20 questions with the Greens’ Jonathan Sriranganathan

Brisbane Times asked 20 questions of the leading lord mayoral candidates.See all 5 stories.

Jonathan Sriranganathan was Brisbane’s first Greens councillor, holding The Gabba ward from 2016 until his resignation last year.

Sriranganathan, originally elected with his surname shortened to “Sri”, is a poet, activist and musician who previously worked as a tutor, law clerk, band manager and events manager. He also worked as a youth worker in Brisbane and north-east Arnhem Land.

He lives with his partner on a houseboat, moored in a small tributary off the Brisbane River.

Brisbane Times asked all three viable lord mayoral candidates the same 20 questions, which were designed to give voters a feel for both their policy positions and their personality.

Labor candidate Tracey Price’s answers can be found here, while LNP candidate Adrian Schrinner’s answers are here.

Greens Brisbane lord mayoral candidate Jonathan Sriranganathan answers 20 questions from Brisbane Times ahead of the March 16 council election. Credit: Matt Dennien

1. Why are you running?

“Because I think we need change. I’m obviously running because I love this city and I’ve lived here my whole life and I want to make it a better place.

“But right now, the political system is failing ordinary people and we need big changes, particularly in terms of housing affordability, transport reform, and also fixing the underlying flaws of our democratic system, because right now, big business has hijacked the entire political system and ordinary residents have very little control over how their city changes and evolves.”

2. Who is your political role model, and why?

“I don’t have any one particular political role model.

“I think I draw a lot of inspiration from different artists and activists, but I don’t think any of them are really politicians.”

3. And your biggest role model outside of politics?

“I think my parents, honestly.

“They’ve they’ve shaped me in a big way. I guess I’ve drawn a lot of my values from them.

“My father’s experience as a Tamil migrant, coming here and building a new life and acculturating into a different paradigm.

“And then my mum has got this really keen social justice conscience, and that’s probably shaped me more than anyone else I can think of.”

4. Sum up your philosophy to governing in three words.

“Decentralise; localise; democratise.”

5. What was the moment you decided to pursue a political career?

“It was after the 2013 federal election and I went to a Greens branch meeting – I hadn’t joined the Greens – just to see what was going on and how they were preparing for the federal byelection after Kevin Rudd had stepped down.

“I was surprised to see that at that time, the Greens organising capacity in south Brisbane wasn’t particularly strong.

Jonathan Sriranganathan: ‘I’m obviously running because I love this city and I’ve lived here my whole life and I want to make it a better place.’Credit: Matt Dennien

“I’d been involved in other forms of events organising and community activism, and had assumed that other people were doing the party politics stuff, and I realised at that point, ‘oh, geez, we need to build up the Greens in Queensland as an alternative political force’.

“And I think about a year or two later, watching Campbell Newman in office, I was really like, ‘geez, we need to run to replace this guy’.

“So yeah, being a young adult under the Campbell Newman period definitely radicalised me a bit.”

6. What do you see as the three biggest issues facing Brisbane and what plans do you have to deal with them?

“The biggest issue is housing.

“We need to be introducing additional regulatory levers to encourage that housing is well-designed, is climate-appropriate, it’s sustainable, but also that it’s affordable.

“Right now, we’ve left too much of the housing supply up to private developers and private developers don’t actually want housing to get cheaper – if you’re a developer or a property investor or a real estate agent, you want housing to get more expensive.

“So the Greens’ policy solutions – like a vacancy levy on empty real estate, like building more public housing, like freezing rent increases for two years, like cracking down on Airbnb accommodation – these policies are designed to put downward pressure on house prices and rents and that is crucial in terms of addressing rising homelessness.

“The second-biggest issue is definitely transport.

“Our public transport system is really good in a couple of areas and an absolute joke in many parts of the city.

“So the Greens want to create more dedicated high-frequency bus services that run directly between suburbs, because not everyone wants to go all the way into the city.

“We also want to roll out free public transport and we also want to support more investment in active transport infrastructure – pedestrian crossings, more footpaths, separated bike lanes – so that people have viable alternatives to driving.

