‘It’s a great privilege to be able to
help people’: Khalil prepares for
Greens challenge in battle of Wills
Mark Phillips
Monday, December 9, 2024
AT the end of a long and gruelling year in parliament that concluded with a flurry of legislation in its final week, Wills MP Peter Khalil is looking for some respite over summer.
But he won’t have long to relax and recharge before the starting gun is fired for the next federal election.
When the election date is announced early next year, Wills – which stretches from Fitzroy North to Hadfield and Glenroy – will be one of the most-watched seats in Australia as Khalil comes under challenge from high-profile Greens candidate Samantha Ratnam.
Khalil is acutely aware that Labor has only lost the seat once in its 75-year history, when independent Phil Cleary wrested control from 1992 to 1996. Not only that, but Wills was former Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s seat during his illustrious 11-year parliamentary career.
For those reasons and more, the contest in Wills will come under national scrutiny like never before.
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But on the first Monday after the end of the parliamentary year, Khalil’s office in the Coburg section of Sydney Road feels like the eye of a hurricane and the man himself insists that he is oblivious to the “white noise” about the election and solely focussed on his job of servicing and delivering for his constituents.
“Look, this is nothing new,” he says.
“Politics and elections and democracy is an adversarial system of governance. People get to choose their representative, and they make a judgment call on the candidates and the MP, the incumbent, based on what they’ve got to offer the community, or what they have done, how they’ve served the community, and also the political parties that they represent and what they can offer.
“In my case, the Labor Party is a party of government that can actually make a difference to their lives by implementing policies if elected to government.
“In the end, democracy is not just a contest of ideas but also how you translate those ideas into practical actions that make a difference to those people that you represent, either through your service to the community at the local level but also, in my case, being a member of a party of government, I can take the issues of the people that I represent to the party room, to the ministers, to the Prime Minister.”
Service to the community is a phrase that Khalil repeats many times through the 45 minute interview, and he wants to be judged on how he delivers for his constituents.
Khalil can reel off at rapid pace the national policies that have been introduced by the first Labor government in a decade – health, education, infrastructure, climate change, cost of living and housing affordability relief – and is proud of local wins, such as $500,000 for the Fawkner pool or $1 million towards the new community arts hub in Brunswick.
“I constantly work in my local community, not focusing on the election per se, but focusing on the community, on the constituency … We’re here to help people with their issues, as their democratic representative, whether it’s issues around the NDIS, whether it’s visas or immigration, whether it’s pensions, whether it’s a policy issue that people are really passionate about, we’re here to serve them.
“And it’s a great privilege to be able to help people.”
Perfect storm
Khalil has increased his majority in Wills at every poll since he was first elected in 2016. In 2022, he won by a handy 8.6%.
But since then, a confluence of events have made Labor’s hold on the seat more shaky.
First came a redistribution that handed the Labor strongholds of Pascoe Vale South, Glenroy and Oak Park plus part of Brunswick West over to the neighbouring seat of Maribyrnong while bringing the Greens-friendly areas of Princes Hill and Fitzroy North into Wills. This has reduced Khalil’s nominal margin to 4.6%, according to ABC election analyst Antony Green.
The pre-selection of Samantha Ratnam as Greens’ candidate is also a game changer for a party who have been dominant at state and local government level in Brunswick, but until now have struggled to overcome Labor’s rusted on support north of Bell Street.
Ratnam has deep roots in Brunswick and knows the electorate well as a former councillor and Mayor of Moreland (now known as Merri-bek). She is an experienced politician with a relatively high public profile who until her pre-selection was the party’s Victorian parliamentary leader. More importantly, the choice of Ratnam as candidate means the Greens will be throwing all their resources towards winning the seat.
Around the world, 2024 has been a terrible year for incumbent governments – a sentiment likely to play out in Australia, making life even harder for a long-term MP like Khalil.
And then there is Gaza.
Khalil is one of a handful of Labor MPs who have been explicitly targeted by protesters over the Albanese government’s perceived lack of support for the Palestinian people. Rallies have been held outside his office, which has been vandalised and one occasion in October had to be evacuated after a noxious odour was injected into a hole in a door.
All of this could combine to create the perfect storm against Khalil.
