Victoria’s hot seats week one as it happened: ‘Quinoa curtain’ that divides Wills into Greens and Labor halves is fading

Afghan-born Liberal candidate Zahid Safi, who has run a string of National Disability Insurance Scheme providers and migrant training businesses, has spent much of his week resharing Peter Dutton content on social media while ignoring my interview requests. Multiple phone calls, emails and social media messages have received no response.

We brought you news earlier in the week of the Liberals campaign office launch for Bruce, marked with boxed pizza and ribbon cutting. The campaign’s official launch party for Safi will be held this Sunday, under a veil of secrecy.

The event is invite-only, with the location only being shared with approved guests four hours before the event kicks off at 4pm. We obtained a copy of the super-secret invite which stresses “bookings must be made prior to entry”.

The Liberals are trying to reflect the diversity of the seat in pre-selecting Safi, hoping to appeal to the electorate’s large Muslim and Afghan-born population.

But Safi’s background didn’t seem to win him any favours on Monday when he turned up to the Omar-Farooq Mosque in Doveton with La Trobe MP Jason Wood promising big money during Eid prayers.

Some worshippers, sick of having religious ceremonies taken over by politicians, booed and heckled Safi and Wood. The politicians exited in a hurry.

The following night, I drove to the Lynbrook community centre for the campaign launch of Bruce’s Greens candidate, Rhonda Garad, which saw a large turn-out from the local Hazara community.

There, the heckling was a topic of discussion – with one man showing me a screenshot of the mosque’s constitution that clearly states: “Protect the non-political nature of the mosque.”

“The Liberals are trying to show a diversified image of themselves but in reality that’s not the case,” Greens supporter Namatullah Karrie told me.

Muslim Votes Matters is expected to endorse the Greens in Bruce in coming days, deploying at least 100 volunteers, but spokesperson Ghaith Krayeem told me earlier in the week the Gaza war was not driving votes in this electorate as much as in some others.

The following night, I dropped into the closing ceremony of Dandenong’s new Ramadan night market, which was attended by more than 150,000 people over nine nights, for delicious food and a vibe check with locals.

Hill enjoys a lot of support in the area, and is certainly winning the poster battle there, but some of the people I spoke to said Labor’s record on immigration and Gaza were two areas of disappointment. Others said the weak jobs market was pushing them towards voting Liberal.

It was WA senator Fatima Payman who received a rock-star welcome at the markets. Payman defected from Labor last year, accusing the party of not caring about the suffering of Palestinians, and has since launched her own political party, Australia’s Voice. She was at the market to promote her Victorian Senate candidate Mohamed El-Masr.

Finally, I ended the week trying to speak to Safi by popping into his Berwick campaign office. No luck there either – but the blue-blood locals I spoke with are keen to do their part to vote Labor out.

Back in Little India, I’ve spotted a few Safi signs in the shopfronts, which is another reminder of why there is no substitute for being on the ground to learn about the wishes of voters.

In many ways Bruce is a typical Liberal-Labor contest, but with pressure from the Greens and the electorate’s unique demographics it’s really anything but typical.

I’m looking forward to the coming weeks on the streets to find out what matters most to this electorate this election. If you have a news tip or want to share your view, please feel free to contact me on charlotte.grieve@theage.com.au. See you out there!

Arms aloft, Wilson declared Goldstein “ground zero” for the Liberal party at this election.

In the days since, I’ve tagged along with both candidates campaigning at train stations in the early hours of the morning and attended a passionate debate between the pair at the Brighton Hebrew Congregation.

The first cracks in the campaign have also emerged, with Wilson coming under scrutiny for declining an invitation to a climate debate the night before the event, and for posing with a member of his campaign team dressed as a tradie in a high vis vest and hard hat for a Facebook ad.

There are more events to come, with Daniel’s official campaign launch planned for this Sunday after she had to cancel her initial outdoor event due to some typically erratic Melbourne weather.

Thank you for all your tips and comments, keep sending them through, I’m looking forward to another week on the Goldstein campaign trail.

This steady gentrification has created stark contrasts in voting in the north and south of Wills. The seat begins in Fawkner at the north and ends at North Fitzroy in the south.

