It’s the electorate where the Howard era began in triumph and ended in farce.
The electorate where “Trackie Dackie” Jackie Kelly was elected not once but twice in 1996, scoring a thumping by-election victory after being dudded out of office on a constitutional technicality. The electorate where Kelly’s dentist husband was implicated when a group of Liberal Party activists were photographed in the dead of night in 2007 distributing stooged, misspelt pamphlets reading “Alu Akbar” on behalf of a fictitious local Muslim group claiming Labor support for the construction of a mosque.
Lindsay, on the westernmost edge of Sydney at the foot of the Blue Mountains, was named after the artist, writer and bon vivant Norman Lindsay, who these days would probably be regarded as a weirdo in this proudly suburban, no bullshit seat where the biggest source of local entertainment is the Penrith Panthers Leagues Club, a venue so preposterously big that it can be seen from space.
In terms of demographics and income levels the area is comparable to Dandenong in Melbourne, Adelaide’s northern suburbs, a Brisbane satellite city such as Logan, combining sizeable public housing stock and welfare dependency, with proud, hard-working, lower-to-middle income mortgagees who are right on the edge of affording their own slice of the Australian home-ownership dream.
But in political terms, the key difference is that for the past 14 years Lindsay has been the venue for game-changing political upheavals. John Howard is on the record as saying the Lindsay pamphlet scandal guaranteed him defeat in Bennelong. Julia Gillard is so worried about losing Lindsay that one of her first actions as Prime Minister was to ask the local member, David Bradbury, to join her on a naval exercise off the coast of Darwin, in a media event aimed at reassuring voters in his seat that the Government was not a soft touch on asylum seekers.
Before getting into the political landscape of the seat let’s hear from the couple in the above photograph - Lane Melrose, 28, who works as concreter, and his wife Jade Melrose, 26, who is busy at home raising their two young kids but would like to work if she could afford the childcare. I met them both yesterday at a South Penrith shopping centre where Jade had this to say:
A lot of people don’t really like Gillard. The way she got the job won’t help her. But in my view you should vote for the party not for the person. If you think about the party, and how they’ve gone since they got back in, it’s like they have been trying to stay in power by giving everybody handouts. We don’t need that. We are a young family, with just one of us working, because we can’t afford for me to work and pay childcare. There is no point me going to work because after childcare I would have $50 at the end of the week. Lane works five, six, sometimes seven days a week, it’s rare that we have this sort of time together like today to go shopping as a family, and you think, well, if we were on the dole and living in housing commission we would be getting it handed to us. It’s just backwards. There should be more reward for effort.
Jade says she doesn’t particularly think that asylum-seekers are the issue, more what she sees as the handout culture. But her husband Lane makes it clear that he sees asylum-seekers as being part of that same handout culture, and is offended that the government will come to the aid of people, at public expense, assisting those who he thinks have broken the law by arriving illegally.
There’s a lot of handouts being given out to all the people across Australia and a lot of support being given to asylum-seekers and what-not, and I honestly don’t believe that it’s fair. I know the sort of money that I am on, and then you see the sort of handouts that they get for coming to Australia and seeking asylum, and they often just start up their own old shit when they get over here. You know, we’re trying to pay for a house, trying to raise a family on one income, and then there’s people out there who rob the system…I don’t know much about politics, but I know what isn’t fair.
Jade and Lane Melrose were indicative of many of the people I spoke to in the seat yesterday. The recent media attention on the issue of asylum seekers in the seat – which is less affected by large populations of displaced peoples than others in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane – has led to sweeping claims of racism on the part of constituents.
With a couple of exceptions, it’s a bit more complicated than that. As the Melroses showed, it’s a working person’s sense that they are the ones who are doing all of the working, while others around them play the system to earn money through welfare, in amounts which probably isn’t a world away from their after-tax pay, especially once you’ve paid for petrol, groceries, the mortgage, books and toys for a couple of young kids.
Since the election of the Hawke Government in 1983, Lindsay has been the suburban equivalent of the bellwether seat of Eden-Monaro, only ever won by the party of government. Former teacher Ross Free ran for the seat in 1975 and 1977 and won it in 1980 and held it through the Hawke-Keating era, serving as Science Minister and Schools and Vocational Education Minister, right up to the Howard landslide in 1996.
The seat was won that year by Jackie Kelly, whose candidacy was challenged by the ALP because, as a serving member of the RAAF, she held an office of profit under the Crown and could not legally nominate under the Constitution.
