“That was Len Buckeridge’s idea. He was a very, very good … Well, not a very good friend, but my wife and I knew Tootsie, his wife … “
One Nation candidate Bill Edgar is answering a question about the proposal to move the Fremantle Port in a characteristically scenic manner. His voice sounds like he sells second-hand couches on commercial radio, and he’s decked out in a ferry captain’s outfit which he has yet to explain. More than once before the evening is done, he will declare “I AM Fremantle!”
Fremantle the place and Fremantle the electorate are two very different things. Even if you’ve never been to Western Australia, you probably have some idea of “Freo”, WA’s hippie/cosmopolitan port city. Starting out as a distinctly unpromising tent city rife with often comically horrific crime and disorder, it was initially saved by an influx of convict labour, which built Fremantle Prison, one of the many heritage buildings that still stand.
But Fremantle really became what it is today during the quarter-century following the war, mass migration from Europe arriving in Australia via the port, imprinting a distinctly Italian flavour on the city centre. It has a real strain of, shall we say, alternative lifestyles too — it was the Australian stronghold of the Rajneeshee sex cult, so chillingly covered in Wild Wild Country.
Fremantle has had WA’s first Green mayor and its first lower house state Green MP. So there’s that. But the electorate, like so much in WA, sprawls and takes in several different worlds.
The true centre is probably Cockburn Central — fast-growing, suburban, diverse, a lot more conservative, 15 or so kilometres south-east of Notre Dame university, which housed the candidates debate last night. So the candidates there and the questions put to them were more diverse than you might imagine — seven of the 10 show, running the gamut from the Socialist Alliance to PHON. That said, it is the only candidates forum I expect to go to in Western Australia where the Socialist Alliance candidate absolutely knocks them dead.
That was Sam Wainwright, a passionate speaker, but also clearly a bit of a policy wonk, as comfortable talking the stats about traffic into the port as he is slamming the capitalist system (“When I first joined the socialists, people said it was such a starry-eyed fantasy. I think what’s clear is the real fantasy is green capitalism, the idea that the system that got us here can get us out … “). So I’m slightly surprised the Greens candidate, Felicity Townsend, isn’t similarly practised and polished; she’s obviously very nervous, not a career politician — “Pretend my hands aren’t shaking,” she says as she reads from her notes. She’s also, I suspect, the most likeable person anyone in the room has ever encountered: when she gets a slam in on the Liberal Democrat candidate Yan Loh, he laughs along. She goes way over time on her closing statement, adding clause after clause as the moderator tries to take the mic away, and no one seems that mad.
The seat is held comfortably by the ALP’s Josh Wilson (it’s WA’s safest seat for them) and you can see why he got the plum gig. He’s a good performer, “president in an action film” handsome, that thoughtful scan of the room as he talks, no statement unattached to a detailed policy plan. And of course he has the advantage of being the only guy in the room who can win — the Liberal candidate, Bill Koul, doesn’t grace us with his presence.
United Australia Party’s Stella Jinman has, apart from anything else, one of the most distinctive speaking voices I’ve ever encountered, that Prue and Trude purr turning E to U (“As an edyookaytuurrr …”), veering an octave up in the most pronounced upward inflection I’ve ever heard — were she to be elected, she’d be a dream for sketch comedies. She gets the hardest time I’ve seen a UAP candidate get at one of these events. She doesn’t hit the vaccine stuff at all hard, and brings everything back to education, obviously her sincere passion, so by the end even the line of day-glo yellow shirts in the second row aren’t even applauding that hard. She gets into the most rancorous exchange of the night with a questioner about UAP’s promises to cap home loans.
Apart from that, and some general bafflement as to what Edgar was actually pitching, or why Loh kept taking the mic — only to repeat that whatever the issue government should stay out of it — it’s largely good-natured. When Townsend and Wainwright get jabs in on Wilson and how they’d like Labor to do better, it seems almost affectionate, and they all talk fairly warmly afterwards. Which I suppose is what happens when you show up to a debate where only one candidate can win — you really are just there to share your ideas.
At the end, Danicia Quinlan of the Fremantle Chamber of Commerce, one of the event organisers, thanked the speakers for their “humanity” throughout, which is an extremely Fremantle thing to say, but also true.
In that spirit, the detail that stood out most was when a young person got up and asked about what the speakers would do to support trans youth. Janetia Knapp, a Noongar woman representing the Western Australian Party, who had given a series of heartfelt and serious answers, said: “Firstly, I would treat them like human beings,” and as she paused to allow the applause that got to fade out, Edgar, sitting to her right, smiled warmly and patted her on the back, and I sighed and discarded a bunch of the jokes I’d written at his expense.
