Walkley Award-winning feminist, media personality and education campaigner Jane Caro has reasons for her first tilt at politics

That's one of the reasons behind her campaign for the Senate as a candidate for Reason Australia.

"I've been thinking for a while that Australia is heading in precisely the wrong direction and I kept thinking to myself, someone's got to do something, then I thought well, maybe that someone should be me,." Ms Caro said.

Reason Australia is an amalgamation of founder Fiona Patton's Sex Party and the Voluntary Euthanasia Party, Ms Caro explained. Reason Australia has kicked off its first Senate campaign this year with candidates running in NSW, Queensland and Victoria.

"Reason is really about pragmatic, evidence-based policy making that is designed to minimise harm, to reduce suffering, to enhance people's lives and is not influenced by ideological concerns of any kind, including religious," Ms Caro told ACM.

"Reason literally is what the name says - let's behave reasonably, put together policy where we know the reasons why we're doing it and the reasons why this policy will have a beneficial effect on the problem."

Ms Caro thinks she will pick up votes from women, older women in particular, as well as older Australians across NSW who may just be looking for an alternative.

Older Australians may be hoping to use their vote for action on aged care, and rural and regional Australians may be wielding their votes this federal election with disaster recovery in mind.

"I certainly think there are a lot of rural Australians who are sick of being taken for granted, having it assumed that their votes will go to the National party or to the Liberal party or with the conservative side of politics."

According to Ms Caro, Australia can only expect more disasters, such as fires and floods, due to climate change - and Australians want a government that will help.

"It's not good enough to say let's put up a GoFundMe account to help the flood victims, as Peter Dutton has done," she said.

"That's a government responsibility and it's just bizarre to expect ordinary Australians to help the government help the victims. That's what our taxes are for. So I think there are a lot of votes that are just looking for someone else to vote for."

Caro's running mate Hannah Maher, an out and proud transgender woman particularly focused on health and social issues affecting LGBTQI+ communities, is originally from the small town of Trundle in Central West NSW.

Ms Maher said the big affects of the climate emergency are being felt in rural and regional Australia.

As a result, a lot of people in those areas are feeling disaffected by parties which have generally dominated in the bush, such as the Nationals.

"I don't believe the Nationals party has really spoken to the voice of actual country people for many, many years and people are starting to feel that. But country electorates are not going to flip to the likes of Labor or certainly not the Greens anytime soon," Ms Maher told ACM.

"It's small parties and Independents that people are really starting to look towards. That's why I think that Jane and I and Reason can have a really important part to play in this, especially since we're running in the Senate, everyone across NSW can support us and get behind us."

Besides her home in Sydney, Jane owns a farm in the Upper Hunter. Her knowledge of that part of Australia has affected her politics. She thinks agriculture, in particular, could be part of the solution to climate change.

"If only we had representatives that would allow it to be, that would make it easy for Australia's primary producers to do the things that they want to do in terms of effective, efficient, sensible production methods that also mitigate climate change," Caro said.

This is Ms Caro's first tilt at politics, although she did consider standing for Warringah as an independent in 2019.

Ms Caro's announcement coincides with the launch of her novel 'The Mother,' which offers a take on coercive control.

Domestic violence is an issue that will be at the heart of her campaign along with public education, climate change, integrity, homelessness, poverty, women's rights and care for older Australians.

What makes you qualified to be a senator?

JC: I suppose the same thing that makes anyone qualified to be a senator - a concern about this country and the direction in which it's heading, passion to do something about it and make a difference, and being a citizen of this country and therefore responsible for making sure that our democracy is robust and has the trust of the community. I think that for a long time the people who have been running our democracy have been undermining it and I think that's a bad thing.

I think written qualifications are not nearly as important as the ability to not have an agenda that's formed by donors or personal ambition, but to do what's right and what will help this country and most of the people who live in it. That would seem to me to be a qualification that we need and haven't got all that much of.

I might be the only published novelist in our parliament. The arts are horribly neglected in this country, perhaps it's time we got some people who have come from different sectors into our government houses.

