When Jim Penman announced a run for Victorian premier on April fool’s Day in 2024, complete with a photo of his face plastered on a big blue bus, he was joking.
But for voters in the seat of Northcote, who spot the Jim’s Group founder’s name on the ballot this November 28, know this; it’s not a prank.
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The face behind Jim’s Mowing has traded the garden shears for Spring Street, taking to the campaign trail with promises to cut red tape, lower the cost of living and do right for the “ordinary person”.
For the next three weeks, Mr Penman will continue his crusade against zoning and bureaucracy as the Libertarian Party candidate for the Northcote district in Melbourne’s northeast.
It won’t be an easy feat, with the 74-year-old competing against current Labor member Kat Theophanous and six other candidates, including Lynda Awad of the Liberals and Campbell Gome of the Greens.
Mr Penman says he is up for the challenge and has even dared his rivals to a local debate. But with that invitation so far met with silence, the franchise mogul is taking his message straight to the voters.
Sitting down with news.com.au, Mr Penman revealed exactly how he plans to shake up parliament in his first 100 days if elected.
Priority one: ‘wipe out’ zoning
Zoning is an “outrageous imposition on the most needy people in society”, according to Mr Penman, who is making the government regulation his first priority if he was to win the seat.
In Victoria, zoning is considered the primary legal and planning system that regulates how land can be used, developed, and protected.
But Mr Penman argued zoning “forces up the price of housing by artificially restricting how many houses you can build and where”.
“We live on a five acre block which can’t be subdivided, we’re five minutes from the station, shops, everywhere else,” Mr Penman said.
“You could put 20 to 30 units on this place and people could have a floor of housing but you can’t do that. So what that means is the people who lose out are renters because expensive housing pushes rentals up.”
Mr Penman said he would “reduce zoning altogether” just like Texas, suggesting it would “half” housing prices and lower rent too, while also cutting stamp duty.
“One of the faults with stamp duty is that it makes it very difficult to sell and buy a house,” he said.
“And you want people to move around because if they can move closer to work or a better job, it’s better for them, it’s better for the economy. So, that’s a particularly noxious kind of tax.”
Conquering the cost of living
Mr Penman may be a green thumb but he is a strong believer in “getting rid of some of the green garbage”.
“Everybody’s pushing away from this idea that we can tax and spend our way into green Nirvana. We just can’t,” he said.
The Jim’s Group founder drives an electric car, has solar panels on his home and has planted thousands of trees, but he said this eco-friendly mindset is not the way to go when it comes to driving down inflation.
“You’ve got to get the debt down. The really pitiful thing is that we used to have no national debt. State debt was totally under control and now they’ve done this ridiculous spending which is crippling us,” Mr Penman said.
“Inflation is basically caused by government. Not just the Iran war. It was going badly before that. You borrow and you spend and you put more pressure on the economy, you put people in useless bureaucratic jobs and you’re going to cause inflation.”
Removing the ‘ball and chain’ from small businesses
The Libertarian candidate has been in small business for over five decades and in his eyes, has more experience running one than most politicians combined.
That’s why he’s calling for the government to stop overtaxing businesses.
“It’s a bit like going to the Olympics and forcing every Australian athlete in a sprint to carry a ball and chain,” he said.
“We’ll see how well they do. It’s the same thing when you cripple business (with red tape),” he said.
Last month, Victoria was crowned the worst state in Australia to do business–- and Mr Penman agrees.
“All these bureaucrats are doing is crippling the economy. You’ve got this rising inflation, you’ve got business fleeing the state. You’d never choose to put a business in Victoria. It’s actually an appalling government,” he said.
Mr Penman added if it wasn’t for his family and staff in Melbourne, he too would “never choose to put a business in Victoria”.
“None of (the politicians) have any sense of what running a business is like. No, none of people in politics and I’m talking about the Greens, Labor, none of them have ever had a real job,” he said.
“They just don’t understand.”
Instead, Mr Penman said the government should put more focus into slashing unnecessary public servants and giving their salaries to doctors, nurses, teachers and police.
Heaven forbid the potholes
“That’s just crazy,” was Mr Penman’s reaction when the topic of potholes came up.
“I don’t understand … they (workers) have got two or three people holding up signs. Why do you need that?” he said.
“They’re there for weeks. Why does it take so long? You look and there’s one person pushing a broom. You know people holding out signs get paid as much as school principals?
“Put (the money) into actually getting the potholes fixed instead of all this garbage that goes on. You wouldn’t have to pay anymore.”
To add insult to injury, Mr Penman said Victoria feels like “a third world country” when comparing its roads to other cities.
“We’ve been in China … the roads there are perfect. You hardly ever see any road works, but there’s no potholes, nothing,” he said.
“You come back here, it feels like a third world country.”
While on the topic of transport, Mr Penman backed calls for the Suburban Rail Loop to be axed.
“I’d stop virtually anything that you can’t get an adequate cost for it,” he said.
“And it has to be costed in advance. Get a quote to do the whole thing, keep the unions out of it because they force up prices and just get a low cost.”
Where to from here
Mr Penman noted he was boycotting the traditional door knocks, rather relying on social media to get his message across.
He also knows rebuilding trust within his electorate “won’t happen overnight”.
“People want short term solution … but you just got to do things and make the hard decisions that will work out in time,” he said.
“It will take years to get some effect because the damage has taken years and years to get this bad. They’ve got to prepare to take a bit of a longer term view.”
Part of those hard decisions, he argued, involved cutting back on “middle class welfare” and redirecting that support only to the genuinely needy, rather than providing “handouts to everybody”.
Ultimately, the Jim’s Group founder said his political pivot came down to shifting focus away from “bureaucrats” and “the wealthy”.
“I want what’s best for the ordinary person,” he said.
“Let’s have a think about what would be best for ordinary people.”
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