A great deal of modern election campaigning takes place over the airwaves and on social media, but in the “ground battle” that experts keep telling us will be crucial, vote-winning techniques have not moved much since the 19th century.
will be testing the political temperature in Bentleigh, one the seat’s more eastern suburbs. If you live there and have insights, tips or thoughts about the key local issues, please let her know.It’s a chilly morning at the Royal Brighton Yacht Club and not just because of the breeze across Port Phillip Bay.
No one denies Daniel’s visibility, including incumbent Liberal MP Tim Wilson, 42, who rails against the cashed-up “cavalcade” of outsider environmental activists encroaching on the “pleasant streets” of his electorate. Melbourne has had only one female independent federal MP, Doris Amelia Blackburn, who held the seat of Bourke from 1946 to 1949.The Royal Brighton yacht club is at the southern end of the Golden Mile, a strip of leafy streets and mansions with easy beach access, one of Melbourne’s wealthiest neighbourhoods. Goldstein is among the country’s wealthier electorates with a median weekly household income of $2018 according to the 2016 census, well above the Australian average of $1438.
Tim Wilson first won the seat in 2016 by a record margin and retained it in 2019 with 52 per cent of the primary vote despite a swing against him. Daniel is banking on these same voters being sufficiently disillusioned by the long, rightward shift of the party nationally to back a respectable, centrist independent. She is a mother of two and lives in Hampton.
Daniel will need all of this and more to win. Incumbents from the major parties have big advantages including publicly funded salaries, offices, paid staff, cars, multi-millions in taxpayer funded pork-barrelling and party expertise and resources.Tim Wilson won’t use the name of his independent opponent. He’s in his electoral office on Nepean Highway East Brighton a slightly barren location removed from election theatrics in Goldstein’s major commercial centres.
He is running hard on national security, even claiming that given circumstances including war in Europe and Chinese expansionism, Australia is in “its most dangerous decade”., an idea slammed by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull as “the craziest” he’d ever heard because of the likely hike in house prices.