It’s 10pm election day and I’m waiting for my lift home from the Dee Why RSL. This is where the independent Dr Sophie Scamps team has gathered and scored a historic victory. They’re still partying upstairs in their sky-blue T-shirts.
Out the front, I’ve gathered one last recording. It’s from a bloke: “Whaddabout when ScoMo jumped on that little kid at soccer? That was bullshit!”
This was always an improbable win. She has unseated incumbent Jason Falinski, overcoming a 13.3% margin and wresting the seat of Mackellar from Liberal Party hands after 73 years.
When I get home, I realise all the other comments I’ve recorded tonight are from women. This is their night. From the top to the bottom, the women of Mackellar have organised, turned up and executed a flawless campaign.
Susan is 70, from Newport, and has been a head teacher at TAFE: “They got up to speed in the space of four months. Something TAFE couldn’t do in a hundred years. They enrolled, gathered. They organised. They managed the logistics, the interpersonal relationships and the teams. They got people to step up and take on different roles, got them to collaborate. There was no ego or conflict.”
Susan: “It was just… magnificent. If every organisation was run like this campaign, Australia would be running the world!”
Helen is almost 80 and is in tears. From the start of the independent campaign, she says she’s watched the disregard for independent women with a quiet fury. She says they’ve been treated as “almost like a cult”.
“I want to tell the world, women can do it!” she says. “We’ve always known this is the way, but it’s been blocked by the misogynistic men. The men with the power.”
The “Voices of Mackellar” was formed in July 2020 by a group of local women — mothers, sisters, daughters and friends — when a candidate of the calibre of Scamps seemed a mirage.
Since then, organiser Rebecca Clarke says her team of volunteers (all 1228 of them) has turned up “day, after day, after day”.
“History is made by those who turn up, and that’s exactly what we did,” she says.
When finally I catch up with an ecstatic Scamps, she’s arm in arm with her women supporters: “This started with women around the table deciding there was a much better way to do politics and a much better way to be represented. Positive. Optimistic. Strong.
“And that’s the way we want to conduct ourselves in Parliament as well.
“We flew under the radar and we were totally happy to do that. We knew there were conversations happening around the dinner table, the wine bars, in kitchens and the cafes.
“We always knew this was the way to do it… one conversation at a time.”
Tonight that quiet kitchen table conversation has resonated in the halls of power.
