The actor, who played dopey dad, Gary Canning, on Neighbours for six years, is running as an independent candidate on the Victorian Senate ticket.
Damien Richardson, best known for his roles in City Homicide and Jack Irish, is speaking out about his discomfort with having to follow the progressive narrative that is prevalent in the arts.
When speaking about the hypocrisy of big stars flying on private jets while being activists for climate change, he said:
“You’re not allowed to call that out, particularly if you want to maintain your role—literally and figuratively—as an actor in the art community and working on mainstream television as I was. I knew that, but I had found it very difficult not to be able to talk about these things”.
Damien, who courted controversy last year when he protested outside a Salvos store in Ballarat, intimated that he didn’t take his decision to protest lightly, knowing it could effectively end his acting career.
“The fact that I ended up even in the protest movement was a huge consideration that I had to undertake because I knew exactly what it meant to be an actor. I’d be in green rooms trying to keep my mouth shut, and every now and then, it would spill out. I had detrimental consequences as far as ongoing work was concerned. There were times when I was not employed because of my stance, public, even if it was only mildly public”.
However, he felt he could no longer keep quiet.
“Socialism grinds everything to a halt. We have to pay lip service to insanity and then exist in another way. But that’s not the country I grew up in. That’s not Australia to me. There’s [sic] 227 parliamentarians at a federal level- seven of them openly questioning the narrative. [They’re paid] to ask the questions on our behalf that we might be too scared to ask because we might lose our jobs. They’ve got parliamentary privilege they’re protected by”.
As with many of the independent candidates, Damien’s decision to run independently was fueled by the “draconian measures” set in place by the government claiming to stop the spread of Covid.
“The bureaucratic measures that were put in place to bring about the destruction, ultimately, of the culture. The biggest protest movement, the most draconian lockdowns resulting in the protest movement, were in Victoria. How can 500, 000 people four weekends in a row have no political representation? That’s a perversion and corruption of the system”.
Damien knows his audience and is more than ready to stand up for them and their rights, particularly construction workers who felt coerced into receiving the Covid vaccine under the threat of losing their livelihoods.
“Who elects me—and it is those people that I expect I would appeal to, they will be my natural constituents. They feel like their government forced them to take [the vaccine]. I’d be elected by the people. And I would represent the people”.
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Author Avi Yemini
