When Matt Keogh was preselected to stand for Labor in the hotly contested byelection for the seat of Canning, near Perth, Western Australia, he was dismissively described by the foreign minister, Julie Bishop, as “the hipster Labor lawyer”.
It’s a label that could sting in a blue-collar electorate but Keogh shrugs it off: “It’s possibly the coolest way I’ve ever been described, but anyone who knows me knows I’m not that cool.”
Keogh, who has made much of his local roots during the campaign, was born in the south-eastern suburb of Kelmscott on the northern fringe of the Canning electorate, an hour’s commute by train to the city offices of Herbert Smith Freehills, the commercial law firm where he has worked as a senior associate since 2011.
He says he nominated for preselection in Canning because he wants to help people in a broader way than he could when working as a lawyer, adding: “It seems one of the key ways to create the change you want to see is to get the federal government to align with where you want it to go.”
He is the third generation of his family to call Kelmscott home and has the distinct advantage over Liberal party candidate, Andrew Hastie, who is leading 51% to 49% in the latest two-party-preferred poll, of being able to do press conferences at the hospital where he was born. He attended a primary school in the electorate but high school over the fence in the Perth hills. He met his wife, Annabel, in his last year of law school at Notre Dame in Fremantle, and worked at his grandfather’s legal practice in Kelmscott before getting a job with the office of the commonwealth director of public prosecutions.
“I wasn’t really thinking about electoral boundaries when my parents were putting me into school,” he says.
If he doesn’t win the 19 September poll, his decision to move back to Kelmscott could sting. But sitting at one of the many chain coffee shops that dot the 6,178 square kilometre electorate that hugs Perth’s southern fringe, he says: “I’ve got the house in Kelmscott and right now I’m focused on the next two weeks. That’s all I’m focused on.
“And realistically I don’t know what’s going to happen with this election campaign, but I’m playing to win, and I’m not planning about what’s going to happen when I get into parliament or if I’m unsuccessful. The next two weeks is occupying all of my thinking.”
A practising Catholic who came up through the rank-and-file of the Labor branches, joining the Armadale-Kelmscott branch at the age of 16, Keogh is aligned with the party’s right faction and deftly toes the party line on asylum seekers, the free trade agreement with China and raising the refugee quota. And while national eyes are focused on what the byelection, triggered by the sudden death of the longtime MP Don Randall, will bode for the future of the prime minister, Tony Abbott, or foretell for the next general election, voters in the semi-rural electorate are much more parochial.
A few have asked Keogh about marriage equality, which he supports. Even fewer have mentioned asylum seekers or what to do about Australia’s refugee policy. A significant number, he said, have taken umbrage with the prime minister himself. It’s to those people, not the Labor party machine, Keogh says, to which he feels most beholden.
“The key pressure I am feeling is from people who are walking up to me on the street and saying, ‘Please win this so we can throw Tony Abbott out,’” he says. “I’m not keeping count, but multiple times a day people would come up to me [and say that].”
But local concerns dominate. Most people in the electorate are concerned about jobs. Unemployment reached 6.4% in Western Australia in July – the highest rate in the mining state in 13 years. And when Guardian Australia sits down with Keogh, the 33-year-old opens with five minutes talking at a fair clip about roads and freight planning, particularly the $1.6bn Perth Freight Link, which is proposed to cut through suburbs to the north of the Canning electoral boundary and head for the port in Fremantle.
The planning and cost of that road has overshadowed the long-planned development of a new container port, dubbed the outer harbour, at Kwinana – also outside the Canning electoral boundary, but a potential wellspring of jobs for the working-class suburbs that make up Canning’s northern reaches.
Keogh has committed to duplicating Armadale Road, which is the main conduit between the south-eastern suburbs of Armadale, Kelmscott, and Roleystone and the Kwinana Freeway, which draws traffic into the city. That commitment, like almost every promise of money he has made for the electorate, is contingent on Labor winning the 2016 general election.
The other big promise, which voters also have to sign up to a two-vote deal to get, is a $3.2m “community safety” package, which includes $2.7m for rehabilitation programs to service people addicted to methamphetamine, also known as ice, the fastest-growing drug addiction in Australia.
The law and order package is in defiance of conventional wisdom in Western Australia which states you’ll never have success in the polls with a soft on crime approach. But Keogh, who campaigned against the Barnett government’s mandatory sentencing at the Law Society, says it’s not that hard to talk people around, particularly as they can see that the current approach “hasn’t produced the results”.
“They might be punishing people severely, but what they’re not doing is reducing crime, he says. “It’s one thing to be a victim and see the offender punished severely, but people really actually don’t want to be a victim in the first place and these sorts of policies support that.”
