The Australian Women's Register

After graduating in 1994 from Radford College in Canberra, Clay obtained her degree in Creative Writing and a Bachelor of Laws (Honours) from the University of Wollongong in 2000. She worked as a Legal Officer and Senior Legal Officer at the ACT Attorney-General’s Department from 2001 to 2003 and later as Project Manager with the ACT Law Society from 2004 to 2008. From childhood, Clay has been concerned about climate change and has become committed to urgent action. This commitment to environmentalism translated into her professional career, and she began working as an Operational Policy and Business coordinator for ACT NOWaste in 2004.

In 2016 Clay became co-founder and CEO of the recycling company Send and Shred with national recycling expert Graham Mannall. While running that business, she decided to set up a personal project with her family, The Carbon Diet, with the aim of cutting their household emissions, aiming for a 75 per cent reduction of their carbon footprint. Clay blogged about her Carbon Diet from 2018 to 2020.

Clay’s commitment to tackling the climate crisis led her to run for the electorate of Ginninderra at the 2020 ACT general election. In her inaugural speech to the Assembly on 3 December 2020 she spoke of how it had never occurred to her to enter politics, but that she wanted more environmentalists at every level in parliament, leading her to ask ‘if not her, then who?’

Clay has been a member of the Standing Committee on Environment, Climate Change and Biodiversity, and she introduced a bill to amend legislation to ban fossil fuel company advertising at Canberra sporting venues. She has also been a strong advocate for a ’circular economy’ strategy, supporting Labor’s draft public consultation strategy in 2022.