and her campaign.
What drew you to being part of the Greens? What has been the best part of being in the movement?
I first joined the Greens in 2012. I’d actually joined the Labor Party when I was younger, partly because I saw them as the best vehicle for getting rid of John Howard, and partly because I grew up in an Irish Catholic family in Tasmania with strong Labor roots. But I left the ALP in 2008, because of both a lack of internal democracy and a disappointment in how little Rudd actually wanted to change or address from the Howard years.
After some years in the political wilderness, I saw the Greens following breakthroughs in 2010/11 really beginning to address economic justice in a way that spoke to my values and expanded the party’s priorities beyond just the environment to all four pillars, and I signed up to help out when I moved back to Tasmania from the US, where I’d been living at the time.
For me, the best part of being a part of the Greens is seeing stuff have an impact at a state or even national level, improving peoples’ lives, and knowing exactly how it got there - through grassroots, participatory, democratic processes.
Being able to be in a meeting where a policy amendment is proposed, bringing it through state policy committees, taking it to national conference and discussing it with others at plenary, seeing MPs announce it while campaigning for them, and then seeing it passed into law - even if it’s often by a Labor Party who pretend that they came up with it from scratch. That’s a whole policy journey that you can’t go on in any party in this country other than the Greens.
Why did you put your hand up to run?
I’d volunteered on countless campaigns over my time in the party, but apart from having my name as a down-ticket paper candidate support slot back in 2014, I’d not put my hand up to run until 2024.
A few people who I look up to and admire in the party spoke to me about thinking about nominating to run and, after laughing at the first couple, thought about it more seriously, about how I could use both my experience as someone with a long history of active involvement in campaigns with the party and my lived experience as a teacher, unionist, renter and trans woman to build the movement, add to the momentum developed by Celeste Liddle in her campaign, and improve representation for the local community.
What has been the best part of the campaign in Cooper so far?
The support from volunteers. I’m still working full-time - teacher wages are pretty mediocre in Victoria, so I can only really afford to take the final sprint off work - and campaigning while working any job is exhausting, especially an always-on job like teaching.
And a lot of the time I’ve thought about skipping a doorknock, a rally, or a campaign night because of how tired I am after a day or a week of work.
But turning up and seeing so many people, both weekly regulars and fresh faces who’ve never campaigned before, all there to volunteer for that same cause of giving Cooper the progressive representation that the community deserves and the country needs, gives me absolute life every time.
What would it mean to be the first trans MP elected to an Australian parliament?
It’d be tremendous, not necessarily for me personally but for the community. Much like what happened with marriage equality in the ‘10s, it wasn’t obvious just how backwards Australia was on this issue until we looked around the world and saw that most had already addressed the issue.
India and Aotearoa have had trans MPs since the '90s. Most of Europe, Latin America and Canada got them throughout the 2000s and '10s, and even the US has had several state representatives and elected a trans person to their national government last year. But Australia never had anyone except at the local government level.
It’s also important that the representative is someone with politics as radical as their gender, who is willing to fight hard for issues which impact both the trans community and other marginalised communities with which we find solidarity, rather than someone who is going in there with individualist, liberal and self-serving politics.
Imagine if the first trans person elected in Australia was an ALP careerist who voted in line with the SDA and other right-faction homophobes, or a Liberal happy to kick away the ladder and pretend that they weren’t in a party full of face-eating leopards? Trans people deserve better than that!
What words of encouragement or advice would you give to other trans people wanting to get into politics?
If you’ve come out as trans, especially if you’ve lived or worked in a regional or outer suburban area without much of a queer community, you already are a public figure.
You’re already being visible and, whether you’ve intended to or not, represented the community. And by coming out, you’ve taken a step bolder than many people will in their entire lives, and developed the thick skin that is unfortunately a necessary part of being active on the left of politics.
What that means is that – no matter how hard the frothing fascists in Advance, the capitalist divide-and-rulers in the Liberal Party, the two-faced cynics of the Labor Party, or their right-wing masters in the Murdoch media try – they’re not going to do anything worse to you than you’ve likely already experienced, especially if you have family members or colleagues or classmates who weren’t supportive.
The far-right wants us erased, which makes it more important than ever that we’re present with a powerful voice.
What gives you hope? And why?
Acts of resistance happening every day around the world. Seeing oppressed communities coming together in solidarity, whether that be migrants making community and holding on to tradition when demands are put on them to assimilate, or people in Palestine holding on and supporting each other in the face of genocide, or a trans community refusing to be erased by fascists and their useful idiots.