Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

First of all, I would like to congratulate you, Mr Speaker, on your elevation into a second term as Speaker in this parliament. It is well deserved. I would like to congratulate the member for Denison on his maiden speech and for his election to this House. This is the fourth term that I have been elected to parliament as the member for Canning. Some will know that I was elected as the member for Swan. I am one of the fortunate people who have been elected to this place five times. I am honoured and privileged, and I never underestimate the honour that it is to represent my electorate in this House.

There is a raft of people who helped me retain Canning at the election on 21 August. There are far too many to name individually, but I just want to make special mention of a couple of people. First of all, I want to congratulate the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, on the magnificent campaign that he ran and I thank him for visiting my electorate. I would also like to thank Senator David Johnston, as my duty senator, on the fantastic job that he did. He is not only a great friend but a great supporter. I also thank the member of Curtin, Julie Bishop, and the member for Mackellar, Bronwyn Bishop, for visiting my electorate and supporting us.

I would particularly like to thank my staff. I am one of the fortunate people who had really good staff with very little turnover in my office. An outstanding person who helped drive my campaign and who was my not-so-secret weapon was Jocelen Griffiths. We are going to miss you, Jocelen. She is not only highly talented and intelligent but one of the nicest people I have met. Her ability to strategically run a campaign, to work with so many people and to be so organised has been recognised by many, and that is why her future prospects are very bright. I thank Jess Finlay for the outstanding job she has done over the number of the years I have had her. I also thank Michael Storozhev and Sam Holly, in my office. As I said, there were many young people who helped in my office and they are just too numerous to mention. They know who they are. I think it is quite fortunate to have young people in your campaign. It sends a very good message. The enthusiasm that they brought to the campaign we just had in Canning was one of the reasons we did well in the election.

There is obviously a whole raft of people who helped us in the campaign, including those who waved those corflutes in the cold morning. The many people who helped stuff envelopes in my office know who they are. There were also hundreds of people on election day who handed out how-to-vote cards in the 48 polling booths in Canning. My thanks also go to the many people who donated to my campaign, especially the pensioners who sent in their five and ten dollars. We were just blown away by the amount of support we had financially from the mums and dads in the electorate who wanted to see us win. I took that as a sign of support and I was quite grateful for that.

Of course, there were people who put signs in their front yards and who wanted me to do well and offered me so much advice. But, most of all, I want to thank the electors of Canning who have continued to show their strong support and have again put their faith in me by re-electing me to this seat.

I would like to put on record some of the details associated with this election. Many will know that at the last election this was one of the higher profile electoral contests in the country, because the candidate that I had as my opponent, Alannah MacTieman, was a formidable opponent. She is sharp and fearless and, even if this made her divisive, she is well respected in the constituency as an undeniable fighter. She had been the state member for Armadale for some 17 years, but even though it was a clever stroke by the Labor Party to select a former state minister who was popular with the media and popular in the electorate that she represented there was more to the election, as I have pointed out to many people since the election, than just the state seat of Armadale. I saw it as a strategic mistake that she and her campaign team made.

Her announcement in August 2009, almost 12 months before the election, that she would resign from state politics to contest Canning came as no surprise to me and those around me. There was a lot of speculation that she would jump ship because she had lost hope of leading the state Labor Party as many in the state Labor organisation had decided they were basically ‘off’ Allanah and did not want her to continue in such a high-profile role. Dare I say that Joe Bullock may have been one of those people. But she was the darling of the media, particularly the sisterhood in the media, and some of the middle aged journalists that seemed to have some morbid fascination with her never stopped writing about her. That profiling certainly did not hurt her during the campaign.

Canning was under the media microscope for more than 12 months and it was a battle royale as people wanted a real fight in this campaign. As I was out doorknocking one day, a gentleman in his front yard—before I was able to stop his dog from grabbing me by the leg—rose up from his front lawn and said, ‘Do you know what I want to see in this campaign? I want to see you two have a really good blue.’ I was not going to accommodate him. The fact is that I was running on the issues as the incumbent member and realistically that is what the campaign was about. It was not about personalities and personal differences. It really was about representing the people in the electorate.

I understand from media reports that my opponent was seduced by the former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. While sitting on the balcony in Kirribilli, she was promised the sun, moon and stars if she would be the candidate in Canning to help ‘knock off Randall’. After the promises made by the former Prime Minister, some of that seemed to evaporate and she was left hanging for a time. This seemed at the time to be a good strategy. Labor has a history of trying to parachute in high- profile candidates to win seats. Sometimes it works; sometimes it does not work. For example, the member for Kingsford Smith is one of those celebrity candidates who was parachuted in and I wonder whether the Labor Party now thinks it was such a great idea, given his track record. This was seen in Western Australia when the state division of the Labor Party tried to parachute in Reece Whitby, a Channel 7 journalist, into the safe seat of Morley—and that came to grief.