The ploy backfired spectacularly. Free had already been flogged at the general election with an 11.8 per cent swing to the Liberals. At the subsequent by-election, the vote swung another 5 per cent in their direction. “Jackie Kelly, we love you!” John Howard declared on the night of the by-election. The legend of the “Howard Battlers”, his beloved suburban aspirationists, was officially born.
Ross Free told The Punch that the decision by Labor head office to challenge Kelly’s candidacy in 1996 was “right in politics and wrong in law” and unwittingly paved the way for Howard to tighten his stranglehold on power.
Now retired in the Blue Mountains, Free feels that Jackie Kelly herself , who traded heavily on her tracksuited stylings to pitch herself as a knockabout local, played a damaging role in dumbing down the perception of his the seat.
My view is that Kelly was essentially a silly person and that she came to be wrongly seen as epitomising the seat. Howard got lucky in 1996. Her victory tended to enhance her position as some kind of talisman for Howard. And the good people of Lindsay tended to suffer for all that because of that sense that people like to imagine that electorates tend to reflect the style of the local member. In the darkest days of the Howard ascendancy there were a good proportion of people in Lindsay who did not share that style. A lot of what has been reported lately about Lindsay has been exaggerated. Journos can always get people to say silly things in vox pops. These are decent people. Battlers is an overworked phrase but in the old sense of the word it’s one I would use. They are working people who want to make the best lives for themselves and their kids and are outpriced of the real estate market closer to town. What the Liberals did out here in 2007 was a reflection on them, not the people of Lindsay. The air was black out here with chickens flocking home to roost. It demonstrated the utter shallowness of the Liberal machine out west. That episode should put those bastards out of business for a generation.
In Lindsay, the Howard ascendancy was also the Kelly ascendancy. It was the now sitting Labor member, former Penrith Mayor David Bradbury, who was derided by John Howard as “the identikit head office candidate” after losing badly to the earthy Kelly at the 2001 and 2004 polls.
Bradbury finally won the seat in 2007 in the heady and now-distant days of Kevin07. He must be worried now that if Kevin was a one-term PM, he might become a one-term MP. A Newspoll survey specifically focussed on Lindsay last month found that, with Rudd’s approval ratings in freefall and Abbott’s surging in his seat, Bradbury was facing a 12 per cent swing against him in the seat he holds by a 4.5 per cent margin. Which is goodnight nurse.
The replacement of Kevin Rudd with Julia Gillard will have altered that trend. But the other issue which Bradbury has to grapple with is the unpopularity of the NSW Labor Government, which recorded a miserable historic low in last month’s Penrith by-election with a primary vote of 25 per cent, albeit in an election clouded by proven corruption allegations against former state member Karyn Paluzzano.
This was the take of one Penrith resident on those issues yesterday, office worker Carol Collins, whose husband runs a small business:
I don’t think David Bradbury has got a hope just because of the way Labor has gone in NSW. David Bradbury is a really good local member, he’s a lovely man, he was a great mayor but I think they’re going to trounce him. It’s not because of the refugees or what happened to Kevin Rudd it’s just because of what’s been happening at the state level. We know people who work at the Nepean Hospital and we can see that there are just not enough people being employed there, not enough money being put in there. They’ve blown the whole lot.
In our conversation with Bradbury, he is at pains to do two things. He wants to quarantine state issues from the campaign, preferring to talk about successful local initiatives he’s involved with such as the Nepean Hospital redevelopment, the new commuter carpark at Penrith railway station, the construction of two new trades training centres. And he wants to downplay the extent to which the federal election is dominated locally by the asylum question, hoping that Gillard’s attempts to neutralise the population squeeze by declaring herself an opponent of “Big Australia”, and the tougher rhetoric she has taken on illegal boat arrivals, will be noticed in his seat.
Bradbury tells The Punch:
I wouldn’t say it (border protection) is the number one issue. It’s an important issue but there’s many other issues that are important issues to people. This is an area where the cost of living is always an important consideration in people’s minds, on the outskirts of Sydney where’s there’s a high dependence on motor vehicles, people with large mortgages that they have to pay. They are the bread and butter issues. Security of employment, having a job and being able to keep a job, knowing that your rights at work and your conditions at work are not going to be under threat, these are the issues which matter to people. (On state issues) the Liberals would like that to be the case but I think people in Penrith have been given their opportunity to express their view on the state of things in NSW.
