Kashmir Miller is a busy woman. She recently ran as the Greens Federal Candidate for the seat of Page and last week announced her intentions to run for preselection for the NSW Greens Upper House ticket for the 2023 state election. In between, she shall complete a law degree with honours at SCU. Kashmir took some time to share her story with Sara Browne.

This has been my home forever. I was born here at Lismore Base Hospital, as local as it gets. My parents have lived here for over 30 years, they’ve raised us all here. My family has been in the Northern Rivers for five generations. My parents and grandparents were all from Tweed Heads and lived around Murwillumbah, always in the region. I definitely have deep roots here.

Those generations had a mix of careers. My parents both worked in the university and my grandfather built houses around the Tweed area. I’ve got two older brothers, we all went to Lismore High which is a fabulous school. It’s been amazing having a family with deep roots around here and having had siblings grow up here, I feel a great sense of community and belonging from that.

My mum and I protesting the government's lack of climate action after the 2017 flood

 Running in the federal election was an epic adventure. I really enjoyed it overall but of course, there were highs and lows. It's always been something I’ve been interested in and having those deep roots in the community was beneficial in that I felt like I could accurately represent the community. It did sort of feel like a natural path for me to do that.

I decided to do it around the end of last year when my local group started looking for nominations. I’ve always wanted to see more young people in politics and it starts to become a matter of waiting for somebody else to do it, then you realise that you can just do it yourself.

I’m 22 and I’ve been active as a Greens member for over 10 years. I became an official member when I was 12 but I was engaged in it before that because I grew up around environmentalists.

Both my parents are environmentalists and I started getting engaged in protests around the coal seam gas movement in the Northern Rivers in 2011. I heard a lot of dialogue around being people afraid for the future for children and as one of those children, that was quite terrifying. I was shocked to hear that our government aren’t working for our benefit. When you learn about government, you’re taught that that is what they’re meant to do so it’s really confronting at a young age to learn that they’re actively vying for private interest rather than the interests of future generations.

That fear can manifest in different ways. A lot of people experience climate grief and it can be quite a draining thing, feeling a lack of hope and a lack of ability for you, as one person, to make a difference when the people making the decisions have so much power. I try to see it as a sense of empowerment and use that frustration with the government to channel change and research and understand the ways that an individual person can contribute to change.

There are so many ways - even if it’s not running for a position yourself – it’s being part of grassroots movements like we’ve seen so much success in the Northern Rivers with the Bentley Blockade and Chullundi and all of the amazing things that we’ve done in Australia with grassroots movements. If you look at the history of protest in our area, you see that people really can make a big difference collectively.

My green ethics apply in my daily life as much as possible, through practices such as giving up eating meat three years ago and boycotting companies that test on animals. I do not have a car so I rely on walking, carpooling and public transport…although I wish we had much more of it. I love all the plastic-free options provided at wholefood bulk shops and buying locally from all our fantastic farmer's markets

At my high school, I definitely felt supported. Lismore High, being a public school, was a really nurturing environment and a lot of my teachers were really open to diverse interests. I even had a climate change action group that my friend Maddy Braddon and I did. She’s another Lismore legend. That was really encouraging at high school, having more like-minded people, I was lucky in that sense.

My father is retired now, he worked in audio visuals at the uni and before that he toured doing sound and light engineering with bands around the country. My mum has a law degree, like what I’m studying now, and she’s an academic at the university.

 on stage in Lismore Theatre Company’s production of ‘The Vagina Monologues’ 

I always wanted to be an actor when I was younger so when I finished school, I studied acting at Sydney Theatre School but unfortunately, the government had made it so difficult to be an actor, especially a student studying acting.

They cut all the funding for the school that I went to just a year before I went there so I couldn’t get any of the support that previous students could get. With the increasing cost of living and the lack of arts funding it became really difficult and I felt drawn back to my community and a sense of purpose with environmental activism and social justice. That made me switch. I still do acting for fun and it’s still a great passion of mine. I do it a lot with Lismore Theatre Company. It felt very natural for me to start a law degree and study environmental science back in Lismore.