I have faced a long, hard fought and expensive campaign and, as I have said, I am honoured to have been returned. Going into this election following the redistribution, Canning’s margin was 4.3 per cent notionally. After 21 August there was a 2.3 per cent swing against me, leaving me with a margin of 2.14 per cent. As an interesting fact, 2.14 per cent was exactly the swing against the coalition in Western Australia after the 2007 election. That might set some context. This is a result which I am proud of and it would not have been possible without a disciplined and targeted campaign. As I have said to many since, I consider the Canning campaign—from our point of view—to have been a model campaign and if I was to run it again I would not do anything different. We were disciplined, we were organised and we made sure that we ticked all the boxes to make this happen.

In the Canning booths covering Ms MacTieman’s state seat of Armadale, the results were a testament to the heavyweight battle of two well-known identities. Despite Alannah’s popularity in the Labor area, the Liberal Party’s two-party preferred vote was 42.4 per cent, up 7.4 per cent on the 2008 Liberal state election win which covered the same booths. So we were able, in some respects, to deal with the strategy of the Labor Party of parachuting in the popular local state member and minister to try to gain the seat of Canning by winning it alone on the state seat of Armadale.

Even the Labor candidate herself declared that the ALP campaign was dysfunctional. There is a whole ream of quotes from her after the election. In fact, she said that the campaign in her seat and in Western Australia generally was ‘a rerun of the disastrous 2008 state election’. She really gave a few people a slap after the election. From every angle it appeared to be disorganised, haphazard and ill informed, and initially it was poorly funded. Labor gave up on Western Australia a long time ago and, after Mr Rudd was knifed, and Alannah was on her own without a factional base. In fact, she did not even have a campaign office and a lot of the campaign did seem to lack direction. We were continually being fed information about the shambolic campaign that was being run. Nobody discredits how hard she worked. However, you can work as hard as you like, but if you get the strategy wrong then it is all to no avail.

For example, there was no critical analysis of where the limited resources would be best placed. People in Waroona in my electorate were telling me the ALP had not bothered visiting their shire at all. The Shire of Boddington was taken aback when the candidate invited herself to a lunch with councillors. And Mandurah, where half of the Canning population resides, was largely ignored until it was too late. For 12 months Ms MacTiernan served two masters, using her leverage and resources as a state member to seek federal office. In other words, she would not get out of the state parliament until the election was called, which again was a strategic flaw in her campaign.

Polling day was another disaster for Labor. Expecting a full onslaught from the Labor army, we were instead taken aback by the shambolic management of polling booths and the sheer lack of manpower on the booths. Whereas in 2007 the Transport Workers Union and the AWU waged a strong campaign against me, this time the ALP was faced with lengthy industrial action by Alcoa workers, resulting in a lack of interest and coordination in the federal campaign. Manning the booths last month were non-local ALP members who had simply been seconded to fill a gap. People on my campaign were telling me that there were well-meaning ladies from the leafy suburbs such as Dalkeith handing out how-to-vote cards for the Labor Party who did not really know what they were doing. In fact, in the Pinjarra booth I heard that one ALP helper who tried to hand out a how-to-vote card to Ms MacTiernan was quickly scolded for not knowing who the candidate was. Whereas the union support might not have been there, in the latter stages of the campaign there was financial support from industry and prominent Perth people. One particular Perth real estate agent really shovelled some money into her campaign. They were quick to change allegiances and hedge their bets, expecting to see me defeated, which I can assure you I have taken account of.

I will take the opportunity to congratulate my Western Australian colleagues and the state director, Ben Morton, on a strongly fought and a WA-specific election campaign. We have been really lucky to have Ben as our state director because he has brought a real freshness and enthusiasm to campaigning in Western Australia—not only in the federal election. You saw the results in the state election, electing the Barnett coalition. The results speak for themselves, with the coalition holding 12 of 15 seats in Western Australia. Overall, the Liberal Party’s two-party preferred vote in Western Australia was 55.1 per cent, up 1.9 per cent on the 2007 result, making it the best result since 1977. While the swing towards the coalition in WA at the recent election was less that in Queensland or New South Wales, it is important to remember that at the 2007 election the swing against the Howard government was only 2.1 per cent in Western Australia, less than half the national swing of 5.6 per cent and well behind the 7.9 per cent swing in Queensland.

