Clarkson is about half an hour of hypnotic, muscle-memory driving up the freeway north of Perth, right out there in the suburbs billowing away from the centre like a spill. As it happens, the prepoll centre on Ocean Keys Boulevard — where I meet Labor candidate for Pearce Tracey Roberts — is on a slight hill, so you can look out from the car park behind the Thirsty Camel bottle shop and the cluster of charity shops and see it spreading north to the horizon, decent-sized houses on decent-sized blocks, surrounded by greenery, linked by giant pancake-flat roundabouts. The city of Wanneroo has been unfurling north for 20 years, and it still is.
The area began to fill up with English expats around the turn of the century, lured by comparatively affordable property, wide open spaces, the beaches — everything the English expat dreams of when they flee their crowded, drizzled homeland. So it’s sort of perfect that Roberts, from Manchester via the Yorkshire Dales — holding her accent despite being in Australia since the 1980s — became their queen. She was Wanneroo mayor for a decade, in local government for roughly a decade more. And she is recognised a lot while I’m around. As we cross the road away from the hectic pre-poll centre, a staffer comes along, implicitly to run interference with locals looking to say hi long enough for us to chat.
“So Ley-bur in the UK is like, with the workers, is that the case here?” A local/Mancunian stops Roberts to clarify, who assures him it is. I say in passing to Senator Sue Lines, who’s there and has been campaigning hard for Roberts in the area, “Oh, it seems like they’re both from Northern England” and she says with a laugh “Everyone here is from Northern England”.
Pearce is not what it once was. It used to be a semi-regional seat, taking in 1300 square kilometres at the outer edge of Perth and swooping north and east to take in Northam, Beverly and Gingin. It’s more or less unrecognisable now, shorn of hundreds of kilometres, losing its rural portion and centring now on the outer metro north.
The redistribution has been fortuitous for Roberts. Not only has the redistribution shaved off some of the Liberal margin, Pearce has essentially been pared down to the city where she was mayor for a decade. “When I saw the boundaries had been redrawn, I said ‘that’s effectively the City of Wanneroo, which is my heartbeat’.”
And, of course, there’s the Christian Porter factor. The former attorney-general’s gilded path, for so long looking like it led to the Lodge, abruptly ended last year. The revelation that he was having his legal fees for his defamation case against the ABC (for their reporting on historical and vehemently denied rape allegations regarding an unnamed MP that ended up being him) paid for by a blind trust was the last straw, and he announced he would not recontest the seat.
Linda Aitken, a clinical nurse and a member of Margaret Court’s Victory Church, is the government’s pick to replace him. She’s just had a week of campaigning wiped out by contracting COVID, which she delayed announcing until it was mostly done and Labor had started publicly asking where she was. Aitken didn’t respond to requests for an interview.
Labor thinks it can snatch Pearce, and indeed they probably need to if they’re going to win this election.
Porter hasn’t been seen on the campaign trail at all, back practising law. But the messy circumstances of his departure doesn’t appear to be front of mind with Pearce voters.
“I don’t get engaged in a lot of conversations around that, but one of the things that comes back is that when he was the representative, local groups said they never saw him, which may have been partly down to his busy portfolio,” Roberts says. “Whereas I’m everywhere. I meet with…” she then rattles off a list of community groups that sound like Alan Partridge pitching TV shows “…the groovy grannies, the knitters and natters, growing old and dangerously…”
Hunting for colour, I’ve been asking a fairly softball question of everyone I’ve interviewed while I’m here, about their favourite place in the electorate they’re running for, and I include Roberts’ answer because I do think it says something about WA and the people who live here.
She says her favourite part of Pearce is the local beaches, talks about watching her sons swimming and surfing as they’ve grown up, and then hits on a feeling that either comforts or repels people about living in Perth.
“Looking out over the sea and thinking, apart from Rottnest, the nearest landmass is Madagascar. And think about what’s behind you, if you had a drone in your mind’s eye, going back, back over the Nullarbor, over the continent, and think about someone on the eastern seaboard and the vastness of this beautiful country in between and you think, ‘Wow, I’m just a little dot on the western edge…’”
Her eyes widen and she smiles as she sees a chance to get back on message (there is an election on, after all, and Pearce is a must-win): “…but a dot with a big voice.”