“I think if we can improve public transport and active transport options, we can give people choices other than having to spend huge amounts of money on their car.

“And the third big issue is really that question of sustainable development and preparing for global warming, because we’re still seeing developers building new housing on the floodplain; we’re still seeing developments that aren’t at all climate appropriate.

“What the Greens are calling for, at a bare minimum, is that all new developments should have 20 per cent of the site area set aside for deep-planted trees.

“We also want to ban development on the most flood-prone parts of the city.

“We want to require developers to ensure that new housing is well ventilated, has enough natural light, is actually comfortable to live in, even during a power cut or a heatwave, and we need to ensure that ordinary people have more meaningful control over how their neighbourhood changes and develops.

“Because right now, developers are designing for profit and that means they cut corners, it means sometimes building design is well below par and, ultimately, it’s the residents that have to deal with those consequences, whereas the developers take their money and run.”

7. On population growth, how big is too big for Brisbane?

“I think when you’re asking questions about population growth, it’s important to define what are the specific issues that we’re trying to address.

“So for example, a lot of people are concerned about population growth because of the traffic congestion impacts, but if we have better public transport, we can accommodate a much larger population.

“Similarly, with housing, people are blaming migration for housing issues, when actually I think the big problem is that we’re treating housing as a commodity and developers are trying to make more money out of housing.

“So people present population growth as a single problem and say, ‘well, what is the optimal number of people to live in the city?’ and the answer is, it depends.

“It depends how much public transport infrastructure can we get? How much green space we can we accommodate? There are parts of the city right now that are already overcrowded, but they could accommodate more people if we had better investment in public infrastructure and facilities.

“There’s no magic number. What we need is for public infrastructure and facilities investment to keep up with population growth.”

8. What’s more important to you – service delivery, or keeping rates low?

“I think there’s a false dichotomy between improving service delivery and keeping rates low because the Greens’ position is that we can dramatically improve the services that the council provides and the projects it invests in without increasing rates for ordinary residents.

“I think the LNP has been very disingenuous about saying that if you want lower library operating hours, or if you want more parkland, that means your rates have to go up.

Jonathan Sriranganathan: ‘I draw a lot of inspiration from different artists and activists, but I don’t think any of them are really politicians.’Credit: Matt Dennien

“That’s a lie.

“Right now, the council has multiple other revenue streams that it can be drawing on and, in particular, we think property developers should pay their fair share – they should be investing more in local infrastructure and community facilities.

“But we can also reduce non-essential spending on wasteful road-widening projects.

“If we reduce spending on wasteful projects, we make developers contribute a little bit more into infrastructure charges, we can deliver better services and projects without putting rates up for ordinary residents.

“But I do think there’s a case to be made for reforming commercial rates to some of the bigger entities, like Queen’s Wharf casino, for example.

“You have big businesses that are taking up a lot of land and have a big impact on the city’s infrastructure, but their rates bills are comparatively low, whereas ordinary owner-occupiers are struggling with really high rates bills.

“So we want to even that balance, put downward pressure on rates for residents and start ensuring that property developers and big business pay their fair share.”

9. Is Brisbane City Council well served by the party political system?

“I think the party political system has a lot of problems at the local government level.

“But I also think that if we got rid of political parties, and people were running as independents, that would have its own problems because people wouldn’t necessarily know the party affiliations of the people who are running.

“We see it in other local governments around Queensland, people run as independents, but actually they belong to a political party.

“But I do think it’s possible to have different parties at the local government level, without so much hostility and adversarialism and tribalism and I think, talking to older councillors and older public servants, in the Campbell Newman era that us-versus-them party tribalism got a lot stronger in Brisbane City Council.

“If I were elected as mayor, I’d like to break down those barriers between different parties and say, ‘look, we might have our own philosophies, but we’re all part of the same council administration – can we find more common ground? Can we work together a bit more?’.

“So even if you have political parties, we should be able to have a system of decision-making that where it’s not just like, government versus opposition.

