Labor has played down its chances of winning the Canning byelection despite polls showing the Coalition apparently losing its grip on the previously safe seat.
On a visit to Western Australia on Tuesday to bolster the Labor candidate, Matt Keogh, the party’s deputy leader, Tanya Plibersek, said it was “very difficult” to expect an 11.8% swing in a seat held by the popular Liberal veteran Don Randall for 15 years.
Keogh will have to beat 11 other candidates in the 19 September poll, including the Liberal star Andrew Hastie, a 32-year-old former SAS soldier; the renewable energy advocate Vanessa Rauland, who is standing for the Greens; Vimal Sharma, who in addition to his day job as head of Clive Palmer’s flagship company Mineralogy is running for the Palmer United party; and the independent candidate Teresa van Lieshout, who made her campaign pitch through dance.
Keogh comes from a good Labor pedigree. The son of a hospital worker and a lawyer who retrained as a teacher, he, according to an obviously glowing profile in the Labor Herald, handed out how-to-vote cards in 1990, at the age of 10, and joined the ALP at 16.
His tie, too, is official Labor red, though that might not be a new addition – he seems to be sporting it in 2014 company newsletter for the corporate law firm Herbert Smith Freehills, where he is a senior associate. Until he resigned to seek election, he was the youngest president of the Law Society of WA to date.
The political ambitions aren’t new either – he ran for pre-selection for the seat of Perth for the 2013 federal election, but stepped down to clear the way for the former state Labor minister Alannah McTiernan, for whom he worked early in his career.
McTiernan is the only person who came close to threatening Randall’s dominance of the electorate – in 2010 she managed a swing of 2.2%, the only one towards Labor in WA.
Labor is fighting strongly against the perception that Keogh is, as the foreign minister, Julie Bishop, put it, a “hipster Labor lawyer” who until recently lived in the cafe-strip Perth suburb of Mount Lawley.
But Keogh hails from the electorate and the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, used the word “local” seven times when announcing his candidacy at a press conference last month at the Keogh family home in Kelmscott.
Keogh was, he pointed out, born at the hospital that was later replaced with the Armadale health campus, where he addressed the media on Tuesday with Plibersek, the WA senator Sue Lines, an assorted crew of lanyard-wearing hospital workers and, briefly, a bus – happily marrying his two of his three campaign platforms of health cuts and public transport investment. The third is cuts to education.
“We’re here because we want to highlight one of the key issues for the people of Canning, which has been that the Abbott government has cut over $2bn from the health services that cover this area,” Keogh said.
“We have got a huge growing area in Armadale and Kelmscott, also through Byford into Serpentine and Jarrahdale, which this hospital needs to support. And instead of investing the funds that are required, to redevelop this hospital, we are just seeing cuts from both the Abbott and Barnett Liberal governments.”
Canning is an area where it pays to be local. Perth’s outer suburbs are even more parochial than the rest of WA, a state so self-contained that it regularly threatens to secede. That’s partly why Hastie, who moved to WA with the SAS five years ago, has been trying to keep his campaign local, commenting on Monday that people in Canning care about “what’s going on right here, right now,” not goings on in Canberra. That’s mostly how Randall operated, except for those few days in February when he agitated for a leadership spill against Abbott.
Plibersek, speaking in front of nodding hospital workers on Tuesday, said Hastie was being insular to distance himself from Abbott.
“The Liberal candidate for this area, Andrew Hastie, is trying to make out that he’s running to be the president of the republic of Canning, that he’s going to have nothing to do with Tony Abbott and his team in Canberra,” she said.
“But we all know that Andrew Hastie will have to defend all of the same captain’s picks as the rest of Tony Abbott’s team will have to defend.”
But Plibersek stopped short of criticising Hastie’s military record, declining to comment on reports that he had been linked to a second matter that had been subject to investigation by the Australian defence force, this one involving the accidental killing of two Afghan boys by a US helicopter crew who were in contact with Hastie’s ground unit.
