Public service

And this September, he takes up a new senior role in the Health Service.

He was appointed MBE for his services to the LGBTQ plus people and the community in Westminster, and holds the freedom of the City of London for public service.

His board portfolio stretches from Amnesty International UK to Single Homelessness Project, and he chairs Public Voice, a community interest company shaping public services around the people who

use

them.

So more general services such as education, health are funded by, like you correctly say, taxes.

Now, you have SARS that is the collecting agency for taxes to fund public services.

And SARS, in my view, you know, well, I won't say narrow, but their mandate is to maximize as much revenue as they can.

And they put a lot of pressure and they do it quite well.

And that is the expenditure side.

And that is where the frustration comes in because people can see that I'm paying a lot of tax.

In fact, and like I said, you so well articulated it, is because I pay tax for general public services, for my education, for my health care.

But because the expenditure on government side is not good enough in terms of the quality of the service, you then have to pay extra for... from your own pocket for the private sector.

And one of the things I found really interesting was his reasoning around knowing when it's time to step aside and make space for new people and new voices.

But I've also followed some of Greg's positions that he's taken throughout his eight-year career as a Councillor, whether it was on protecting public services, harm reduction, regional governance, Palestine, or even speaking out about what's happening south of the border.

You've been willing to take on positions that aren't necessarily easy or politically convenient.

So I guess we really want to just have a conversation about what it means to be a progressive voice in municipal politics.

We are also outraged.

if those things are happening in this country we're against them right

yeah so let's talk about libraries a little bit public services in general okay um so i guess we'll talk we'll go simple why are why do you think like public spaces like libraries are so important to a community

oh man um yeah i can't it'd be hard for me to articulate how important libraries are um I, there's, you know, under the current iteration of capitalism, there aren't a lot of spaces where people can just go and exist without spending money.

let's get back to it.

So, yeah, instead of putting money into public services like housing, drug services, supporting young people, instead the government is just adopting a tough on crime approach.

So they've said that there's going to be a zero tolerance approach to crime.

And so actually under the Jacinta Allen government, they brought in the adult time for adult crime laws, aping the right wing liberal government in Queensland.

And this is the land tax.

So the Liberal Party want to reduce the amount that property investors pay in tax.

So by doing that, uh in order to do that uh so daniel andrews reduced the the threshold for land tax um to be paid uh the liberal party want to bring that back up to what it was before um and they're like we'll do it now uh ben carroll's like we'll do it uh in a few years kind of thing but like the same thing like reduce the amount of tax um that property investors pay uh for like i mean like their property investment but like these are the same people that are saying like you know we're gonna cut you know Victorian government spending because the budget is fucked and everything there's a massive deficit or whatever like this is gonna cost billions and billions of dollars to do this they're not concerned about that particular deficit or the deficit when it comes from property investors they're only concerned about you know making sure that we like fuck off public housing stop spending money on public housing like stop spending money on any public services whatsoever But yeah, when property investors are profiting, that's fine, actually.

That's fine.