“Even little things to shift culture like saying, rather than Labor councillors sitting on one side, and Liberal councillors sitting on the other, let’s all sit next to each other.

“Let’s all have afternoon tea in the same break room and let’s stop reinforcing those divisions, because I think that, genuinely, people from different parties do still want the best outcomes for their communities.

“It’s a problem that they’ve gotten into this adversarial mentality, where they can’t agree to anything that the other side has said because it’s going to make them look bad, which I think is a real shame.”

Jonathan Sriranganathan: ‘I do think it’s a shame that we don’t talk to people outside our existing bubbles often enough’Credit: Matt Dennien

10. What has been the most enjoyable thing about your campaign so far?

“The most enjoyable thing has just been meeting more people and also, for me, getting out of the neighbourhoods that I know the best.

“I spent the first 20 years of my life in West Chermside on the northside and I know Brisbane’s northside ’burbs really, really well.

“I honestly haven’t spent quite as much time in places like Calamvale or Rochedale and heading out to those neighbourhoods and connecting with other people and other places.

“It’s been really cool. I’ve become a little bit of a tourist in my own city, which has been nice.

“But yeah, meeting people and exchanging ideas has just been so powerful.

“There are so many people who, otherwise in life, I might not have interacted with and certainly for me, as a musician and an artist, I don’t actually often interact with quite as many people in the upper professional class.

“So I guess I’ve been meeting more people from a broader range of demographics and that’s been cool, to meet people and understand their perspectives on the world, but also share my ideas.

“I could go on all day about this stuff, but I do think it’s a shame that we don’t talk to people outside our existing bubbles often enough and the campaign’s always been really good for forcing candidates to talk to people that they wouldn’t otherwise normally interact with.”

11. And the least?

“The least enjoyable part of the campaign has definitely been the negative adversarial attacks.

“I’ve really tried hard to avoid directly attacking other individual candidates.

“I’ve been quite critical of other parties’ policies, but I’ve tried to avoid attacking individuals.

“Certainly the major parties – and particularly the Liberal Party – have really attacked me as an individual and that’s been kind of sucky.”

12. If elected lord mayor, could you work with councillors from other parties – or independents – if your party does not get a majority in City Hall?

“Yeah, I’m definitely open to working collaboratively across party lines.

“I’ve done that for the past 7½ years because, as the one Greens councillor in Brisbane, to get outcomes for my community I had to be able to collaborate with both Labor and Liberal councillors.

“I was able to do that; we secured some pretty significant improvements for my area, including the new footbridge from Kangaroo Point to the CBD, a free bus loop for West End, these are big positive improvements for the community I represented that were only possible because I was willing to work across party lines.

“If I were the mayor, I would definitely seek to create a more collegiate atmosphere where councillors from different parties are cooperating and collaborating and seeking to find common ground rather than us-versus-them tribalism.”

13. How would your administration leverage the Olympics?

“The biggest opportunity for the Olympics is securing more public housing, securing more investment in new public transport infrastructure that we really need, and supporting diversification of local culture and community facilities.

“My concern with the way the Olympics has been planned and proposed at the moment, is that the kinds of public transport projects that are being proposed are mostly about shunting people in and out of the stadium, as opposed to building the inter suburban links we really need.

“And, at the moment, there’s no significant public housing on the table.

“We should be demanding that the new athletes’ village is 100 per cent public housing, because it’s built on land is owned by the government, but right now the government is proposing to privatise and sell off that public housing for faux-affordable housing.

“We really need to be pushing for more public housing, for public transport – the kind that we actually need – and also for more investment in the local, so local arts, local live entertainment, local sport and community facilities, rather than just invest in big stadiums.

“The other opportunity that I’m interested in exploring further is how can we ensure that the Olympics benefits the city as a whole, rather than just a few big businesses or international sports coverage companies?

“It needs to be an Olympics where the benefits flow widely throughout the community, rather than the community bearing the costs and then the profits flowing to big business.”

