Ken Wyatt’s campaign team is discussing spare pants. “We should make sure that everyone has jeans and casual shoes in the office to go with the T-shirts, because a suit pant can look incongruous,” a staffer notes. It’s week one of an eight-week election campaign and, in Wyatt’s electorate office in Forrestfield shopping centre, 23km east of Perth, Western Australia, the details are still being mapped out.
It will be a fight. Hasluck, the outer metropolitan seat Wyatt has held since 2010, is being targeted by the Labor party as one of its potential gains in the west. Internal Liberal party polling of the neighbouring seat of Burt, leaked to the West Australian newspaper this week, showed a notional swing of 6% toward Labor. Wyatt currently holds Hasluck on a margin of 6%.
Even without a national swing against the Turnbull government, Hasluck is notoriously difficult to hold. Wyatt was the first representative in its 15-year history to win a second term. A Yamatji and Noongar man, he was also the first Indigenous person to sit in the House of Representatives and wore a booka, a kangaroo skin cloak bestowed upon him by Noongar elders, when he made his maiden speech. He has since become the first Indigenous person appointed to the frontbench, taking on the role of assistant minister for health in September. Before the boundaries shifted last year, his electorate was home to a quarter of Perth’s Indigenous population. Now it stretches from the older eastern suburbs of Guilford and Midland to take in most of the Darling Scarp.
The Labor candidate in the seat is Bill Leadbetter, a local historian who frequently appears on ABC radio talking about heritage issues. He is a well-known community identity but Wyatt has worked at becoming better known, holding drop-in sessions at local cafes and pubs and attracting a small band of well-wishers. These include Roger, the man who comes to all his community events “in case you had no one to talk to”, and an elderly lady from the suburb of Lesmurdie, who attends public events just to say a prayer over him.
Emeritus professor David Black, a political expert at Curtin University, says Wyatt’s personal vote could be as high as 2-3%, which could buffer him from national swings.
“An Indigenous candidate with moderate views is a good a choice as the government could have at this moment,” Black says. “If he can’t win it’s because of the overwhelming national mood, not because of him.”
One of the areas drafted in during the Hasluck boundary change is Beckenham, a suburb under the flight path. After the morning strategy meeting Wyatt heads to a street to door-knock residents about their experience signing up to the national broadband network, which was switched on in the area last month. Two staffers, who divvy up the electoral roll and prepare to tackle the odd-numbered side of the street, slip their Team Wyatt T-shirts over their collared shirts and suit pants. It does indeed look incongruous.
It is not a resounding success. “Sometimes you get houses with people in them but they pretend not to be home,” Wyatt says, after a third house elicits no response. Of the four people who do open the door to chat, two have no interest in the NBN, while a third requests more street lights.
Beckenham is a focus of Wyatt’s pre-election door-knocking schedule. He allocates three minutes per house.
“You get the incredible privilege of being able to intrude but you must never abuse that,” he says.
Photograph: Will Russell for the Guardian
In the car on the way to Kalamunda community radio station, Wyatt talks about his family history. His mother, Mona Abdullah, was a member of the stolen generations and grew up on Roelands Mission but his grandmother, Maisy, lived at Guilford near the banks of the Swan River.
“I got hold of her native welfare files a few years ago, because I got my native welfare files, and my mother’s,” he says. “She lived there for some time and every now and then you’d see an entry that says ‘Maisey Deekie: drunk and disorderly’. It was like revisiting the past when I was elected because it took in that area, and I remember as a kid staying at the old Guildford hotel and my grandmother being in the area, so it’s got special meaning.”
Wyatt says his Aboriginality created a dual constituency: voters in Hasluck, and the broader Indigenous community who expect him to represent their views.
“You can have pressure brought on you that competes against what people expect of you and also what is possible to deliver,” he says. “And then you have got your own party priorities within that.”
He wore the booka to show “we should never be embarrassed about the qualities of our heritage”, butsays he does not want to be overlooked because of that heritage.
“I do have a concern though that I am ‘stereotypified’ as only being able to cope with Indigenous issues,” he says, adding that was why he was pleased to be given the job of assistant minister for health and aged care. “In working in those areas I’m demonstrating that my capabilities are not just channelled into the affairs of our people but to broader Australian society, and I am relishing that opportunity,” he says, adding that he won’t resile from the things he needs to do to champion Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander causes.
The Labor party is running four Indigenous candidates in lower house seats this election: former state MP Linda Burney in New South Wales; and former WA state MP Carol Martin, human rights lawyer Tammy Solonec, and Aboriginal employment mentor Barry Winmar in WA.
“It’s going to be good for Indigenous Australians with the number of candidates standing because it means we have got a lot of people who have confidence, who believe in their abilities and capacity, but they have also been able to be supported by a party and I think that’s important,” Wyatt says.
The Kalamunda community radio station is temporarily located in the Gooseberry Hill community hall after its former home was, like so many unattended buildings in WA, converted to a Dome coffee shop. The curtains, faded in bright sunlight, are patterned with dancing elephants. Between the elephants and the microphone sits Wyatt, who is talking with the station’s president, Monica Martinovich.
They talk about the federal budget and the proposed youth unemployment plan, which would see young jobseekers paid $200 a fortnight on top of the ordinary welfare payment to do an internship.
It has been labelled exploitative by Labor and the Greens and prompted a backlash from young voters.
But 7km down the road, at Lesmurdie Falls, a group of young Green Army volunteers – who are paid $16 an hour – are supportive.
The volunteers are lined up under broad-brimmed hats waiting for the environment minister, Greg Hunt, who announced funding for an additional Green Army team as well as $150,000 to allow local conservation volunteer group Men of the Trees to plant 50,000 trees.
The Green Army, part of the Coalition’s Direct Action climate change policy, has been downsized since its birth as the former Abbott government’s centrepiece environmental policy, but is still a favourite of both Wyatt and Hunt.
“I don’t want to get too emotional about it, but we are really proud of you,” Hunt says.
A 21-year-old volunteer Liam Smith, who endeared himself to Hunt’s media adviser by talking about the sense of purpose working as a conservation volunteer had given him, replies earnestly: “We’re proud of us, too.”
He later tells Guardian Australia: “Everything that you don’t get paid you get in self-satisfaction ... I would rather get paid less and feel good about what I’m doing than work on an oil rig and get paid heaps and feel like crap because one day we had an oil spill and 1,000 gallons of oil fell into the water and started messing with our environment.”
Both Smith and Patrick Moody, another volunteer, say they support the Direct Action policy ahead of an emissions trading scheme, because it’s “doing something real”, foreshadowing a comment by Hunt, who defends Direct Action a short time later on the basis that it is “real and physical”.
Wyatt’s environmentalism is, like his politics, hyper-local. It is better to do something that will have a positive impact now than do something which could change things later, he says.
Wyatt’s office has become known as a place people go when caught in the bureaucratic tangles of government policy that he, more broadly, supports.
One of those tangles is waiting to talk to him in the Perth suburb of Wattle Grove. Pouriya Naderi is an Iranian refugee who came to Australia by boat in 2001 and is now an Australian citizen with an Australian wife and two children. Since the government tightened security protocols he has been unable to get a visitor’s visa for his brother, who still lives in Tehran.
“One week, two week, doesn’t matter,” he told Wyatt. “Just so he can come and see my family, see my life here.”
Wyatt nods; it’s a complaint he hears a lot. He tells Naderi to come see him again after the election.
“I never make a promise to anybody, I always say: look, let me have a go at it, and if we can get it fixed then that will be a plus for you,” he told Guardian Australia. “I do enjoy engaging.”
Bill Leadbetter was contacted for comment.
