Hi, I’m Sophie MCNEILL.
I was born in Bunbury in a family of four girls. As a teenager, I learnt about the horrors faced by the East Timorese people in their fight for freedom from Indonesian occupation. I was so outraged by the injustices my own government had turned a blind eye to, I became involved in the movement to support East Timor’s independence. When East Timor had to rebuild in the wake of its historic successful referendum and the militia led violence, I borrowed a video camera from my public highschool, fundraised for a flight, and flew over and shot a documentary highlighting the health crisis that was now gripping the newly independent country. I discovered the importance of powerful, brave investigative journalism.
Since then, I have dedicated myself to a journalism career devoted to shining a light on injustices around the world. In 2003, I investigated the case of a Palestinian asylum seeker who died in a Port Hedland detention centre, after being refused health care under John Howard’s horrendous mandatory detention policy. In 2006, I moved to the Middle East, living in Beirut and Jerusalem, covering conflicts throughout the region, and uncovering war crimes committed against civilians in Palestine, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, including the killing of five children in Afghanistan by Australian special forces soldiers.
As the ABC’s Middle East correspondent, I spent much of my time covering the Syrian refugee crisis, and in 2015, my reporting helped to reunite a Syrian family that had become separated in Europe. As a reporter at ABC’s Four Corners, I assisted in exposing the mass detention of Uyghur muslims in Xinjiang by the Chinese Communist Party and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest by the Bolsonaro government.
After years of reporting and human rights advocacy, I came to the realisation that the climate emergency was our biggest human rights crisis, and that much of the suffering I had witnessed around the world would pale in comparison to what was in store if we did not urgently cut emissions from fossil fuels.
I left journalism to dedicate my time to climate advocacy and working to stop new gas expansion in Australia. WA is the world’s 2nd largest exporter of LNG, a dangerous fossil fuel, and our contributions to the climate crisis are having a real tangible, negative impact on people everywhere.
And it’s affecting people here, too. The revolving door between the Labor and Liberal parties and fossil fuel lobbyists has us fronting billions of dollars in handouts to Woodside and Santos, at the expense of hospitals, housing, and education for Western Australians.
My husband and I are raising our boys here in WA. I want our state to be leading the way on climate change. We have all the natural resources at our fingertips to turn WA into a renewables superpower.
But to do it, we need people in government who will fight for it.
We need to vote. We need you.