For someone whom David Bradbury has labelled a “professional spin doctor” his Liberal opponent Fiona Scott is pretty raw. The 33-year-old former marketing manager has no political experience – but the Liberals are instead trying to bill her as a latter-day Jackie Kelly candidate, and hometown girl made good. Scott’s pedigree in the area is solid - anymore solid and she’d be playing second row for the Panthers.
Born in Nepean hospital, she went to pre-school, primary school, high school in the areas, and also went to University of Western Sydney. Her grandfather started the automotive business in 1936 which her father now runs.
Last week NSW Opposition leader Barry O’Farrell was caught admitting to a journalist on Twitter that the Liberals were having trouble attracting candidates since “the ranga” became Prime Minister. The delay in process has also upset Tony Abbott. Scott attempts to put down the delays to the process of preselection within the Liberal Party.
She tells us:
I haven’t spoken to Barry O’Farrell about these issues. What I am focussed on is getting out there and working really, really hard. This is the mortgage belt of Sydney. There are so many good Australian families out here that are really working as hard as they can to pay their mortgage and send their kids to school. To have seven interest rate rises in a row it hurts families, hurts hard working families, and unless the Government can reduce its debt and deficit and get out of swelling up all the money that is in the banking system we will not be able to bring interest rates down. They do care that our borders are safe, absolutely, but they do care also about what is important to them here in Lindsay.
Oddly, despite the fact that her boss Tony Abbott has listed it in the four-point plan which is running on high-rotation campaign advertisements, Fiona Scott tries to downplay the importance of border protection in the campaign. While accepting asylum seekers is an issue with some in the area, when asked whether race and immigration more generally is an issue she tells the Punch:
“I wouldn’t think that it is an issue in the area. As I said, these are good hard working people in Penrith. They are really focussed on the issues that affect them on a day-to-day basis.”
Fiona Scott obviously hasn’t met Kelly Cooper, 28, a cook and mother of three, having coffee at Gloria Jeans with three girlfriends, who also regard the asylum seeker question as not only pivotal, but indicative of the same handout culture the Melroses described at the start of this article.
Put it this way. I have asylum seekers living two streets away from me and when you see them driving around in a $30,000 car and wearing brand-new Versace and you look at them and think, hang on, we are paying through our taxes for them to be here, and you just think no way. Why should we be paying for them to be here? We can’t even afford to buy that sort of crap for ourselves. Mum knows the name of them, what are they called again? Sudanese. I don’t want to sound racist but they’re as rough as guts. There’s more boats now than there were before, definitely. We’re no good at controlling it. You hear about how they might die if we turn the boats around. They could have died anyway when they were coming here, they probably should have thought of that first. Send them home. We can’t even afford to do stuff for ourselves in this country at the moment so why should we do it for them? Simple as that.
We all grew up under the Howard Government and now I don’t know what sort of a choice we’ve got. Basically we’ve got a bloke who is forthcoming in admitting that he lies, versus a back-stabbing moll. What sort of a choice is that? She’s not even a real ranga – you could see it yesterday when she called the election that she had dyed her roots. You can’t trust her. Seriously, if she gets in, are we allowed to do to her what she just did to Kevin Rudd? It was one of the biggest dog acts I’ve ever seen.
I’m a cook and a mum. I’m straight-forward. I make take-away food and my husband works as an asphalter. We’re the normal people of Australia. I want a government that is looking out for us, not for people who think the world owes them a living.
Don’t miss: Get The Punch in your inbox every day
Get The Punch on Facebook
Facebook Recommendations
Read all about it
Punch live
Up to the minute Twitter chatter
Government to consider a Greens call for a national anti-corruption body #auspolhttp://t.co/mrkCu9HQ
Recent posts
The latest and greatest
Reports of Ron Paul’s death are greatly exaggerated
Reports of Ron Paul’s political demise have been greatly exaggerated and his tactical genius is…
They must pay for one’s bitter disappointments
A private school girl’s family is sueing her elite, extremely expensive private school for not…
Our Budget blade didn’t cut aid, it’s being paid in spades
Ten million children vaccinated. 2.5 million people with access to safe drinking water. And 30 million…
Gentle jabs to the ribs
Real women like men who drink beer
British comedian John Cleese calls them “beer fairies”. It’s a euphemism for… Read more
Most commented