Susan Monson has never run for office before and never thought she would.
But the Beauty Point local reckons too many of the same faces have been making decisions for too long, and she’s decided to do something about it.
Monson is running as an independent candidate for the upper house seat of Rosevears in the Tasmanian Parliament.
This story is part of a Pulse deep-dive series on the May 2 Legislative Council elections. To read more about the candidates standing, click here.
She’s a construction business owner, a community volunteer and a mum who says she’s fed up with government policies that look good on paper but fall apart in the real world.
“Rather than complain about it, I thought I would put my hand up and say, I’ll have a go,” she said.
Monson was born and raised in Beauty Point and left the electorate for around 10 years in her late teens and early twenties before returning to raise a family.
She’s been back for 18 years.
She and her husband run a construction company, and it’s through that work she says she’s seen firsthand how red tape is hurting everyday people trying to build or renovate.
“The paperwork and the legislation that they bring up, all of the reports that you need to have and how much it’s costing our customers or how much time it’s wasting for our customers,” she said.
“It just doesn’t work. It slows everything down.”
Housing is a key issue for Monson, who argues the push for higher building standards is at odds with making homes affordable.
“We’re bringing in seven-star efficiency ratings and we have people living in parks,” she said.
“You can’t have cost effective seven-star rated housing. They don’t go together.”
She pointed to a client who saved enough to buy a block of land and build a tiny home but was priced out after months of back and forth with the planning process.
“By the time she finished the back and forth, she can’t afford to build the house,” Monson said.
“It’s just ridiculous.”
She also shared stories from her own business where minor changes spiralled into months of delays.
In one case, a couple doing an extension wanted to move a steel carport about four metres to the left.
Because the new position was closer to the house, it triggered bushfire rating requirements that forced window changes and required elevation reports.
“It was just extreme,” she said.
Monson said in her years in the building industry, she’s met just one person who had a seamless, happy experience dealing with councils and planning requirements.
“I don’t know why we’d make it hard for anybody to put their money into property,” she said.
Asked where she sits politically, Monson said it depends on the issue.
She said she couldn’t give a straight answer when people asked, so she tried a different approach.
“I might put all of the things that I believe and think and wonder about into ChatGPT and see what it says,” she said.
“And it was, oh, you sit in the middle, but you lean a bit left on this issue and a bit right on that issue.”
She said that’s true of most people she knows, including family members who’ve traditionally been rusted on to one side.
“I’ve got my father, who would be Labor. I have my father-in-law, who would be Liberal. And even they are starting to waver,” she said.
Monson believes independents play an important role in the upper house by holding the major parties to account.
“It should be where politics goes out of it a bit and it just becomes what’s good for the state,” she said.
Community sport is another issue close to her heart.
Monson has served as secretary and treasurer for local sports clubs and plays netball with two of her daughters.
She said the cost of playing 17 games for the three of them comes to around $1,400, working out to more than $30 a game.
She’s also frustrated by the grants process, saying a recent funding round aimed at keeping women and girls in sport required volunteers to come up with an idea, write reports and read countless pages of documents.
“No one’s got time for that,” she said.
“People who are volunteering, they work full time. They have families.”
She said the government should get money where it’s needed rather than putting the burden on volunteers.
“We sort of spend our time raising funds so that we can give money to councils to use their mediocre facilities,” she said.
On greyhound racing, which has become an election issue after a vote on the industry’s future was postponed, Monson said she brings personal insight from helping her father train greyhounds.
She said the debate has jumped too quickly to phasing the industry out entirely.
“I think that rather than it being all or nothing, we should be putting a bit more time into making it a better industry,” she said.
“You can’t just pull the rug out from people like that.”
On local issues, Monson flagged longstanding concerns about landslip zones and development restrictions along the Tamar River that she believes should be re-examined.
She acknowledged that if engineers say it’s not safe to build, that’s the final word, but said it had been a long time since those assessments were reviewed.
Monson said the current member for Rosevears, who also serves as a minister, is visible in the community but questioned whether enough was changing in areas like education.
“She’s at every event, so she’s still giving to the community,” she said.
“I can’t fault her too much on that.”
She said her own strength is the breadth of real-world experience she’d bring to the role, having worked across the building industry, on the Spirit of Tasmania, at the maritime college and in hospitality.
“I’ve had 10 different jobs, different world experiences that aren’t just on a path for politics,” she said.
