When the Coalition recently used her leafy seat of Ryan to announce tax breaks for business lunches — a policy partly aimed at regaining ground in inner-city Brisbane — Greens MP Elizabeth Watson-Brown wasn’t fazed.
The former architect, who won the once-safe Liberal seat in 2022’s Greenslide, calls it a “throwback” policy, appealing to a Ryan that no longer exists.
“I think they understand Ryan in the 1980s, to be honest,” Watson-Brown tells me.
“When I started my practice in the ’80s, that was the time of long lunches for the blokes. I was a working mother, trying to work out whether I could get some kind of support for childcare for me to be able to run my practice. And the blokes — and they were inevitably blokes at that time — had taxpayer-supported, long, boozy lunches.”
Ryan — the western Brisbane seat that, prior to 2022, had been in Liberal hands for all bar eight months of its entire history — is no doubt on the Coalition’s wish list. Peter Dutton has said so. Overlapping the Greens-held state seat of Maiwar, it is well-off and well-educated — similar in some ways to the blue-ribbon seats that went “teal” in 2019 and 2022.
Watson-Brown, who has dismissed teal comparisons, reckons the Libs are out of step with Ryan, where voters are concerned about social and environmental issues. There was a “real distaste for what Morrison represented”, she argues, predicting there will be just as much distaste for Dutton.
She might know. Despite only joining the Greens in 2018, Watson-Brown had thousands of conversations with voters, part of the Queensland Greens’ extensive ground campaign. The 68-year-old grandmother says she quickly got “addicted” to grassroots campaigning, though never intended to run herself. When leadership tapped her on the shoulder for Ryan, she was told she was unlikely to win — but win she did, with the Greens defeating Liberals in Ryan and Brisbane, and Labor in Griffith.
Things are different this time. The Coalition is marshalling its considerable resources against Watson-Brown, with groups like Advance Australia and Australians for Prosperity (run by former Liberal MP Julian Simmonds, who she dislodged) funding negative billboards, many of them personal. Watson-Brown says there is “dark money” pouring into the seat, which the Liberals see as their “birthright”.
Will the right-wing attacks work in Ryan?
“I’ve got a higher opinion of the intelligence and judgment of the Ryan community than the LNP,” she says. “It’s actually backfiring. Anecdotally, I’ve had lots of people say to me, ‘This is disgusting, I’ve just got this flyer in my letterbox’ … And a lot of people have been telling us, ‘We like what you’re doing’.”
As the first female Greens MP in the House of Reps, Watson-Brown has kept a relatively low profile (compared to others). I ask her how it has been coming in with “bigger and more established personalities”.
“I love the way you’re framing that,” she laughs, noting she previously spent 50 years working in a male-dominated field. “The Greens, you know, 15 people around that party room table — we’re incredibly collaborative. And the decisions that we make, there might be people out there who are actually articulating those in the public domain, but they’re all the result of incredibly detailed and intense conversations to which everyone contributes.”
“I’m okay with not being the spokesmodel because my main work is here in the electorate,” she adds, praising the “invisible” work of the electorate office. “We actually make a point of responding to every constituent who comes to us for help.”
Her other activities revolve around her portfolios — Infrastructure, Transport and Sustainable Cities — another area she links back to her former career.
“I’ve had the real privilege of developing probably the first comprehensive policy for the federal Greens around sustainable cities,” she says. “Eighty-six per cent of Australians live in cities. People don’t realise that — it’s not part of the Australian identity — but we’re one of the most urbanised nations in the world. Cities cause problems, you know, create most of the pollution in the world. But they also can be therefore like the solution to a whole lot of problems that plague us.”
Watson-Brown has sometimes been accused of being a NIMBY — one of her top Google search results is an article titled “Greens tell wealthy voters how to object to housing”, accusing the three Brisbane MPs of opposing apartments in their inner-city electorates.
“The Greens are not anti-development,” she says. “The Greens are pro good development, good development that actually delivers for people’s needs. There’s a lot of crap stuff out there. And we’ve certainly been doing a lot of advocacy in the electorate, actually helping people object to crap that just gets kind of superimposed upon them.”
It’s clear the YIMBY/NIMBY thing grates on her; arguing it is reductive. And it’s not the only dichotomy Watson-Brown is sick of.
“Ordinary everyday people are not represented, in my view, by either Labor or the LNP,” she says, expressing frustration at the influence of lobbyists and corporations.
“The thing that blew my mind, actually going to Parliament House for the first time, is to see how obvious that is. You know, the day we went to vote for the important climate legislation at the end of 2022, Albo was having breakfast with Santos and Woodside. They don’t even bother to kind of try and hide that… And therefore, it’s really critical, our role, being the voice of everyday people.”
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