I want to welcome Ken Wyatt as the new member for Hasluck and first Indigenous member of the House of Representatives. He represents the Hasluck electorate, a neighbour of Canning, and I look forward to working closely with Ken over the coming term. Ken’s wealth of experience and cultural background will be a valuable addition to this parliament and to his electors in Hasluck. I also welcome back my colleagues Warren Entsch, the member for Leichhardt, and Teresa Gambaro, now the member for Brisbane. They were part of the class of 1996. There are 10 of us left, and it is great to see them come back and help swell our ranks. I know firsthand what it is like to lose a seat and have to fight to get it back and re-enter the parliament. If there is one thing I have learned during my time in parliament it is never to take anything for granted. My campaign for re-election started on 22 August and will continue up till the date of the next election. You cannot serve your electorate well if you only serve it in the 33 days before the election every three years. As John Howard used to say, you cannot fatten the pig on market day.

I say a few fond and sad farewell words to my long-term colleague ‘Iron Bar’ Wilson Tuckey, the former member for O’Connor. Wilson is somebody that I liked and he is a friend of mine. Wilson was an interesting character. The first time I really had much to do with Wilson was when he was trying to explain in the 1993 election campaign about a lump of steel and how the GST would affect you turning it into something. He lost everybody but he was enthusiastic! I also met Wilson when I used to train racehorses semi-professionally down at the Ascot Racecourse and Wilson was dragging a horse around. He gave me a bit of advice on how to become a candidate and get involved in the Liberal Party, before he got involved in an altercation with one of the other trainers, who happened to be the tough man on the course. Wilson stood there chesting him and I thought, ‘Wilson, don’t go there, because Colin Clune will pick you up and throw you away.’ But he seemed to get away with it all the time—that was Wilson. He was a very interesting character and we are going to miss him here after 30 years in the federal parliament.

Of course, a special mention must go to my Western Australian colleagues the member for Cowan, Luke Simpkins; the member for Swan, Steve Irons; and the member for Stirling, Michael Keenan. They all managed to turn their wafer thin margins into safer seats. As a former member for Swan, I take a special interest in the seat and congratulate Steve Irons, the current member, on increasing the margin there to around two per cent. In fact, I think his margin is greater than mine, and that is a credit to him for his hard work and dedication.

There were a number of interesting trends in this election to do with Indigenous voting. Certain trends jump out at elections and one worth mentioning is the Indigenous vote. Labor has taken Indigenous Australians for granted. That was confirmed to me only recently by talking to Norman Fry, the former head of the Northern Territory Land Council. The Labor Party offered them only symbolic gestures and there was a backlash against the ALP at polling booths. It is the coalition that has provided the first Indigenous senator and now the first Indigenous member of the House of Representatives. The 2010 results show that the Indigenous vote is no longer owned by the ALP, or at least that this vote is up for grabs when the ALP takes it for granted.

Durack is an interesting case. Booths in Fitzroy Crossing, Halls Creek, Wyndham and Roebourne had swings of 20 per cent against Labor. In all these booths the Liberal Party polled well in front of the Nationals and received a strong run of National Party preferences. Overall there was a swing in Durack of more than six per cent. Indigenous voters in Lingiari turned against Labor, and Labor lost six of the 19 remote polling booths, with swings of up to 45 per cent in some cases. The sitting member suffered a 13 per cent overall swing against his primary vote and saw his margin more than halved. Leichhardt, Warren Entsch’s seat, has one of the highest proportions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voters in Australia, at about 15 per cent. He had Indigenous people running his polling booths for him. That is testament to him. As I said, Indigenous people are suddenly starting to realise that it is this side of the House that is actually interested in seeing them go forward rather than being kept on welfare and kept on the camps by being drip-fed welfare rather than having real jobs and a meaningful way of going ahead.

There is much more I could say in this speech, but I am out of time. What I want to say is that being re-elected as the member for Canning in Western Australia is something that I am going to cherish. Let us hope that during this term we can change sides; there is a good opportunity to do so given the delicate balance of this House. As I say, we are only one death, one desertion or one sickness away from having the ability to change the composition of this House, and we will be doing our best to hold this government to account. If that opportunity arises it will be fantastic to see this high-spending government taken away. This government has not changed, it cannot stop the debt, it cannot stop the refugees and now it wants to form an alliance with the Greens, which would see this country head further to the left and into economic malaise. Western Australia is an icon; it is the way to go, because it has a Liberal state government.

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