In the last election, the Greens secured 63 per cent of the primary vote at Carlton North Primary School, the seat’s southernmost polling booth, Australian Electoral Commission figures show. (This part of the seat was in the electorate of Melbourne in 2022 but a redistribution has moved it into Wills.)

Antony Green notes media coverage often concentrates on areas like this, or along Sydney Road in Brunswick and Coburg, where the demographic shifts have been most pronounced.

“But that electorate goes a long way north, to all of those little houses on moderate-sized blocks in Oak Park and [Glenroy]. So there are a lot of [votes] north of, what do they call it, the quinoa curtain along Bell Street.”

At the northernmost polling booth in Wills, Moomba Park Primary School in Fawkner, the Greens’ vote in 2022 was just 14 per cent. Labor got 44 per cent.

Labor’s best-performing polling booth was Glenroy College, where incumbent MP Peter Khalil secured 50 per cent of the primary vote, compared to just 15 per cent for the Greens.

The Liberal Party runs a minimal campaign in Wills – The Age has made repeated attempts to contact its candidate this time, Jeff Kidney, without success.

But the Liberals still pick up just under 20 per cent of votes. Its strongest booth in Wills at the last election was in Pascoe Vale, where the Liberal primary vote was 27 per cent.

The Labor primary at the last election across the seat fell by 5 per cent between 2019 and 2022.

This year, the impact of Greens candidate Samantha Ratnam is likely to be important – the former local mayor for the area and later leader of the state party is a strong campaigner. At council elections here in 2016, for instance, she won more than half the primary vote.

“The Greens have picked a high-profile candidate who has run before and who has some profile from state politics – she’s not Bob Brown so her profile isn’t that high, but she’s known,” says Green.

Monash University political scientist Zareh Ghazarian says Ratnam’s time leading the state party and in local government has indeed given her “a very high local profile” and that there is a sense this could finally be the moment the Greens take a seat once held by former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke.

International issues – particularly Gaza – will also play into the result this time around.

“This election, probably more so than others in recent years, international events are playing a role,” says Ghazarian. “We’ve got the economic debate around security arrangements, trade and tariffs with the USA. But the Israel-Palestine issue is really prominent.”

Advocacy group Muslim Votes Matters has endorsed the Greens in the seat because of Ratnam’s stance on Palestinian rights, and are running a campaign to oust Khalil.

Antony Green warns that even though Labor holds Wills by just 4.6 per cent from the Greens, it may be wise not to exaggerate the potential power of the Muslim vote in the seat.

The Muslim population, according to the 2021 Census, is about 10 per cent. Green points out this pales in comparison to two Sydney seats where Muslim voters could be influential. In the western Sydney seat of Blaxland, Muslim voters make up 32 per cent of the electorate, while in the neighbouring seat of Watson, they make up 25 per cent of the electorate.

Wearing a yarmulke, Wilson said too many people in the Jewish community now felt marginalised and afraid.

“Frankly, it has been the silence of our leaders that has angered me,” he said to a round of applause.

Wilson said he was a founding patron of Liberal Friends of Israel and had also helped list Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organisations.

He said the Coalition wanted a judicial inquiry into antisemitism on Australian university campuses, and would make it clear that Australia was Israel’s ally.

Both candidates were asked whether they would describe themselves as a Zionist. Wilson said he would.

“Would I declare myself a Zionist? It’s not something I’ve ever thought that I needed to do,” Daniel said. “I believe in the state of Israel and the sanctity of that.”

Daniel said the fact that some children in the Jewish community were scared to go to school, and Jewish people had their businesses boycotted was “not only inappropriate, it’s abhorrent”.

Daniel faced some heckling that she did not attend the “Never Again Is Now” rally in May last year. “I have not attended any rallies on this subject, pro-Palestinian or pro-Israel. I have attended several vigils,” she said. “I don’t think it’s appropriate to attend rallies on this matter.”

Daniel said peaceful protest was fine, but hate speech and hateful behaviour was not and needed to be managed by police.

Wilson said he did not think the expression, “from the river to the sea”, could be banned.

He decried Daniel for accepting funding from Climate 200 but would not reveal where his funding came from. He described Climate 200 as “a private company designed to subvert Australian electoral law”, adding that it employed people who were engaged in advocating for racism and antisemitism.