At the 2022 election, the Greens achieved 42.7% of the primary vote at the 10 Brunswick booths – winning all but one of those booths – but Khalil was able to counter that with 39.8% in the other booths in the electorate.
While the numbers tell a story, Khalil insists he will put as much effort into the south of the electorate as elsewhere.
“I don’t artificially see people in that way, and I actually think there’s a much more complex and nuanced picture.
“People, regardless of where they live in my electorate, have complex and varied views about issues.
“I guess my task is to engage with the people that I represent, articulate what I stand for, what I believe in, how I’ve represented and what I’ve done for them, what I’m going to do for them going forward.
“And whether someone lives in Glenroy, whether they live in Brunswick, I don’t make a distinction about that. I treat every constituent in the same sense that they are a constituent of mine.
“And regardless of where they live, their opinion matters, their views matter. The issues that they face matter, and it’s my responsibility to do my best to try and address that with them.”
“Democracy is not just a contest of ideas but also how you translate those ideas into practical actions that make a difference to those people that you represent, either through your service.”
Gaza looms large
Whether Israel’s war in Gaza will have a real impact on the election result remains to be seen, but with a large Middle Eastern migrant population, particularly in the north of the electorate, the conflict there is seen by some commentators as a vulnerability for Khalil. And it is certainly not one that Ratnam and the Greens have shied away from highlighting.
Khalil stresses that the Albanese government has consistently called for peace in Palestine and has voted at the UN for a ceasefire.
But he adds his critics do not acknowledge the work he does locally to take the concerns of Muslim, Arabic and other communities to the government, nor the number of Palestinian refugees he has helped come to Australia, particularly those with relatives already living in the electorate.
“Frankly, when it comes to the issue of the Middle East, you know, Australia has a very limited capacity to move the dial,” he says.
“But what Australia has done has been working with all of its international partners and the international community in what has been a significant effort to end the conflict, to end the war.
“Everyone wants to see the end to the loss of innocent life in the war, and also the return of the hostages … and every effort is being made diplomatically, by the foreign minister, by the Prime Minister.”
Putting Gaza aside, Khalil has noticed an increasing intolerance in the political debate, both here and overseas, along with a rise in anti-establishment populism.
Khalil said everyone had the right to protest peacefully, but some of the behaviour of protesters at his office – whether it has been leaving mock ups of blood soaked dead babies on the doorstep or the more serious attack in October – has crossed the line and made his staff feel unsafe (this interview was conducted before the December 6 arson attack on the Ripponlea synagogue).
He refuses to apportion blame for these attacks, but they have had an impact on his own work since he was appointed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as special envoy for social cohesion earlier this year, a role which has involved much listening to groups representing all parts of the community.
The aim is to ensure our democracy remains robust to withstand manipulation by extremists while still fostering respectful debate over differences of ideology and policy.
Khalil admits it is a multi-faceted problem, exacerbated by bad faith political actors, the fragmentation of the media, and the distortions enabled by digital platforms.
“I guess the role really is about how we can mitigate some of the risks to the cohesion of our society, and some of those risks emanating from what are genuinely held grievances that people are disenfranchised, the socio-economic disparity, there’s intergenerational unfairness.
“These are genuine grievances. They’re genuine issues which the government is trying to address through the cost of living relief that we’re providing the other improvements to our healthcare system and access and equity to education and so on.
“But political populists manipulate those genuine grievances for short-term political gain, and they do so in a way that rather than showing leadership in trying to unite people together, despite the differences, they actually exacerbate the differences because it gives a political win or political gain.
“So they use the worst aspects of human nature, like fear and anger and hatreds, and people are divided based on identity and so on, in order to get that short-term political gain.
“And that’s a real challenge.”
Khalil professes to have no idea when the election will be held. It must be called by May, but there is scuttlebutt in Canberra that it could as early as March.
Whatever the date, Khalil says he will be ready.
“There’s always a contest in every election,” he says. “There’s always challenges that you face.
“I think what I’ve done, and what I need to continue to do is to do the work first of all, to serve the community, to articulate what it is that I stand for and what I believe in, to exercise my judgment and whatever skills I have and abilities I have to best represent the communities that are in my electorate.
“And people will make their judgment on that basis.”
