Entering the cramped boardroom from the lunch room opposite, where he and the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, had been looking at cut fruit and chatting to social workers for the benefit of the cameras, Matt Keogh, Labor’s candidate in the Canning byelection, came to meet the media.
Assuring them that crime and community safety – which has been a central tenet of the Liberal campaign – were also key issues for Labor, Keogh said: “You don’t get to learn about issues like this in just two weeks. I have spent my entire life, 33 years, in Canning listening to the people.”
Keogh and Shorten were at the drug rehabilitation, youth outreach and justice support provider Hope Community Services, in Armadale, proving their law and order bona fides in the form of $3.2m in extra funding for community-based programs in the constituency – if there’s a Shorten government after the next general election.
It was the second visit for the Labor leader since the start of the campaign for the 19 September byelection, prompted by the sudden death of Liberal MP Don Randall. Julie Bishop, the foreign minister, has put it about that Labor is “running dead” in Canning, but Shorten’s third visit aces the two by Tony Abbott.
Legal support services are home turf for Keogh, who served on the board of the family violence service Starick Services and the Street Law Centre, a legal outreach service for homeless people. The package promised at Thursday’s press conference included $2.7m for drug rehabilitation programs like those run by Hope community services and $270,000 for the Peel community legal centre’s family violence services.
It also included $200,000 for CCTV cameras in Armandale and Mandurah, the same cameras Abbott looked at during his visit with the Liberal candidate, Andrew Hastie, on Wednesday.
Shorten then segued into the China free trade agreement, which he said was a significant concern to the voters of Canning, a concern the Coalition claims was inflamed by Labor scaremongering.
Speaking as though he was delivering a monologue in an amateur theatre production, he confessed that “Australian jobs are an obsession of mine” and defended his increasing isolation in opposing the free trade agreement among a growing chorus of Labor premiers who have given it their support.
“When did it become so wrong to stand up for Australian jobs?” he said. “There are plenty of households in the Canning electorate where you have got trained construction workers, people with the sort of skills that can work on projects – they are unemployed now.”
Shorten then countered claims that the ALP was running a deliberately lacklustre campaign by saying it was the Liberal party which was “running doggo”, suggesting Abbott’s “lightning visits in and out of the place” was because the local campaign heads were “trying to hide Mr Abbott”.
That was a nod to Wednesday’s chummy Liberal press conference down the road at the City of Armadale council offices, when Hastie stepped in to take an awkward question directed at Abbott about the future of his leadership.
In a reverse Hastie, Shorten stepped in on Thursday to save Keogh from a pressing question about how many billboards he had placed around the electorate, but not before his untroubled candidate coolly replied he was “not running a count”.
Keogh, a commercial litigator and former prosecutor with the Commonwealth Department of Prosecution who is experienced dealing with the media in his recently relinquished position of head of the Law Society of WA, only faced interjections from his own team.
Perth Labor MP Alannah MacTiernan, who has previously gushed that she has known Keogh since he was a child, also helpfully chimed in on his running sheet of Canning place names to remind him that he planned to visit the Alcoa aluminium refinery in Pinjarra on Friday.
But Shorten appeared eager to make sure Keogh did not get caught out. Picking up his lengthy speech about Abbott somewhere around the fifth page, the opposition leader suggested Labor makes up for its lack of signs in other ways.
“Someone asked earlier, ‘How many billboards do you have?’ ” he said. “Labor doesn’t have billboards. We have ideas for the future of Canning.”
The dearth of Labor campaign advertising has at least saved it from the fate of one of Hastie’s mobile billboards, which greeted Thursday morning commuters on Armadale Road with the new slogan of “fuck Tony Abbott” and other, more offensive, assertions.
Keogh, whose campaign strategy has been to shelve his lengthy CV and focus on the fact that he, unlike Hastie, was born in Canning, but whose campaign events have been largely centred around the swing voting suburbs of Armadale and Kelmscott, was asked if he had made the trip down to Wagerup, 90km from Armadale, on the southern fringe of the electorate, since the writs were issued.
He has not, but like Lucky Starr he has kept a concise itinerary. He has been to Boddington, Pinjarra, Mandurah and Byford, Serpentine, Jarrahdale and Kelmscott since the campaign started. But before that – because remember, he was born here – he’s been everywhere, man.
“Having grown up here, I’m aware of a lot of the issues,” he said. “The things Bill has been talking about, my friends have been raising with me for years.”