14. What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made, and what did you learn from it?

“This is gonna sound like a snarky attack, but the biggest mistake I made in my early years as a councillor was having too much faith in the Labor Party’s ability to listen to residents.

“I’m not casting aspersions on any one individual, but in my first years as a councillor with projects like the Lytton Road widening, I had thought that if I made an evidence-based argument to the Labor Party about why they shouldn’t kick 50 people out of their homes, and they shouldn’t support wasting $115 million widening a 700-metre stretch of road in East Brisbane, I thought they would listen to evidence and reason.

“And they didn’t.

Jonathan Sriranganathan: ‘It needs to be an Olympics where the benefits flow widely throughout the community, rather than the community bearing the costs and then the profits flowing to big business.’Credit: Matt Dennien

“What I should have recognised from the outset, was they were so beholden to the influence of big property developers and construction companies that they were incapable of understanding what the community on the ground actually wanted.

“I think we could have stopped that waste, we could have saved those 50 homes, we could have stopped the council wasting $150 million widening Lytton Road, if we had recognised earlier that the Labor Party was part of the problem.

“But we tried to work collaboratively with them and they kind of misled the community about what their position was.

“And I think that’s a great shame because 50 people were forced out of their homes and it was because I made the mistake of trusting the Labor Party.”

15. How do you commute to work?

“I ride my bicycle most of the time.

“Very occasionally, if it’s raining really badly, I might drive. But most days, it’s riding my bicycle.”

16. What’s the best concert, artistic or sporting event you’ve been to?

“I’ve been to so many amazing events over the last couple of years, it’s really hard to pick any one.

“I think the best events I’ve been to are the really small local gigs that happen like in the basement of a bar, or in someone’s backyard, or under a house, where you’re right there next to the performers and the action and you feel immersed in a local community.

“I haven’t enjoyed as much the really big stadium concerts, or the mega events – I really liked those small local community events.

“I don’t want to name any one particular one because it would be too hard, but I’ve been to some great gigs under houses and I think it’s a bit of a shame that noise complaints and the loss of those under-house adaptable spaces means that the house gig in Brisbane is starting to die out a little bit.

“But gigs under houses are where it’s at.”

17. What is your favourite meal?

“A really good vego curry, one that’s been cooked for a couple of hours so that the spices can really soak in.

“I hate it when people rush a curry and they just cook it for 20 minutes and the flavours don’t really soak into the veggies, but a proper vego curry with some lentils and chickpeas in there as well, heaps of chilli, heaps of different spices, that’s I think my favourite meal.

“But I often don’t have the time to cook it anymore.”

Jonathan Sriranganathan: ‘Gigs under houses are where it’s at.’Credit: Matt Dennien

18. What three words best describe you?

“I don’t think it’s for me to say.

“What three words best describe me? Passionate, maybe? Creative?

“Honestly, I find it hard to answer because it feels weird to answer a question about how other people would probably perceive me.

“But yeah, let’s go with passionate, creative and occasionally frustrated, to be honest.”

19. Do you have political ambitions beyond City Hall?

“I don’t necessarily have electoral political ambitions, but I definitely want to help change the whole political system.

“I think when people ask the question ‘what are your political ambitions?’ they mean ‘are you going to run for state or federal?’.

“What I’m interested in is deep transformational change, reshaping our entire democratic system so that ordinary people have more say over the changes that matter to them, so that we have more community voting and participatory budgeting and meaningful deliberative democracy.

“That’s my political aspiration – system change.”

20. What positive things can you say about your main two rivals?

“The interactions I’ve had with Tracey Price, so far, have been really positive. I’ve once or twice raised concerns with her about the behaviour of some of her campaigners and she’s taken those concerns seriously.

“I think she’s genuinely interested in avoiding party political rivalries and credit to her for that.

“I think Adrian Schrinner really cares about his family.

“He’s a real family man and I can see that he wants to do right by his kids and his partner and I think that’s something I really resonate with.

“Family is really important to me as well and I can see why often he wants to put his family first, and that’s a laudable thing.”

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