Will the bells of Loreto teal for Helen Conway on the North Shore?

“Are we a divided nation? It certainly looks that way, when you’re enjoying a pineapple daiquiri in the Caltex box at the State of Origin.” — Alex Buzo (from memory)

“We acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which we stand, the Cammeraygal people of the Eora Nation, and pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging,” the MC intoned from a lectern.

Vague murmurs of approval.

“Now the acknowledgment has been done for everyone, so no individual candidate needs to do it.”

Applause. Big applause.

It was going to be that sort of evening.

In a sweeping, sparkling-white auditorium at the Loreto school in Kirribilli (your taxes at work!), a school hanging off the side of Milsons Point, right near the water, its Italianate tower throwing a late afternoon shadow of the Cross giving off a whole Vertigo vibe, 200 or so electors of the North Shore electorate had turned up for just about the last “meet-the-candidates” event before the election — a good turnout, with many good citizens driven there by the responsibilities of politics, the conscience of the moral middle classes and the off chance that Cate Blanchett, from the Mosman end of the electorate (or was), might turn up. Light wood, white walls and rows of marine-blue seats, pretty much the colour that has (erroneously) become known as “teal” in our era. 

Had they got the organisers to tilt the vote with the colour scheme? No, the Libs are using the same shade of blue. The organisers were Milson Precinct, part of the “precinct” network, the partly very good and useful/partly cultish political wellness community organising movement which is big in Sydney and so far as I know unknown in Melbourne, where our model of community organising is to have the Midsumma revolutionary anarcho-communist collective try to break police lines so they can righteously beat the crap out of Nazis parading round the steps of Parliament. Which I prefer, to be honest. 

The turnout would also have been due to the fact that North Shore is in play, and may be another of these key seats that puts government utterly beyond the reach of the Perrottet command. Reconstituted in 1981 from half a dozen seats lying across North Sydney’s ridiculously ostentatious hydro-geography, North Shore was taken at its inception by independent Ted Mack for two terms, handed on to a successor for one, with the Liberals taking it “back” in 1991 and holding it since, most recently against a proto-teal independent who gained a 20% primary vote in 2019. 

That was a shot across the bows of the yachts nestled in the waters below, visible to students from their state of the art labs, classrooms and such. What a city! Why doesn’t everyone live here? Oh yes, the heat. This suffusing warmth, never wet but never dry — and everywhere all the time. Getting off at Central that morning, you could grab it in your hands, a hot thickness with that Sydney odour, a mix of petrol, money and lube. The heat has driven a whole phalanx of Australian intellectuals and movements southwards, leaving a city whose cultural life is house prices, white pants, yoga and endless excited conversations about legalised MDMA. 

But not on the North Shore, where fully coloured-in teal independent Helen Conway is running, with Climate 200 support, against incumbent Felicity Wilson, whose two terms have seen her predecessor’s unbeatable 58% primary/72% 2PP vote decline to a 60%/40% 2PP split. The seat is back in play, and there is blood in the harbour. Whether Wilson will be fed to the sharks remains to be seen since Conway has had some shellac knocked off her by revelations that she worked in a senior executive position for Caltex. But only for 11 years! Really, not a good look for a teal. Seen the light and all that, but still. It’s particularly inconvenient since Wilson has also worked for Caltex — what are the odds? (In North Shore, about 60%.) 

Wilson is from the moderate faction of the Liberals, and holds the seat on that basis — a moderate, in the Perrottet government, one suspects, is someone who self-flagellates using a cat-o’-nine tails without metal studs — and so the Caltex connection would have been a great thing to attack her on. Which would have been useful, because Wilson came out fighting and didn’t let up all evening. And to be honest, Conway didn’t have the game to match. 

To be honest, I took an instant dislike to Wilson. I arrived a little late, so it saved time. Wilson is from modest circumstances but she comes across as a Jean Kittson character who escaped and swam here across Double Bay. Very Veronica Glenhuntly. Very… Felicity. 

