I was at a bar in Fremantle the other night when I got chatting to a local. The conversation drifted, as it often does here, to politics.
He was gushing about one of the Greens MPs he follows on social media. He loved that they were talking about the big stuff: geopolitics, climate disasters, the state of the world. Serious, important, global. Then he contrasted that with another Greens MP he’d seen posting about bike paths, infrastructure and planning. That, he said, felt smaller. Less important.
I get the instinct. When the world feels like it’s burning, “bike lanes” can sound trivial.
However, although I too gush about each of the Greens MPs and their unique, individual passions, portfolios and communication styles, I had to correct him.
I used the line often attributed to Tip O’Neill: all politics is local. In WA state politics, nothing is more local, or more consequential, than what we build and where we build it. Planning decisions decide whether our lives get cheaper or more expensive, whether our suburbs get cooler or hotter, whether emissions go down or keep climbing.
Bike paths aren’t a distraction from climate action. They are climate action.
And honestly, cars ruin cities. They eat space, lock in emissions, fracture communities, and force people into expensive lifestyles. Perth is often described as an extreme sprawl city, and you don’t need a slogan like “world’s longest city” to understand the point: we’ve built a metro area where many people have no genuine alternative to driving, and it shows up everywhere, from household costs to congestion to emissions. (How many times have you heard people say that it’s impossible to live in Perth without a car, or that Melbourne is so much cooler, partly because of public transport?).
This is why transport-oriented development matters. Putting more homes near train stations and frequent public transport isn’t just a design preference. It’s a direct emissions strategy and a cost-of-living strategy. It cuts car dependence, makes daily life less expensive, and gives people time back. It also makes cities fairer for people who can’t drive, can’t afford a car, or shouldn’t need one to exist.
But transport isn’t the only place where WA politics gets painfully literal.
Infill is where we decide whether Perth grows up sensibly or keeps sprawling outward. We can argue about density forever, but here’s the thing: sprawl is a choice too, and it’s a choice with consequences. It pushes people to the fringe, away from services, jobs and community, then acts shocked when traffic gets worse and infrastructure costs explode.
What makes it even more maddening is that some publicly owned land has sat vacant or underused for long periods during an escalating housing crisis. There have been specific, publicly discussed examples of state-owned sites in and around Fremantle that were approved or identified for housing and then left empty for years.
Public land should be delivering public good.
That brings me to something I care about deeply, and Fremantle is a perfect place to say it plainly. Social and affordable housing should not be quarantined to the edges of the city. Mixing social and affordable housing into well-connected, higher-opportunity areas is good policy. It reduces segregation, keeps people close to transport and services, and makes communities stronger and more resilient.
Fremantle shouldn’t become a curated museum of only those who can afford it. It should stay a real place where different kinds of people can live.
I am a single woman earning under $100,000 a year, and I don’t think my strategy for finding a home in the community I’ve lived in my entire life should be to “get into a relationship so I can split rent and bills.” I find this just as obtuse as the government telling me to take money out of my superannuation to buy a home, or more recently to utilise the 5% deposit scheme, which does not make housing in Fremantle affordable on a single income and does nothing to increase the supply of secure, well-located homes in the community I already live in.
Local government should have more power to make better outcomes possible. Councils are close to the ground. They understand local needs and see the consequences of state decisions immediately. Too often, though, they are boxed in by state settings, state land decisions, and a planning culture that prioritises what is easiest politically over what is best in the long term.
Energy is the other half of the WA reality check. WA has extraordinary renewable energy potential, particularly solar. You can see how strong the solar resource is in public datasets like the Global Solar Atlas and the Bureau of Meteorology’s solar exposure mapping. Yet, WA’s grid is still heavily gas-based. Federal energy statistics note that gas accounts for a very large share of electricity generation in Western Australia (much higher than most other jurisdictions).
On renewables performance, careful wording matters: WA isn’t literally “the worst at everything,” but multiple comparative reports have pointed out that WA’s renewable electricity share is low relative to many other parts of Australia, despite strong resources and high rooftop solar uptake.
So yes: we should be leading. And we are not yet doing that at the pace our resources make possible.
That’s why renewable energy targets matter at the state level. Targets create certainty, and certainty gets infrastructure built. Targets also make it harder for governments to talk about ambition while approving fossil-fuel lock-in. (And yes, locking households into gas is exactly that.) It’s not “culture war stuff”; its household bills and long-term emissions baked into the housing stock.
And then there’s heat. Perth is getting hotter, and urban design can make it dramatically worse or meaningfully better. Urban greening isn’t decorative. Tree canopy and accessible green space reduce heat exposure and health risks, and the evidence base for this is strong. The equity piece matters too: the suburbs with less canopy and more hard surfaces often carry the heaviest heat burden.
I’ve seen where the “cars first, sprawl forever” approach ends. I used to live in Los Angeles. It’s an iconic case study in what happens when a city is shaped around cars: long travel times, fragmented communities, huge land devoted to roads and parking, and a daily grind that makes people feel like they’re living inside a traffic system rather than a city. Plenty of urban planning work documents how auto-centric development became dominant there and what it costs socially.
Perth is not LA. But we should be honest about the direction of travel if we keep building outward while under-investing in public and active transport.
Here’s the part that connects all of this to the bigger political moment. While the whole world rubber-necks the clowning of Donald Trump and the spectacle politics of people like Pauline Hanson, it’s easy to miss the quieter conditions that let far-right authoritarianism grow: housing stress, isolation, decline in trust, and a sense that life keeps getting harder while the powerful stay protected.
That’s why “local” doesn’t mean small. It means structural.
The hopeful news is: other places have made real shifts. Paris has reduced car traffic substantially over the last couple of decades and expanded cycling infrastructure at speed.
London has used tools like congestion charging and low-traffic measures (with plenty of debate and lessons) to manage traffic and reduce emissions in key areas. Cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen show what’s possible when cycling, public space and human-scale planning are treated as serious civic priorities over the long term. That doesn’t mean we copy-paste. It means we stop pretending WA is uniquely incapable.
For the WA Greens, the through-line is clear. Emissions targets remain essential, but state politics is where we win or lose the conditions that make targets achievable. That means pushing hard for:
strong, credible renewable energy and storage targets, backed by delivery and grid planning
an end to new fossil-fuel lock-in in buildings where alternatives are available
TOD and infill that prioritises living near transit, not more sprawl
using public land for public good, including mixed social and affordable housing in high-opportunity areas
giving local government more real power to deliver community-led solutions
urban greening as mandatory climate infrastructure, not a nice-to-have
So yes, geopolitics matters. Climate disasters matter. But in WA state politics, the fight against climate breakdown and inequality is won or lost in planning schemes, transport budgets, housing decisions and energy settings.
Sometimes the most radical climate politics looks like a bike path.
Or a shaded street.
Or social housing in the heart of Fremantle.
And that’s not small at all.