‘Fighting for democracy’: seat thrown into doubt on Victoria’s South West Coast

Roma Britnell spends nearly all of the South West Coast candidates forum — held in the immaculate Reardon Theatre in Port Fairy on Wednesday night — walking a shuddering, wire-thin tightrope. Events like this are guaranteed to be uncomfortable for anyone from a major party and most especially for a Liberal incumbent. Indeed, she’s the first conservative candidate I’ve ever seen at a “Voices of” organised event, and the fact she showed up at all is a sign that this time no one quite knows what’s going to happen.

The seat takes in… well, the south west coast of Victoria, from Peterborough in the east through to the South Australian border. Inland, it’s dairy farming country, with the seat and surrounding areas containing more than 1000 farms. It has been Liberal property since its creation in 2002. Future Liberal premier Denis Napthine took it from a razor-thin marginal in the Liberal Party drubbing that year to blue-ribbon Liberal by the time he resigned in 2015 and Britnell took over. The margin has been chipped away at ever since he left, and now Britnell holds it on 3.2%.

Like seemingly everywhere Liberal politicians once felt safe, the teal movement has played a part, albeit not as directly as, say, Hawthorn. In the federal election, former Triple J presenter Alex Dyson ran in Wannon — the closest federal equivalent — with the support of the local “Voices of” movement and took the seat from safely Liberal to marginal.

The Voices aren’t supporting a candidate this time around, but organised the evening’s event to “help voters make an informed decision”.

The crowd is mature, but this is a rural state election candidates forum, so the scattering of under 35s (including a couple of what looked like first-time voters) among the 60 attending was frankly miraculous, and I half wondered if they’d been misled by the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever poster in the foyer.

Britnell is joined by the Animal Justice Party’s Jacinta Anderson, Greens candidate Thomas Campbell, independent Carol Altmann, who describes herself as more of a “community independent” in the mould of Cathy McGowan than a strict teal, but is the probably closest to that profile in this seat. Then perennial independent Michael McCluskey and Kylie Gaston from the ALP.

Gaston kicks off the savaging of Britnell in her opening address, saying that the funding for the area Britnell has claimed is a result of her advocacy and snatching it back as funding allocated by a Labor government. More than once candidates say (politely) that the best way to bring about change in the area is to vote in “anyone but a Liberal candidate”.

Britnell and Gaston have a strange dynamic to deal with, a sort of major party yin and yang: Britnell is a long-time member representing a party very unlikely to win government, and Gaston represents the likely government and is almost certain to not win the seat. Britnell is bullish about the Liberals’ chances of winning, because I guess she has to be. Hence the tightrope act — criticising the Labor government for its inaction in the south west while spruiking her own achievements in the area.

Altmann nails this when she asks, “If you’re such a great advocate, why are things still so bad?”, to a ripple of applause. Gaston gets a bit of this too, extolling the Andrews government while having to acknowledge enduring issues around access to health, schools and the concern every single person I’d spoken to that day — in Port Fairy, Koroit, Terang, Panmure — brought up: the area’s car-shuddering, pockmarked roads.

Anderson is the token real person on the panel — a single mum, whose young children are being babysat in the foyer, and who she occasionally has to pick up and cradle as she speaks. She orates haltingly, all passion and nervous energy, but she vividly gets across that she understands what the issues are, because she’s lived it; on housing affordability or education, she’s seen it affect her friends, not heard it from constituents.

Campbell has run in every state election since 2014, and the practice shows. He’s on message and knows what works with this kind of crowd — practical, mainstream stuff, more talk about small businesses than workers. But — and I don’t know why it’s always the Greens who do this — he can’t stop going over his allotted time. He gets a genuine laugh from everyone on the panel when a question comes in about the climate crisis and he says “60 seconds on an environment question for a Green. Let’s see how I go…”

If elected, he’d join the cohort of huge units of Auspol alongside Milton Dick and Dan Repacholi. They put him next to Altmann, the teensiest person on the panel, probably as a joke. He does well — a woman ahead of me, who told her group she’d be judging the candidates on their “ability to put a sentence together”, comments approvingly that he spoke “very eloquently”.

Altmann is a long-time journalist and she has a quality that’s equally handy for journos and politicians: the ability to sound smart and across the issues without ever giving the sense that you’re talking down to your audience. So far as I could see, she was the only candidate with people wearing her shirts in the crowd.

Britnell is predictably strongest when the questions veer more conservative. A young man in flannel and a ‘tache, a veteran who starts with a rambling, impassioned aside about the rubber bullets shot at protesters at the Shrine of Remembrance, asks whether there ought to be royal commission into the COVID response in Victoria — everyone on the panel, even Gaston, carefully agrees there should be.

On this, Britnell is superb — starting on the symbolism of protesters being shot at the shrine, expanding to the failures of hotel quarantine, ending on the 800 deaths. I realise with a jolt this is the first time I’ve seen any state Liberal politician have genuine cut through on what Victoria went through for those two years, and I wonder how Britnell must feel watching her colleagues spread conspiracy theories and get caught using staffers in their ads, as she struggles to hold on to an area that has traditionally delivered Liberal premiers and prime ministers.