The issue of domestic violence among middle-class populations is multi-faceted. Where do you sit on the issue of shared parental leave, where both parents can share in 12 months of parental leave, fully paid, and take more equal responsibility?

JC: I am in favour of anything that encourages both partners in any kind of partnership to take equal responsibility for the work that needs to be done, both paid and unpaid. I think that partnerships where one person does paid work and unpaid work and the other does paid work but not a whole lot of unpaid work is a recipe for disaster for everyone, and I am absolutely in favour of shared parental leave.

I'm in favour of anyone who takes time out to care for people in the community, be they small children, people with a disability, aging parents - whoever it is that needs care, I'm in favour of them receiving superannuation paid for by the government the whole time they're out of the workforce caring for others. First of all, they're saving us money by doing that, second of all if we pay them their superannuation, they themselves are less likely to end up poor when they're old and it's a decent and compassionate thing to do.

I am very much in favour of paying women for their work. Most of the unpaid parents in Australia are women and at the moment we run this society on the unpaid work that women do. I would love to see paid parental leave shared and unpaid parental leave shared as well.

Do you think an improved parental leave policy would empower more men to be better contributors in the home and better partners and fathers?

Yes, I think it would have that effect. I think there's only one way to get to know your children and that's to do the work of parenting. I think it would make a difference and that's a really important thing that we need to have happen for the sake of men, women and particularly children.

If successful in your bid for Senate, do you hope to influence government spending on public and private schools, and if so, how?

JC: I certainly do. I'd like us to at the very least go back to the original Gonski where the funding we spend on education actually goes towards the children who need that funding. It is absurd that we are pouring billions of taxpayers money into already luxuriously resourced schools filled with children who are already doing perfectly fine. That money is gaining us nothing. It is gaining very luxurious amenities for a lucky few kids, but it's not actually gaining this country anything. The amenities are not making any difference to the educational performance of the students who attend them, that money isn't making any of those schools more accessible - the fees rise every year.

At the same time we have crumbling public schools that are not cooled properly, not heated properly, with leaking roofs. Kids who really need large sums of money spent on their education because they're the most expensive to teach - the poorer the child's background, the more rural or remote they are, if they're Indigenous kids, kids with a disability, refugees - those are the kids who walk through the school gate with the least social capital, the least resources behind them, so they need the most input to reach their potential. In this country, unlike almost any other, we do it the other way around. Quite apart from the lack of social justice of that is the sheer fiscal irresponsibility, we're not getting anything for our money.

If we actually put much more money into our public schools that are serving our most disadvantaged children, we might actually see an improvement. If we could reduce the class sizes, increase the number of teachers, increase the number of counselors and support workers in those schools. Then we would actually see a difference, we would get a return for our investment, at the moment, we're not.

In your opinion what is the biggest barrier to more people being engaged politically in Australia? How is that barrier best overcome? Do political parties even want that barrier to be overcome?

JC: I think there's a sense of hopelessness and a cynicism about politicians and why they go into politics and what they do when they get there. I think that's because politicians keep trying to pretend to us about things, they keep trying to present to us the story they think we want to hear rather than the actual truth and I think the public is wise to that and now they're totally suspicious of anything that's presented to them by politicians.

I think there's been far too much vested interest going on in why policies are made, and why things that desperately need to be done are not being done, and I think the public are aware of that and so what's happened over the last decade is that the public's trust in their democracy has been fatally eroded. That's fatal to democracy.

Democracy operates on trust and we really need to find people to stand for office who don't have hidden agendas, who are clear and concise about the reasons they're going into it and what they care about and that's why I'm pleased not only that I've decided to stand but that so many women are putting their hand up as independents, particularly in the lower house, but not only in the lower house. I think that's wonderful and I think that is a vote of confidence in the fact that democracy is the form of government that we must maintain and we must keep in a high functioning fashion. In a way it's as if women have collectively said, well, the guy's have made a right mess of it, let's all get in there and clear this thing up.

- The author of this story, Eva Baxter, is the niece of Jane Caro