It’s a gamble few politicians are willing to make – risk an incredibly safe upper house seat for a tilt at the lower house. The last to attempt it – former Labor senator Kristina Keneally – lost big: her plans to parachute into Fowler, a previously safe lower house seat in Sydney’s south-west, failed specularly, with the party losing to a local independent candidate.
But the Victorian Greens’ leader, Samantha Ratnam – who was formally announced as the party’s candidate for the federal seat of Wills on Friday – insists she has momentum on her side.
“I hope it’s perceived as the opposite of that example,” she tells Guardian Australia.
“I’ve lived in this area for a very long time and it’s because I love this community so much that I’m running.”
To run for the seat, in Melbourne’s inner north, Ratnam had to step down as the party’s state leader and says she will leave Victorian parliament altogether once the Greens preselect a candidate to replace her in the upper house later this year.
She’s also had to make the decision well before a redistribution later this year that could substantially affect her chances.
Adam Bandt, the federal Greens leader, says Ratnam’s candidacy is proof the party sees Wills as a “priority” in the upcoming election, due by the middle of 2025.
“It’s really significant that Sam’s taking this chance, I think it is testament to a broader shift that is occurring in this electorate ,” he says.
Indeed, two weeks ago – when Ratnam announced her preselection tilt – several Labor MPs told Guardian Australia it could spell the end for incumbent Labor member Peter Kahlil, despite what is, on paper, a healthy 8.6% margin against the Greens on a two-candidate-preferred basis.
The quinoa curtain
Taking in the northern Melbourne suburbs of Brunswick, Coburg, Glenroy, Fawkner and Pascoe Vale, Wills was once Labor heartland, the seat of party legend Bob Hawke.
But as the area has increasingly gentrified, the electorate has split, with the Greens establishing a stronghold south of Bell Street in Brunswick and Labor’s vote holding firm further north.
“Bell Street is really the quinoa curtain in this seat,” the ABC’s election analyst, Antony Green, says.
“If they decide to add to the seat from the north in the upcoming redistribution, it will help Labor significantly and could stave the Greens off.”
It’s no wonder the Greens, in their submission to the Australian Electoral Commission on the redistribution, pushed for the addition to come from south of the electorate.
It’s also no coincidence the announcement of Ratnam’s candidacy was on Coburg’s Sydney Road, which is dotted by European and Middle Eastern stores and delis – and across the road from Khalil’s electorate office.
Speaking later over lunch at A1 Bakery, a popular Lebanese haunt where the old and new parts of the electorate collide, Bandt says the Greens will forge ahead no matter the result of the redistribution.
“You just have to accept whatever is decided,” he says. “We will be campaigning strongly on housing and rental prices and cost of living – they’re issues that are affecting people in the north as well as in the south.”
He also says the party isn’t concerned about where the Liberals preference them. Green says this is just as important as the redistribution- if the Liberal party puts the Greens above Labor, it could narrow the margin to 2%.
“We have to campaign to win enough votes and what the other parties do will be up to them,” Bandt says.
The party is hopeful it can sway the 10% of Wills voters who are Muslim with its position on the war in Gaza. Ratnam has attended several pro-Palestinian protests since Hamas’ 7 October attack on Israel and Israel’s military response, with the protests garnering large crowds in Melbourne. Several protests have also been staged outside Khalil’s office.
Having fled war-torn Sri Lanka for Canada in the late 1980s before settling in Melbourne, she says like migrants and First Nations peoples, she has empathy for the plight of the Palestinians.
“There are a whole bunch of people like me and my community and the broader migrant community who have experienced war, who have experienced racism, who’ve experienced colonisation, who have experienced oppression … who see themselves in the oppression that Palestinian people are feeling,” she says.
While the Greens are yet to outline their priority seats other than Wills, Bandt says the party will continue to campaign heavily in Macnamara, where there is a large Jewish population. He denies their position will affect their chances in the ultra-marginal electorate, though privately some Labor MPs are saying it will help them hang on.
“Increasingly, people are looking at the Greens and they understand that we do what we say, we stick by our principles and we fight according to our values,” he says.
Kos Samaras, a former Victorian Labor assistant state secretary who is now a pollster with RedBridge, says there are several electorates with large Muslim communities, once loyal to Labor, who are “looking for alternatives”.
“Since the pandemic, probably even before that, Labor has developed a strained relationship with the Muslim community – particularly millennials and Gen Z, who were born here but raised post 9/11 and not made to feel welcome, ” Samaras says.
He says this was exacerbated during Covid-19, when refugees and asylum seekers in Melbourne’s towers were locked down and people of African or Middle Eastern appearance were overpoliced.
“The war in the Middle East has poured petrol over the fire. Whereas we saw younger Muslims turn away from the party in the state and federal elections in 2022, I think at the next election it’ll get some of the parents to shift their vote too,” Samaras says.
Ratnam says voters in safe Labor seats feel they have been “let down”.
“They’ve got inaction on the issues that they really care about, so there’s an appetite and an openness to change,” she says.
“We’re going to demonstrate in this seat, in this election, their vote is going to be powerful.”
