MAYLANDS Labor MLA Lisa Baker says she’ll be sinking her teeth into meat alternatives when she retires from politics at the next election.

Ms Baker, a tenacious animal rights campaigner during her 16 years in Parliament, announced in March that she won’t recontesting her seat, which is likely to be picked up by Bayswater councillor and former mayor Dan Bull, whose pre-selection was confirmed by Labor late last month.

Ms Baker says she’s planning “a huge future commitment to a very exciting new industry sector, called the ‘alternative industry sector’”, with a focus on protein alternatives.

• Lisa Baker is planning to move into the ‘alternative industry sector’ when she retires from Parliament at the next election.

Propelled

She says it’s a growing sector being propelled along by the climate crisis, including a growing recognition that if the Earth’s population hits 10 billion by 2050 as predicted there will be food shortages.

“We will run out of the right kind of protein needed to feed the entire human race,” Ms Baker said.

She also wants to challenge the way people approach food, but wants to ensure any transformation benefits Australian farmers and people working in the food and agricultural industries.

Ms Baker says her commitment to animal safety and welfare have helped shaped many of Labor’s commitments, including a landmark 2015 document which shifted the party’s wholehearted support for live animal exports.

Labor’s platform that it took into the 2022 election recognises “strong economic, jobs and animal welfare reasons for transitioning from the live export trade to domestic processing of animals”, which she says she ensures is updated every year.

Ms Baker has held regular animal welfare which she says were aimed at “focusing the government’s attention on what the community was thinking about animal welfare,” and to “lobby for improvement”.

• Ms Baker, with Thea Campbell, was a fierce opponent of greyhound racing and helped force reforms to help protect animals, part of her ongoing animal welfare advocacy.

She was also proud to have championed a $2 million animal welfare grant for rescue groups, as well as anti-puppy farming legislation passed in 2021 which “is the best of its kind in the world”.

Ms Baker also led the push for historic anti-gay convictions to be quashed and the victims to receive an official apology from Parliament.

“It is pretty amazing to think that that was not that long ago, that it was a chargeable offence for two consenting adults to have sex with each other in our state,” Ms Baker said at the time.

Campaigns

She says that along with other campaigns in support of the LGBTQI community and women in the workplace, it came from a strong background in the social justice sector.

“I have been working with the vulnerable and excluded my whole life,” she said.

Ms Baker said locally she’d advocated for improved public transport and support for local businesses, and had seen much change within her career.

“I had the massive Tonkin Highway gap project, the Bayswater redevelopment, I’ve had the Morley/Ellenbrook line, I’ve had massive redevelopments that never would have happened under a Liberal government,” she said. 

by BRIANNA WALSH