Brisbane Council election: Inside the lives of Tracey Price and Jonathan Sriranganathan ready to rock the Schrinner boat
Go inside the campaigns of Tracey Price and Jonathan Sriranganathan as they set out to dethrone Adrian Schrinner as Brisbane’s Lord Mayor.
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Labor’s Lord Mayoral candidate Tracey Price’s life is best described as being like one of the quilts she makes: colourful and made of many different squares, each telling a different story.
While an oft-repeated observation/criticism about politicians is that they don’t have enough real-life experience before hitting the campaign trail, that can’t be said about Price, who, it’s fair to say, has crammed a lot of living into her 50 years.
From her peripatetic childhood – courtesy of her father Kevin’s long engineering career in the Air Force – to her own professional path, Price has lived in Ipswich, regional towns in Victoria, Melbourne, Missouri in the US, Townsville, New York, London and for the past 20 or so years, Brisbane. She has worked in advertising, banking, product manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and owns her own law firm, Get Real Legals in Chermside, established in 2016. She also owns a small business, the Bernina Sewing Centre, also in Chermside.
Married to Michael, 47 – a senior manager with a global transport and logistics company – she has three children, Joshua, 21, Matthew, 17, and Jessica, 14, the family residing in Bridgeman Downs. She also has an impressive memory of the many places she’s lived (ask her where she grew up in Ipswich she’ll say: “44 Peacock St, Amberley”, where her home was in St Louis – “Timberidge Drive, St Charles, and so on), and a seemingly indefatigable energy.
To wit: “When I was pregnant with my first child, I also found out I’d got into law and justice (double degree) at QUT. I used to take him to university with me as a baby to lectures, and then I had my middle son in my final year.
“When I had my daughter, I went back and did my Masters (of Law) and then I did my executive MBA, and my Graduate Certificate of Domestic Violence,” she says. “And I was working full time most of the time. I did my five- year article clerkship when I did my double degree.
“When I had Joshua, I remember I’d feed him, and keep studying until his last feed, and then I’d have a couple of hours sleep, then do some more study.” She laughs. “I used to read my law textbooks to him.”
Price will need all of that energy come next weekend’s local government elections. Relatively unknown in political circles, she’ll be up against two high-profile candidates. The incumbent – and popular – LNP Mayor Adrian Schrinner, and the Greens’ Jonathan Sriranganathan, riding the so-called Green-wave expected to at least rock the LNP boat in several wards. Price, who considers herself an optimist and a realist, is backing herself and her party.
“I’ve been working really hard, door knocking… attending community events and talking to people, just introducing myself, who I am and why I’m running,” she says.
So why is she running? “I see so much potential in Brisbane, and I see all of these opportunities from places I’ve been. I’ve been to Atlanta (and) Barcelona, post Olympics, and I’ve seen how important it is to get the infrastructure right. There are cities that move more people around their city in the same amount of space without the difficulties we have. And we don’t need to be spending hundreds of millions.”
Like Schrinner, who told Qweekend last weekend that he sees transport as a huge election issue, so too does Price. But she’s coming from – figuratively and literally – a different direction, advocating for less spending on road extensions and upgrades, and more on public transport. “We need to increase frequency and routes, making it cheaper and highly reliable,” she says. “We have pockets of Brisbane that don’t even have a bus.”
As a small-business owner, Price also believes she has a unique insight. Her mother, Janette, was a dressmaker who taught her how to sew and make quilts – Price regularly donates her quilts to homeless women and victims of domestic violence. A regular at the Bernina Sewing Centre, Price bought the store in 2020.
So in between working at her law practice and campaigning, Price runs the business. She laughs.
“Since I was endorsed, I have a lady who runs my shop and an office manager at my firm, and I haven’t taken on any more court work.
“When you own your own business you really do see how council decisions affect people. I know how difficult the red tape is. We need to get rid of a lot of it. We need to streamline processes in council.
“Small businesses are really struggling, and right now most of the work that is being done is reactive, instead of getting in there and supporting them, being proactive.”
If Price wins, she will be the first female Lord Mayor Brisbane has had since Sallyanne Atkinson’s reign from 1985 to 1991, and the first Labor Mayor since Tim Quinn (2003-04).
