Vanessa Rauland is not good at talking in soundbites. This has her worried – heading into the final week of the Canning byelection campaign, the Greens candidate will be called upon to deliver her party’s message to an electorate that’s rapidly getting tired of all the would-be politicians clogging up its shopping centres.
“That’s what the Greens advisers keep telling me,” she says. “Soundbites. Keep it short.” Sitting in a cafe in Fremantle, Rauland brings her hands down for emphasis on the last word, cutting a discrete chunk out of the air. “Be concise”.
Rauland doesn’t do concise. She’s a university lecturer, working part-time at the Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute (CUSP), where she completed her PhD in low-carbon urban development in 2013. That’s a career suited to talking in lengthy detail, and only when you’re sure you know everything it is reasonably possible to know on a subject.
The politician’s knack of speaking confidently from a recently memorised page of briefing notes is foreign to Rauland, as is sticking to a party line. Fortunately, her key concerns – renewable energy and sustainable communities – and those of the Greens. No memorising necessary.
“I get so excited by the future and I am so amazed at the research that’s coming out of CUSP,” she says. “I get really excited – and then you just look up to the government and at every point they are squashing it all.”
It was the removal of the carbon tax last year that first made Rauland consider switching her focus from research to politics. Then the prime minister, Tony Abbott, said the federal government would not fund passenger rail projects. And finally, in June, the Abbott government wound back the renewable energy target.
“I have always put my blinkers on to politics and just tried to keep working away at it, but if we’re working away and we just keep getting roadblocks, I think this is a fantastic opportunity to actually work to change policy – so that the other me’s can keep doing what they are doing,” she says.
“Then we can actually progress society along much quicker, rather than having to be stopped at every corner because of silly policies that are not evidence-based, not forward thinking.”
In the socially conservative, working-class seat of Canning, the Greens took just 7.4% of the primary vote at the last election. Early polling for the 19 September byelection, triggered by the sudden death of sitting MP Don Randall, puts them on a marginally improved vote of 7.9%. That’s roughly the expected combined vote of all the other minor party candidates.
Rauland has never lived in the Canning electorate. She grew up in Melbourne and spent four years in Europe, completing her masters at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam before moving to Perth to take up a position at Curtin University in 2009. She now lives in Fremantle – culturally very different from the Canning population centres of Armadale and Mandurah – and runs a sustainability consultancy business with fellow Curtin academic Dr Samantha Hall, as well as lecturing part-time.
At 33, she is the contemporary of Liberal candidate Andrew Hastie, 32, and Labor candidate Matt Keogh, 33. With her dark-rimmed glasses, leather jacket and green tea, Rauland is perhaps a more appropriate target for Julie Bishop to label a hipster than Keogh (who, when he spoke to Guardian Australia earlier this week, drank black tea).
But, Rauland tells Guardian Australia, Canning is the perfect test case for sustainable development. A rapidly growing area where new suburbs pop up in empty paddocks every six months, on the fringe of one of the lowest-density cities in the world, Canning is the frothy tip on the wave of urban sprawl.
“I get a little bit upset and get a bit ranty when people talk about affordable housing being cheap housing on the outskirts of suburbs,” she says.
“That’s not thinking long-term affordability. That’s putting people who are vulnerable, who have not much money, somewhere that they have got huge transport costs, [where] they’re car dependent.
“And if it’s a cheap house, it probably means it’s not really well-designed, it’s not efficient, so they have got high energy bills as well … like in America, it could end up being the slums if you end up just having massive big houses that consume a lot of energy and are cut off from transport.”
Rauland says housing affordability is the issue Canning voters raise most with her, followed by concerns about local crime levels – something that has been a major focus of her opponents’ campaigns, but not hers. Some are concerned about renewable energy, but usually over the impact on their bills – half of all houses in Canning have either rooftop solar or solar hot water, to keep costs down.
“We have got the biggest power station in Western Australia on our rooftops – I think it’s 500 megawatts now,” she said.
“It just doesn’t make sense to me – why aren’t we increasing that?”
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