Armadale is not used to all this attention. The semi-rural suburb, nestled halfway up the Darling Scarp, about a 45-minute drive from the centre of Perth, Western Australia, is one of the major population centres of the electorate of Canning, which will go to the polls on 19 September in a byelection triggered by the sudden death of its longstanding and popular Liberal MP Don Randall.
The low-income suburb is a mix of public housing and new residential estates, whose tessellating culs-de-sacs brush up against horse paddocks and small farms. Residents of Armadale and the nearby Perth Hills suburbs of Roleystone and Kelmscott normally only come to national attention when they’re being burnt down, as they were in 2011 – when a bushfire destroyed 72 homes.
Now they’re in the spotlight for their political opinions. If the Liberal candidate, Andrew Hastie, fails to hold the swing seat, once Labor but held on an 11% margin by Randall, it could be a deadly blow for Tony Abbott’s already questioned leadership.
It’s a novelty Graeme and Lorna Smith could get used to. The pensioners live in a caravan park at Mount Richon, a neighbouring suburb to Armadale. They spoke to Guardian Australia on their morning walk through Armadale on Monday.
The Smiths say they hate and distrust all politicians – except the late Don Randall, who they say was in a different class. “Don Randall did a lot, he got a lot of things done,” Graeme said.
The 62-year-old’s devotion to the seat, which he held for 15 years, was legendary. He died in his car on 21 July on his way to a community event at Boddington.
Without Randall, the Smiths said, there’s no one much to vote for. But they’ll vote Liberal – Lorna because, as the family budgeter, she says she understands what the Abbott government is trying to do even if she doesn’t like it much, and Graeme because a bad experience at a workplace in his youth turned him off trade unions and their supporters, like Bill Shorten.
“I’m sick of that Shorten with his criticisms and his negativity,” Lorna said. “It will be more local issues that people care about, not Tony Abbott.”
Rachel Park, walking through the small shopping centre with her four-year-old daughter, said she will use her vote to punish the prime minister for what she sees as unfair budget cuts. “They’re targeting all the wrong things and putting the money on external things, on defence,” Park said.
That’s the view the Labor candidate, Matt Keogh, is hoping will prevail. Keogh spent the morning campaigning at Kelmscott train station before moving on to Byford, where he is trying to sell the state Labor leader Mark McGowan’s renewed promise of Metronet, a $5.2bn plan to build a railway around Perth’s outer suburbs. Byford is one of the planned stops.
Keogh, together with Shorten, who was in WA at the weekend for the Labor state conference, are trying to push public transport spending, as well as capitalising on frustration with the Abbott government.
Despite their different political stripes Keogh, a church-going lawyer, is styling himself as the closest successor to Randall in terms of local nous.
“Don was a good local member because he went out and listened to people,” he said. “I really want to bring that same commitment if I am elected, to listen to the people of Canning.”
The second major population centre in Canning is Mandurah, about 45 minutes south-west of Armadale.
The rapidly growing satellite city of 80,000 people, one of the wealthier postcodes in the electorate, had a stronger Liberal vote in 2013. It holds an annual Crabfest, which this year attracted 140,000 people.
Self-funded retirees Peter and Gail LeSerf live just outside Mandurah. They too distrust politicians – federal politicians most of all – but liked Randall, who they praised as someone who “did a lot” for local causes.
The LeSerfs are concerned about changes to the GST – they don’t want to pay more, but think WA deserves a larger share than the 38c in a dollar it recouped this year. They’re also concerned about crime rates in Mandurah. But they have little faith in the ability of any political party to fix things.
“These guys are not even from here,” Peter LeSerf said. “They won’t know anything about the area.”
That is partially true. Keogh, who until two weeks ago was the president of the Law Society of WA, grew up in Kelmscott and began practising law in Armadale. He moved back to Kelmscott from the inner-city suburb of Mount Lawley.
Hastie, who was born in Wangaratta in north-east Victoria, also moved into the electorate two weeks ago, taking residence in the Mandurah suburb of Dudley Park.
Both missed the 30-day cutoff for changing their enrolment to Canning, so neither will be able to vote in the byelection.
A few kilometres out of Mandurah is the well-to-do suburb of Halls Head, where many of the two-storey houses have private jetties on the network of inlets. It’s here that Hastie and the communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, tried to look photogenic on Monday while visiting a particularly windy national broadband network construction site.
After 10 minutes of wearing hi-vis vests and pointing at conduits, the pair retired to Halls Head shopping centre, where Turnbull assured the waiting media that he was far too concerned showcasing “this fine young man” to turn his mind to “east-coast political gossip” – namely, whether he supported the view apparently coming out of cabinet that Joe Hockey should be ditched as treasurer in favour of Scott Morrison if Hastie fails to top the poll.
Turnbull is one of a rota of ministers expected in Canning for Hastie’s campaign, which was launched by Abbott a week ago. He defended the use of his ministerial travel allowance to visit the state, saying: “I am here campaigning for Andrew and I have certainly come over as part of my ministerial work,” before dodging a question about the impact losing Canning might have on Abbott’s leadership. He said his comment at a morning tea earlier on Monday, that the Liberal party would be diminished if it lost Canning, should be taken literally – the party would be diminished by one seat, that’s all.
Hastie is keen to keep the fight local – a slightly redirected focus for the 32-year-old, who originally listed his qualifications for the role as a “demonstrated capacity to fight for the Australian way of life”.
The former SAS officer is a disciplined performer. If he feels the weight of the Abbott government’s political fortunes resting on his shoulders, it doesn’t show.
Hastie insists he hasn’t heard any talk about the Liberal leadership out on the hustings. “I’m focused on the people of Canning, I’ve been speaking with the people of Canning, and they’re not interested in Canberra at all,” he said. “They’re interested in what’s going on right here, right now.”
Hastie’s selling point, other than his clean-cut image, is his military experience. Asked how he planned to increase WA’s share of the GST when Randall and the WA premier, Colin Barnett, failed, Hastie replied: “In my previous experience, mission failure wasn’t an option. So I’ll just keep banging on until I get some results.”
It does seem to have cut through – many who spoke to Guardian Australia were unable to name any of the candidates but said they had heard of “that SAS bloke”.
In Pinjarra, a small town of 3,200 about 17km inland from Mandurah, where Hastie and Turnbull addressed a gathering of Liberal party faithful on Sunday night, Pam Squires had already mulched the political flyers she got in the mail and couldn’t remember any of the candidates’ names.
Leaning on dual walking sticks, she bowed her head at mention of Randall’s passing and then shook it in assessment of his potential successors.
“Send them all back to kindergarten,” she said. “All the politicians – you tell them I said that. Send them all back.”