“Labor say they’ve changed, but can you trust that they’ve changed?” Wilson came out fighting, and she didn’t stop. She was fifth of the opening speakers — Michael Antares of the Informed Medical Options Party (“Informed Medical Opinions Party”, the MC had accidentally called it, meaning “get some, idiot”), had won the toss; he was a bearded, Falstaffian type who announced that he was a former Buddhist monk, now retired, who did not believe in the Voice — and her style put a jolt through the other candidates, especially local deputy mayor Godfrey Santer, a gentle, leather elbow-patched type from the, well, non-scum faction of NSW Labor (NSW Labor is amazing, from Eddie Obeid and Ian “Sir Lunchalot” Macdonald to someone like Santer, it’s akin to a dog show — pony-sized Irish wolfhounds, grinning teacup Pomeranians and snorting Rottweilers together, and they’re all somehow the same species). Wilson kept hammering: “The NSW Liberal and National government has the toughest emissions reductions target in the country, 70% by 2035, we have independent assessments of new projects…”

Conway: “This government can’t be trusted with coal and gas commissions. Their targets and processes are completely inadequate; we’ll legislate for targets, and we want 80% by 2035 and net zero by 2050…”

Gotta give it to Flic, she didn’t let up. Having improbably presented the Perrottet government as the green option, she then went in hard defending the beaches link, a megaplan to connect that area (Manly and points west, for non-Sydneysiders) to the south, a toll road project which might have some fans in the north but will put a huge entrance-exit smack in the middle of North Sydney and — as the typically capable, typically without-a-chance Greens candidate James Mullan said — would just be another car drain increasing traffic, not solving the problem. I had a look at the project and the visuals later. It is one of those Sydney things that convinces you that the city’s planners are using the paintings of Jeffrey Smart and the novels of David Ireland not as a warning about alienating dystopia, but as a forward strategy. 

Wilson took a quick swerve to give Conway a whack for unreasonable expectations — tough call in a city where the privatisation of buses has screwed the system up so badly that people are running ad hoc “pirate” buses on routes the new operators won’t service. She batted back stuff on privatisation, and made a case for asset recycling.

Boy, Wilson was good. Boy, I hated her. She was a private sector warrior, that’s for sure. She passed the microphone along the candidates line like she resented having to share it, like everyone should have their own, like she’d brought one but wasn’t allowed to use it. Following the beaches link we got on to the “Harbour Bridge bike ramp”, which will either go around public green space or cut through it, and which consumed the meeting for about a quarter of its duration. It was end-stopped brilliantly by the Informed Medical Options rep who, after everyone had debated the politics of flange curves and ramp incline footprint, said: “I like my car. The tunnel’s great. We don’t need the bike ramp. It’s just another thing we don’t need.” This is an admirably Buddhist approach to infrastructure planning. Renounce desire, one community facility at a time. If you’re going to escape from samsara, better have some V8 grunt beneath the hood.  

When all is said and done, Wilson might just save her skin in this election, because Conway just doesn’t seem like a great candidate. Maybe she was better in the field (my visits to these seats are flying ones; this one was supersonic), but she wasn’t bringing the energy tonight. Teals and other independents have to make a case for the prosecution against a major party incumbent, have to convince enough people that they cannot, simply cannot vote for this party, no matter what they think of the person representing it.

As your correspondent noted after the 2019 federal election, the teal/community independent target will always be, by the nature of the seats, a factional moderate, and the double whammy is to not only portray the party as not fit for government, but the party’s representative in question as shameful for even being associated with them. That is what Monique Ryan did to Josh Frydenberg in Kooyong, and it should be the preselection acid test for any community independent: can they bring it, and bring it in forums like these, on walkarounds, etc? 

Conway, in my opinion, really couldn’t. She’s an executive, with decades of high-level corporate experience, and that showed through in her approach. She was falling into the “rationality trap” that some Greens and teals can get lost in, that if you just explain how effing stupid the existing plan is and why, and explain what you’re going to do about it, people will vote for you. It’s the administrative and instrumental mode that comes through, and it doesn’t seal the deal. Curiously enough, there was another teal-style candidate, Victoria Walker, who claims she got short shrift from the teal selection committee, and is running solo. She’s more forceful than Conway, she can “prosecute” on corruption and incompetence, but had a tendency to meditate on what she would do when elected, as she surely won’t. With grey tight-cut hair and spiky earrings, she was a sort of punk version of Conway. It was very Sydney.  