At the end of the debate, both candidates were asked whether they would recognise a Palestinian state and in what circumstances.

Wilson said the only circumstance would be when a Palestinian authority recognised the right of Israel to exist and the right of Israelis to live in peace.

“By advocating for a Palestinian state in current circumstances, we are rewarding incredibly bad behaviour,” he said.

Daniel said she supported a Palestinian state under a negotiated two-state solution, but this was not possible at the moment.

Goldstein has a large Jewish population, with 7.1 per cent of residents in the most recent census identifying Judaism as their religious affiliation compared to 0.4 per cent across the broader Australian population.

Wilson has identified rising antisemitism as a key issue in Goldstein in this election campaign, and at his campaign launch he spoke of how many Jewish Australians felt marginalised.

“In the past two years, what was dormant has been completely invigorated and emboldened,” he said. “The best we have seen from our prime minister has been a belated disinterest and our local MP tweeting messages of Kumbaya. Peter Dutton is committed to confronting it head on and so am I.”

Daniel has said the dramatic spike in antisemitism since October 7 had a major impact on the Jewish community in Goldstein, and she had been working hard with and for the community on this.

“Standing up to racism and antisemitism requires all of us to play our part,” she said. “It is important to be able to have civil conversations and debate about these issues across society, including federal parliament, and I look forward to having this discussion in Goldstein tonight.”

Daniel has backed a two state solution in Gaza, with both Israelis and Palestinians living side by side.

As I mentioned yesterday, regulations don’t permit two corflutes on the same property, and we were waiting on Boroondara Council’s decision on whether these zip-tied additions counted as one sign or two.

A council spokesman has informed me this afternoon that after conferring with lawyers, they’ve concluded the signs are technically one and can therefore stay.

That’s one political mystery put to bed.

However, others have been quick to point out that the two-sign rule appears to be breached elsewhere in the electorate. I’ve received photos of homes displaying both a placard for Ryan and a separate one for Victorian Socialists Senate candidate and tenants’ crusader Jordan van den Lamb (better known online as “purplepingers”).

I’ve checked in with Boroondara’s long-suffering communications adviser for a ruling on these – and yes, they are in breach.

He says if the council receives complaints about these, a council office will attend and “take appropriate steps to ensure compliance”.

Albanese and Butler were visiting the marginal seat that Khalil is defending from the Greens to spruik the government’s changes to Australia’s much-loved Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS).

Albanese announced several drugs that would be added to the PBS, among them “medications that support children who are diagnosed with glioma”, which occurs in the brain and spinal cord and is “the most common cancer of the central nervous system in children”.

Spyropoulos welcomed the move more widely for his customers, who include many first- and second-generation migrants, as well as the newer residents who have moved into this section of Pascoe Vale South and Coburg (the Coburg border is a street away from the pharmacy).

“Many years ago, the co-payment was over $40, and now it’s coming down to $25. So that’s what they were here to talk about,” he said.

After the press conference, Spyropoulos made a Greek coffee especially for the PM. “It was well-received. He took it with sugar,” he said.

Spyropoulos, the Australian-born son of Greek parents, said the area still had many Greek and Italian residents. Pascoe Vale had not yet become as gentrified as Brunswick and Coburg, he said. “Brunswick happened first, then Coburg and Pascoe Vale was next in line.”

Asked if he was a Labor member, Spyropoulos said he tried not to talk politics in the pharmacy. “If someone else wants to come in and talk politics, they’re more than welcome to.”

But asked who he thought would win the seat of Wills, he said: “We’re hoping Peter Khalil gets up. He’s given us a lot of support in the past, and he’s a nice person, and it’s good having a nice person in the position of your local politician.”

Before Albanese spoke, Khalil welcomed him and Butler to Pascoe Vale South, saying Labor was “making medicines cheaper”.

“For some of the people coming in here today, it makes a difference to their lives every day,” Khalil said.

The Greens’ candidate for Wills, former state party leader and an ex-mayor for the area, Samantha Ratnam, welcomed the PBS expansion but urged the PM to go further. “This is good news, but while he’s at it, why not expand Medicare to cover dental, too?”