I was in Sydney only about eight months. It was a one-year diploma course. It was fun living there but it’s no Lismore. I think it’s a good rite of passage for young people growing up regionally to experience the other side but I think a lot of us come back. The sense of community and belonging that you get from your home town is pretty unmatched.

The course is great, I’m almost finished. I’m in my last session and I’m doing honours as well so I’ve been focussing on my honours dissertation. It's on the treatment of female perspectives in the criminal justice system and how survivors of sexual assault, who are often female, can be inherently disadvantaged by a legal system that was developed for a male subject. When our legal system was developing, from colonialism, women were barely human in the eyes of the law. They were basically property, so it’s understandable that when they’re going through the criminal justice system as a complainant, they’re always going to be one step behind until we have major reform. Big topic. Bit of light reading.

I’d love to stay in the area when I finish. I’d love to keep fighting for this area and working with local environmental groups, that would be my dream, to help support them around major logging things such as the Cherry Tree State Forest and representing protestors in court. Unfortunately, our government keeps making our civil right to protest illegal and that’s a huge human rights issue, I believe. That’s something that I want to represent for our community. That’s where I’m hoping that a law degree will be able to help out community.

I was definitely the youngest in the federal election. I don’t know exactly how old the other candidates were, I wouldn’t ask, but I’d say that there was probably at least a decade between me and the next youngest candidate. I ended up getting around 7% of the vote.

I knew that the Greens vote would take a bit of a hit from the teal independents so I was expecting that a little bit. But I had faith that - especially with the climate catastrophe that we’ve all been living through - the Greens vote would stay substantially strong because we’re proven time and time again to be the only party to continually act for climate justice.

So, I did have an expectation, more of a hope I guess, that people would connect the dots of what we are living through and how that really is impacted by the decisions that are made by the government, in particular the coalition government.

There was a 4% swing to the Senate in Page which assisted in getting David Shoebridge, our next NSW Senator, elected. He’s been a great asset to our community, immediately after the floods being in NSW parliament and bringing the voices of our community back to parliament in the upper house. Now our local, Sue Higginson has taken over from him, it's great having Greens at all levels of government representing the Northern Rivers.

I met Adam Bandt on the campaign trail. The new deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi, I’ve met a bunch of times, she’s another mentor and inspiration of mine – a strong woman and the only engineer in parliament as well. Adam Bandt is a good guy, he was very supportive of all of the electorates and really made an effort to visit us all.

The same with David Shoebridge too, they all want to hear from the community first rather than meeting with big business. They’re more inclined to walk around the street and meet people, unlike when we were all standing outside trying to talk to Scott Morrison and we got shoved back by police. Pretty much the exact opposite of that with Adam and David.

marching in Mardi Gras in Sydney earlier this year 

Dealing with the other politicians isn’t really what people would expect. We are all very congenial with each other, in my experience. I always try to lead with positivity because we’re all just doing what we think is best for the community and all the other candidates got along really well. We were at pre-poll and if it was slow, we could all chat to each other and to the volunteers.

That’s something that I benefit from because I don’t like to play a nasty game of giving the opposition the side-eye. There’s a time and place for that conflict but it’s not in the streets and it's not in those times.

Talking to the media has been a learning curve as well, something that you have to get used to, going from being a nobody to the minute you announce your candidacy – the media start posting about you and people recognise you in the street and the media start calling you on your phone and suddenly your emails are blowing up. It was definitely something that I had to get used to then it kind of all goes away once the election is over. It’s definitely a marathon but once it was over, I do tend to miss it a little bit. It was a fun ride.

The hard part is the assumptions people make about me and people being really dismissive because of my age. I think that is such a backwards way of viewing a candidate of how they can represent you, something as minuscule as how old they are when we’ve seen people who are much, much older than me can do an absolutely terrible job of representing a community. I think, for me, it was a benefit being a young person because I see the world differently and I see into the future differently and I represent a group that often doesn’t have their voice represented at all.