“I think the current administration is really tired. It’s been there for 20 years. People are saying to me they think it’s time for a change.
“I would love to make a difference here. I may have travelled the world, but Brisbane is where my heart is. I came back to raise my children here; it’s my home.”
Greens Jonathan Sriranganathan
Jonathan Sriranganathan is exactly how you expect him to be – and nothing like you expect him to be.
If your image of the Greens candidate for Brisbane Lord Mayor is that of an inner-city, rainbow scarf wearing, radical poet, performer and politician, you would be correct. But you’d also be correct if you pegged him as a kid who grew up in middle class, suburban Brisbane to become dux of Mitchelton State High School, and valedictorian of his University of Queensland law class.
Since winning the Gabba Ward in 2016 – and becoming Queensland’s first Greens councillor – Sriranganathan, 35, has become one of local politics’ best-known faces. From the Queensland Greens head office in Milton, where an army of campaign volunteers are beavering away, Sriranganathan reflects on this somewhat Janus-faced image. “I know people are like ‘this guy from the inner city’, but actually I’m a guy from a cul-de-sac in Chermside,” he laughs.
“And I think I am often misportrayed as being more divisive or antagonistic than I am.
“Anyone who watches my behaviour in the council chamber, would tell you I’m actually really diplomatic. I will be sitting there and the Labor and Liberal guys are hurling abuse at each other and I sit there being very polite, not interrupting anyone… so there is this frustrating mismatch between how I operate as a politician, and how I am perceived.”
So, who is Sriranganathan, the man who some believe is in with a chance of becoming the 18th Lord Mayor in Australia’s largest local government?
“My mum Noela is an Anglo Australian teacher from Nambour, and my father (who Sriranganathan calls the Tamil “Appa” for father) is Sri Lankan,” he says.
“He came to Australia in 1987 (amid Sri Lankan political and social troubles), worked in hospital administration, and later in the Australian High Commission.”
The seeds of Sriranganathan’s future career can be found in the school holiday trips he took as a child and teenager with his family to the remote community of Galiwinku, in Arnhem Land.
“Mum would teach there and Appa would work there in various roles and I think seeing the stark differences from suburban West Chermside to remote Aboriginal communities and the really obvious material injustices probably politicised me a little bit.”
But it would be years later, after leaving university, “realising I didn’t want to be a lawyer”, and returning to Arnhem Land to work on youth projects that Sri would officially join a political party. Since then, his rise through the Greens ranks has been rapid, and highly visible, regularly at the forefront of protests against developments in his ward such as the controversial 2016 West Village development in West End, and the now all-but-scuppered, Olympic-sized, Gabba stadium plan. Sriranganathan may say he’s just a suburban boy, but he’s not afraid of taking on the big end of town – and is unapologetic about some of the less- popular methods used to do so.
“I think sometimes people forget that the goal of a protest is not necessarily to win over everyone, but to provoke a response, to highlight issues and make that issue enough of a problem that the government can’t ignore it. When activists block a road, they are not trying to win over the motorists, they are saying to the government that this disruption will keep happening and keep being a headache to you unless you do something about it. And my repeated experience again and again is that protesting can make a difference.”
Of the controversial Gabba redevelopment, he has said: “It’s utterly ridiculous that we’re spending billions of dollars on stadiums rather than reusing existing facilities. The government needs to spend a lot more time addressing the housing crisis, the climate crisis and the cost of living crisis.”
These issues are at the heart of Sriranganathan’s campaign, and the reason why he believes the Greens have grown from a fringe party to a “serious force”.
“The people who are really concerned about the environment are already voting for us, but we have broadened into improving public transport – which is also an environmental issue, affordable housing, gentrification forcing people out of their local area – we have been talking about this for a long time. We first put rent controls on our flyers back in 2015.”
As for his own abode, Sriranganathan, a saxophonist and a spoken word performer, lives with his partner Anna Carlson, 34, who is a radio producer on Murri Radio, and has her own show on ZZZ, on a houseboat on the Brisbane River. It’s just 15sq m and the sandflies and mozzies can be a problem, but it’s home. Whether it will remain so if he pulls off a win come March 16 remains to be seen. What is certain is that no matter where he always passionate Sriranganathan ends up, he’ll always be rocking the boat somewhere.
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