That said, Climate 200 itself has gone in hard, challenging Wilson on her bad habit of being a bit off-ramp with the truth, overstating her time in the North Shore, her qualifications and allegedly her environment credentials. Conway distanced herself from the leaflet, which attacked “Duplicity Wilson” (hahaha) — teal politics is not at all a Gossip Girl episode, and I’m sure this was just a stuff-up, not a double play to both slam Wilson and distance Conway from Climate 200. No, sir, not at all …

So it’s tough politics, and the Libs are feeling the pressure and losing their precision. Treasurer Matt Kean is the nicey-nicey moderate, the non-sinister-religious-crackpot part of the leadership team they hope will hold off a defection to the teals, but even he did some Frydenberging, accusing Conway of hypocrisy given her Caltex connection, and saying her “T-shirt should be smeared with oil”. 

Now Matt presumably meant her T-shirt should be — that is, might as well be — oil- instead of teal-coloured, but in saying the moral adjectival form of “should” he yielded to the active verbal sense and gave the impression that he was urging people to hold down a rival candidate and tar her — not a good look. If that costs Wilson some votes, she may be the first candidate to lose due to the absence in modern English of the subjunctive mood. Which would be a treat and, to be honest, more comprehensible than the bike ramp issue. Conway hedged her bets on the bike ramp thing, lending less than full support to the “fold-back community plan”, but my notes at this point simply say that too often she sounds like Judith Lucy, so [Judith Lucy voice] I guess we’ll never know for sure. 

After it was all over, I found plenty of undecided voters. What’s that? Questions from the floor? Of course not. The public can’t be trusted to talk and react to each other in real time. Instead we had a quickfire yes/no/maybe round on questions like the dogs’ and cats’ home at Kurnell, and support for Slovenian lubricant. (Was I having heatstroke? No, it’s a train noise thing, apparently.) 

Lots of people were undecided on the bike ramp, and none of the candidates had satisfied them. A sort of ad hoc committee approached me, very North Shore Ted Mack-era, moral middle class. The lead guy looked like Acker Bilk with his scarf/cravat (a lot of knotted scarves here): “We’re disappointed in all of them.” The Greens have backed the linear ramp, steering clear of NIMBYism; Conway has not delivered for them. They were downcast, strangers on the North Shore. 

The Medical Options Party guy was being yelled at by his campaign manager, a shouty bloke who’d been berating Wilson so hard and so long that several people had slowly sidled up, wanting to be in intervening distance if it got weird. “Well, look, I’ve done all I can and I can do no more,” the candidate was saying as we walked, in the still warm night, up the palm-fronded path to the street (your taxes at w- … oh, what’s the point?). “They don’t believe us!” said the shouty bloke. “Millions know the truth! They don’t want the truth! The fools!” (He actually said “The fools!”) What’s it like being a Buddhist in the crazy right? Talk about pointless suffering.  

Team Conway huddled in the street beside me, very professional. “I thought you got the angle on the ramp question right”, one said; soooo … not professional enough to cut the strategy talk when someone next to you is scribbling in a notepad. To be fair, I was writing down some thoughts about the Scooby-Doo remake, but they didn’t know that. Time and place, folks. Will Conway come through on the North Shore? It’s an interesting test of teal politics, because if she does it would suggest the movement is not so dependent on sparkling, super-confident, chatelaine/aviatrix/private school prefect candidates as they have been, and has more options than sparkly sparkle. If Wilson makes it back in, against the turbulent currents the government is facing, it might show that a Liberal candidate really can fight their way back, if they can kick themselves one level up from the “mum said I could have this seat” torpor of Frydenberg. 

The crowds disappeared into the soft blue night; most of them were only going a few blocks. I considered a ferry, the Sydney treat, but passed it up for an Uber back to Kings Cross, now a shadow of itself — the Bourbon and Beefsteak gone, the neon gone dark, no more bada-bing. My gaff was the DeVere Hotel, a ’70s survivor — bathrooms of pink porcelain! The air-conditioning and radio controls mounted into the bedside table! — redolent of petrol, money and lube as the towers-to-come clustered above the dying Cross.