Australian Conservatives’ senate candidates to hold meet and greet at Waratahs

Lead candidate for NSW Sophie York, and Riccardo Bosi, will meet with local supporters at Waratah Sports Club at 10am.

A barrister, naval legal officer, university lecturer and national spokesperson for Marriage Alliance, Mrs York is based in Sydney but said it wasn’t fair to assume the issues that dominated the recent Wentworth byelection – “rainbow issues”, “climate issues” and whether or not to move the Australian embassy in Israel to Jerusalem – were priorities for regional voters.

The Australian Conservatives were founded by South Australian senator Cory Bernardi in 2017.

Mrs York – a long-term member of the Liberal party – joined in February after becoming disenfranchised with the Liberal party’s direction.

She said her new party aimed to implement “good policy for the Australian people” on issues like national security, border protection, immigration levels, and the “reliability of electricity without having it cost a bucket load”.

“What we’ve picked up is that people are concerned about the rate [of immigration]; there’s about 190,000 arriving in Australia each year … and it’s very hard to keep up the infrastructure in the cities,” Mrs York said.

“The Conservatives say we should halve that figure.”

Mrs York also pledged to “push back against political correctness which is getting out of hand”, and questioned Australia’s emissions reduction target saying the “Paris agreement would actually be terrible for Australia’s prosperity”.

“One of the reasons we’re such a rich country is because we sell $57 billion worth of coal to the world each year,” Mrs York said.

“If they’re able to burn it then why shouldn’t we?”

She was concerned Australian school children were being taught “grievance studies” in relation to the country’s colonial history, instead of “true history”.

“We are actually one of the richest, happiest, most stable countries in the world but this is all being put at risk … they’re trying to re-write history,” Mrs York said.

She conceded “that the introduction of alcohol and certain diseases… had a poor effect” on Indigenous Australians, but said “now we’re 200 years down the track”.

“The original founders can’t be held responsible for their decisions by people around today,” Mrs York said.