A song and dance in the tightest seat in the state

The window-slapping rain has subsided, and now it’s sunny and clear and freezing as the sky darkens over the descending sprawl of greenery outside the Somerville Senior Citizens Centre, visible through sheer tan curtains. We’re in a tiny hall, its 60-odd chairs two-thirds full, and the candidates for Hastings are lined up at a trestle table in front of us. Behind them, a little stage with a piano under a canvas cover. There are two pictures of Queen Elizabeth ll on the wall, and the years have drained both to a hue of yellow-tinted white.

Near me, some people are discussing why Labor’s Paul Mercurio (yes, that Paul Mercurio) hasn’t shown up. “You can’t go everywhere,” one says. “Oh, exactly, exactly, like Briony and that environmental group thing…” It soon becomes clear that everyone in this conversation is here to actively support a non-Labor candidate. For God’s sake, stop being so gracious, don’t you know where you are?

Hastings, which takes in the eastern half of the Mornington Penisula, is on a knife edge. This is Liberal Party heartland — Neale Burgess has held the seat since 2006, but suffered a huge swing against him in 2018 and a redistribution has wiped out the rest of his margin — Antony Green has it at 0.0%. Again, this is based on Danslide numbers, and you wouldn’t have counted on those even before the polls started to tighten. Like Nepean, which it nestles up against, a Liberal loss here would be a disaster.

Complicating matters is the fact that Burgess is not contesting this election, announcing his retirement around the same time as allegations about his behaviour in the workplace surfaced. Standing in his stead is adviser to former health minister Greg Hunt and sometimes professional singer Briony Hutton. Combine that with a high-profile Labor candidate — apart from the acting lark, Mercurio’s serves as a local councillor — and the seat’s a tough call.

Joining Hutton is independent Robert Whitehill, a public transport wonk; Felicity Benson of the Freedom Party; Paul Saunders of the Greens, and Tyson Jack, contesting his fourth election for the Animal Justice Party.

Benson never mentions stolen elections and doesn’t seem the sort to jam screws into someone’s tyres. She’s part of the other cohort called populist minor parties — someone not engaged with politics until the pandemic, when lockdowns and the Andrews government’s extension of emergency powers made her worried and angry, and drove home the disconnect between herself and power.

I think of this late in the night when an elderly man (even by the standards of state government candidate forums, this is a mature crowd) asks the panel about the flurry of local bank closures, an issue affecting regions all over Victoria: “They say simply, go online, but of course many elderly people simply don’t identify with computers,” he says. All the candidates agree it’s a huge problem — and of course, none can offer a solution. It’s just the wave of history, the inevitable product of a system both parties have no intention of moving away from.

Australia is yet to produce a figure who can pander to the demographic left behind by that process — we’ve hardly heard a peep from the United Australia Party in this election, after it spent $100 million getting one federal senator just barely elected in May, while One Nation’s vote has flatlined ever since Pauline Hanson tried to pitch an actual organised economic policy.

It may be that she’s just got a free hit with her only real rival absent, but Hutton is a frighteningly slick performer. She never forgets the questioner’s name, never goes over her allotted time, never mentions Mercurio by name (“my opponent, the councillor” having less pizzazz than ” ’90s heartthrob Scott Hastings”, I guess). Never mentions Matthew Guy. Never stumbles on a figure or a policy, however detailed it gets — she’s across the local footy stadium capacity and the practicalities of the Lib’s Frankston line extension.

She’s been associated with the Liberal Party’s religious right, without yet being dragged into any of the ugly public culture warring that engulfed Moira Deeming and Renee Heath. She handles a question about abortion rights deftly enough, saying it’s a complicated area, that she believes everyone ought to have access to “health- or faith-based advice”, and she condemns the removal of the right of conscientious objection, to a round of applause. The part of the question about whether she’d work to wind back women’s abortion access in the state goes unanswered.

The Herald Sun’s list of young candidates from last month is illustrative — Hutton tells the paper about her passion for women’s health, while the next interview is with the freshly disgraced Timothy Dragan talking about school kids being indoctrinated into “victimhood and cancel culture”. Hutton is up against this, and the preferencing of people who have advocated for political violence, as much as she’s up against Mercurio.