David Shoebridge

David Shoebridge
Member of the New South Wales Legislative Council
Incumbent
Assumed office 7 September 2010
Personal details
Nationality	Australian
Political party	Greens New South Wales
Residence	Woollahra, New South Wales
Website	http://davidshoebridge.org.au/

David Martin Shoebridge is an Australian politician. He has been a Greens member of the New South Wales Legislative Council since September 2010, when he was appointed to replace outgoing MLC Sylvia Hale.

Shoebridge's portfolio responsibilities within the Greens include: Forestry; Industrial Relations; Planning & Heritage; Firearms (including the Game Council NSW); Justice and Local Government.^[1]

Early career

After a brief stint as a cellarman and superintendent for the Royal Agricultural Society, Shoebridge started his career as an associate to Family Court justice Eric Baker.

Shoebridge then went on to become a lawyer and worked six years as a solicitor at Taylor and Scott, a union law firm, and more than seven years as a barrister at Denman Chambers, with a focus on employment, discrimination, industrial and tort law. While no longer practising, he continues to hold a practising certificate as a NSW Barrister.

Political career

Shoebridge outside Parliament House in Sydney

Shoebridge was elected to Woollahra Municipal Council in 2004 and reelected in 2008.^[2] He served one term as Deputy Mayor.

He was the Greens candidate for the state seat of Vaucluse in the 2007 state election, outpolling the ALP candidate in the seat held by the then Liberal party leader Peter Debnam.^[3]

He was preselected to the first position on the Greens' upper house ticket for the 2011 state election despite not having served in parliament but, after Sylvia Hale resigned from the Legislative Council in September 2010, he was deemed eligible to take her position which allowed him to contest the election as a sitting MP.^[4]

On 2 June 2011, Shoebridge took the record for longest speech in the NSW Legislative Council while talking continuously for over five hours and 58 minutes against NSW government legislation which drastically affected public sector wages and conditions, including capping wage rises at a rate less than inflation.^[5][6]

Shoebridge has campaigned to curb the use of police drug sniffer dogs and stun guns, and called for independent investigations of police when officers are involved in critical incidents and members of the public are killed or seriously injured.^[7][8][9]

In 2012, Shoebridge again advocated on behalf of workers as the NSW government made sweeping changes to the workers compensation system in NSW. Accompanied by the first general strike by fire-fighters since 1956, Shoebridge and the Greens secured amendments to the legislation which meant that fire-fighters and paramedics retained the same cover as police officers.^[10][11]

Shoebridge also campaigned on behalf of victims of sexual abuse, calling for a Royal Commission into sexual abuse by the Catholic Church and other institutions, and proposing legislation to overturn the Ellis defence. The campaign reached a level of success with the announcement in November 2012 of a Special Commission of Inquiry into alleged cover-up of Church sexual abuse in the Hunter and a Federal Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.^{[12][13][14][15][16]}

Another campaign success for Shoebridge came in July 2013 with the abolition of the Game Council NSW by the NSW government. This followed the findings and recommendations of the Dunn Report into the Game Council's governance, called after senior Game Council figures were suspended after allegations of illegal hunting.^[17][18]

References

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