People under the age of 18 can’t vote yet they’re the ones that are going to be living with the decisions of the government for longer than anyone. So, I thought my age was a benefit but unfortunately, a lot of facebook trolls thought differently. I try not to play into that too much but encourage people to think progressively. I think of it in the sense that, decades ago people were saying the same things about women running for parliament and people of colour running for parliament and now we see that as a completely regressive view. I think we will think the same way in the future about young people running for parliament. We’ll have lots more young people in parliament and we’ll wonder why we ever thought that wasn’t a thing we could do.

I think the voting age should be lowered. I definitely think that people aged 16 and 17, it should be optional if they want to vote. As we’ve seen with school strikes for climate, young people are so politically engaged and aware, more so than a lot of older generations, and they care about what their future looks like. It makes sense to give those who want to have their voice heard, the opportunity to do so.

I don’t give myself the opportunity to lose hope because it’s too precious to give up on. It’s too precious to not have that hope. We absolutely have to keep trying no matter what because everything is at stake, as we’ve seen. This could only be the beginning in Lismore, of people losing their homes.

As climate refugees from other countries have to battle with their lives, for the sake of the climate, and as all of the innocent bystanders of our natural environment and our biodiversity – we have a duty, I believe, to protect future generations and our earth and we just can’t give up. It’s too big a loss to give up on. It is stressful but I do feel like I’m built for it. I’ve always been outspoken and somebody that thrives under pressure in high-stress circumstances so I haven’t felt a big burnout yet.

For me, theatre has always been my escape and my fun place. I’ve been in plays recently. I was in Running up a Dress (LTC). I was doing that during the campaign and it was such a wonderful thing that I really looked forward to – being on stage and in character and be in that space with your fellow actors. You kind of leave the world at the door.

That’s my biggest de-stressor, for sure. And that’s why I find it so important that we all invest and cherish our arts, it’s not just me who feels that way, I know. People who watch or experience art in so many different mediums also feel that way. Art is precious for mental health, it has been for mine.

Both of my parents have been very engaged politically and they’ve really encouraged and fostered that tenacity in me so I’m lucky, in that sense, to have a family that aligns with me and supports me. Many don’t have the same luxury.

My parents have been involved in our wonderful protest history and in our counter-culture of Lismore and surrounding areas. It’s in my blood I think, not just through my family but as a Lismore and Northern Rivers resident, to have that sense of resilience. We can see now that Lismore is an extremely resilient place and that’s what makes it so special.

My family weren’t directly impacted by the flood, overall we were very lucky but of course, the whole community is feeling that grief and impact. My workplace got destroyed. I used to work at the Slate Café. Sadly, they’re not coming back.

Within the Greens locally, I have some incredible women as life mentors and inspiration like Sue Higginson and Vanessa Ekins and Mandy Nolan in Richmond. I can talk to them when I’m feeling that sense of climate grief and that all the issues are too big. I see those women keep fighting and all of the other people in our community keep fighting so I can always look to them and see that you just have to keep going. Eventually, there will be little lights of success.

At the moment, I’ve got my sights set on the upper house in the next state election so I’ll be running for pre-selection within the Greens to be on the ticket. That’s next year and then local government elections the next year and then federal elections again the year after. There’s a lot of opportunities.

It’s not in my hands, it’s in the hands of people and the voters but I know that I’m the type of person not to give up, also when it comes to my future in environmental law. It feels like fate in that there really isn’t an alternative for me. It will be that or nothing and I’ll just keep going regardless.

If I finish my degree and get a job offer elsewhere, I’m not opposed to doing something somewhere else for a few years but I intend to always have Lismore as my home base. I’m always open to wherever my skills are best suited, where I can make the most overall change. Working with something like the UN for stronger environmental laws across the world would be something that I would be really interested in.

In 10 years time, I would hopefully be in parliament in one medium or another, even earlier than that, to represent the incoming generation that are fighting for climate and social justice. That’s where I see myself. I’d step up to be PM sure, if I had the opportunity, of course, why not?