‘WA’s been a focal point for this election, and I can’t tell you how happy I am that’s happened’

“Are you voting today, sir?” The Liberal Party volunteer asks the balding man in high-vis striding purposefully past the pre-poll centre.

“Nah, I’m not voting at all. I don’t believe in any of those pricks.” He thwacks the last word like a slap.

This happens as I sit with Greens Senator and Yamatji-Noongar woman Dorinda Cox in Belmont Forum, one of those beautifully anonymous shopping precincts. Everywhere has them, and Perth has perfected the art. Multicultural, working and lower-middle-class patrons slipping past to Belmont Market and Halal Meat, the Juice and Falooda Bar, the Coles and Bottlemart over the road.

Ahead of us is Reading Cinemas, another example of Perth’s strange obsession with wood panelling on its buildings, and faintly grand signs for local coffee franchise Dome and for Chinese restaurants.   

The seat of Swan contains multitudes — there’s that anonymous flat stretch of Great Eastern Highway that takes you to the airport. There’s Curtin University, Crown Casino, lower-cost flats, but also the Swan river views of Como and Victoria Park with an extremely underrated strip of restaurants. (If I had my way, this whole piece would be a review of Mei’s Noodles in East Vic Park, hidden in an industrial-area car park that does the best Yunnan Chinese food you’ll get anywhere.)

Along Orrong Road, another stretch of suburb dotted with the occasional small accounting firm or corner shop, there are no fewer than three mattresses that have been set up as impromptu election billboards. “ScoMo couldn’t lie straight in bed. Federal ICAC NOW”, one says.

Between the first sighting of the mattress on my first week in Perth and the day of this interview, someone had protectively placed traffic cones on both sides of it. For a long stretch, these improvised protests outnumber official corflutes. 

Liberal Steve Irons has held the seat on a tight margin for 15 years, but now he’s retiring, replaced as the candidate by Kristy McSweeney. Labor’s Zaneta Mascarenhas was given a platform at the ALP Party launch, and the general sense is that if the ALP can’t manage the swing that takes Swan, it’s in trouble in WA and in the election.

“WA’s been a focal point for this election, and I can’t tell you how happy I am that’s happened, we’re so often the poor cousin who gets no attention,” Cox says. “So it’s been good to have the leadership visiting here — I think both leaders have been here four times so far.”

“It’s good to see recognition, not just of the economic contribution the state makes, but also the richness and diversity. From the Pilbara to the goldfields to the south-west, there are so many different communities with different issues, different things they care about.”

It’s one of the great challenges of getting cut through for a WA senator: travelling the breadth of the state. And inevitably the subject falls to the day’s news that the Australian Electoral Commission is struggling to staff polling booths in remote areas.

“It’s disastrous, these are the people who need to participate in our democracy most of all, and be involved in political decisions. I’ve been to remote communities that don’t have running water between midnight and 5am. In a developed nation like Australia, this kind of thing shouldn’t be happening,” she says.

“So even at a state level, we have billions in surplus and we still have remote communities with poor housing that aren’t energy efficient, that don’t have drinkable water. And if people aren’t voting in the right places for the right people, we won’t get the change, we’ll continue to not have these issues elevated to the level that they should be — it’s a question of human rights.”

I suggest that, with the constant hectoring of the major party leaders, and with the focus on teal independents, the Greens have for good or ill gone under the radar a little this time, and whether that might be the reason leader Adam Bandt seems to be the only party leader to have any fun whatsoever in 2022.

“It’s been good!” she says. “Adam’s been here a few times, we’ve done policy announcements, we’ve done politics in the pub, it’s been fun. I don’t think we’ve been quite able to rise above the success of the McGowan government, because that’s been such a powerful force in WA. But I’ve been talking to people, saying, basically, vote like your life depended on it. I don’t think we’ve gone under the radar with that, we’ve been very upfront, but we’ve needed a government to partner with, that is going to be open to those conversations.”

The lower house in WA isn’t really in play for the Greens this time. But Cox believes in the next two elections they could take Perth or Fremantle, and identifies Curtin and even Swan itself as possibilities.

“This is a global trend — major parties ruling outright is a thing of the past, there are always going to be minor parties and independent voices coming into that, representing the diversity in the community.”

Indeed, a good election for the Greens as far as Cox is concerned is “getting some friends [in the lower house] for Adam!”

And while you wouldn’t pick the ill-tempered bloke in high-vis as a Green voter, it is that sentiment, as ever, that the Greens have to tap into.