‘People want to feel hopeful again’:
Ratnam’s plan to win in Wills
Mark Phillips
Friday, September 6, 2024
IF Samantha Ratnam feels any trepidation about stepping down as Victorian leader of the Greens party to run for Federal Parliament, it’s not showing.
Ahead of her official campaign launch in Coburg this Saturday, Ratnam is upbeat about the battle ahead to wrest the seat of Wills from Labor for only the second time in its history.
If she does so at the next election, which must be held by May, she would become the first Greens member and the first woman to represent the area since the seat was created in 1949.
Ratnam will formally resign as MLC for Northern Metropolitan province at the end of October. She has already stood down as leader of the Victorian Greens, a position she has held since she entered state Parliament in 2017. Her successor in Northern Metropolitan, Anasina Gray-Barberio, was announced this week.
Ratnam announced her candidacy for Wills in April after a short pre-selection process that she won convincingly over the party’s 2022 Greens candidate Sarah Jefford.
Her campaign got a boost on Thursday when the Australian Electoral Commission confirmed new boundaries for Wills which have slashed Khalil’s margin from 8.6.% to an estimated 4.6% by taking in parts of Fitzroy North and Princes Hill and shedding part of Glenroy.
But to win the seat, Ratnam will still have to convince voters in the north of Bell Street who have proved a stumbling block for the Greens in previous campaigns in Wills.
Speaking ahead of her campaign launch, Ratnam said she felt the momentum was growing in her favour and she had no regrets about stepping down as Victorian Greens leader for the uncertainty of a federal election in what was once one of the safest Labor seats in Australia.
She and her volunteers have knocked on 10,000 doors and had mostly positive conversations, she said.
“It actually wasn’t a hard decision, because ever since I’ve got involved in the Greens, I’ve wanted to be of service to the party and to the community, and think about the best way I can contribute to changing politics,” she said.
“So with the campaign in Wills really gaining momentum, I wanted to put myself forward if I could help the party make some gains and hopefully make the breakthrough.
“And yes, there might be some uncertainties, but we are traveling with a whole bunch of hope, and we’re being met with really positive responses on the doors [and] in community spaces.”
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SAMANTHA Ratnam has been here before. In 2016, when she was Mayor of the City of Moreland (now known as Merri-bek), she stood for the Greens against Khalil, who was a first time candidate following the retirement of Kelvin Thomson.
She gained a two-party preferred swing of 10.3%, but while the Greens have continued to dominate in Brunswick and the south of the electorate since then, they have gone backwards in Wills.
But Ratnam senses there is a real mood for change this time around.
She said that when she spoke to voters, they often expressed despondency that Labor had failed to deliver on the promise it had shown when the Albanese government ended nine years of conservative rule in 2022.
“We’re actually meeting a lot of despair out there,” she said.
“A lot of people are going, ‘Can I believe in anything anymore? Can I believe in anyone anymore?’
“So one of the biggest things that we have to do in this campaign is to keep the concept of hope alive.
“And one of the most powerful things we’re doing in those conversations is just to say we remain hopeful, it’s really tough, and we understand that, but we’re going to do everything that we possibly can. And if we don’t have hope, we don’t have the capacity to create change.”
In her conversations with voters, Ratnam has also discovered that kitchen table issues of the cost of living, including grocery prices and the cost of housing, are front of mind.
She says the Greens can differentiate from Labor by promising an inquiry into price gouging by supermarkets and advocating for a national rental cap and freeze along with increased funding of public housing.
New Wills electorate boundaries
ANOTHER issue that often comes up is the war in Gaza and frustration that the Albanese government is perceived as not doing enough to push for peace there.
Peter Khalil’s office has been regularly targeted by pro-Palestine rallies, and he has condemned the behaviour of some protesters as making his staff feel unsafe. Some have even blamed the Greens for fuelling attacks on the offices of Labor MPs.
“It seems quite clear that Labor is feeling very uncomfortable and feeling the pressure of the community sentiment roaring against them, and they’re trying to distract from their inaction,” Ratnam said.
“So now they’re turning on the very people who are standing up for peace … People want our governments to take stronger action. They’ve seen our governments do that before for other other people who’ve been marginalised and attacked and they don’t see they were doing that for the Palestinians.”
Last weekend, Ratnam attended the launch in the neighbouring seat of Calwell of the Muslim Votes Matter campaign, which has been formed ni part to put more pressure on Labor over Gaza.
She skirts around whether the Greens are deliberately wooing the votes of Muslims, who make up a significant proportion of voters in the northern parts of Wills, but says she welcomes greater engagement with politics by multicultural communities.
The northern section of Wills remains the Greens’ Achilles’ heel. Ratnam believes the demographics are turning in her party’s favour.
“People are much less rusted on to a party, particularly the major parties, whereas elections gone by, we’d have a lot more people saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m a Labor Party person and thank you, but no thank you’.
“We’re having very few of those conversations and many more saying, ‘I’m really worried what’s going to happen in the future. I’m open to talking to you’.”
SAMANTHA Ratnam’s own passage into the Greens was initially sparked by the Tampa and Children Overboard controversies in the early-2000s.
A migrant herself from Sri Lanka, her pre-politics career was as a social worker for refugees and asylum seekers.
But the trigger for joining the party was the ditching of an emissions trading scheme by the Rudd Government in 2010.
She sees similar disillusionment with Labor 15 years later among the voters of Wills.
“I was hopeful too, that Labor would take the action that they promised, big promises that they made, and I became so disheartened and despondent at the action they weren’t taking.
“When they shelved things like the emissions trading system, there were a whole lot of people like me who joined the Greens because of that, because we saw the Greens as the ones with the vision and the courage to stand up and talk about the future.”
But despite having steadily progressed from local government to state politics and now potentially federal Parliament, Ratnam said there was never any pre-ordained path to a career in politics when she joined the party.
“Essentially, I just wanted to be able to help,” she said.
“I thought if they asked me to hand out flyers for the rest of my life. I’m happy to do that, I’m happy to be of service
“The way I look at it is that as the party grows and the movement grows and we’re growing our representation, I still use that same principle in terms of where can I be of best use and most help?
“And I’ve been happy to put myself forward.”
SAMANTHA Ratnam was born in London in 1977 and grew up in her parents’ native Sri Lanka. Her family came to Australia when she and her twin sister were 12. She spent time growing up in Melbourne’s south-eastern and eastern suburbs, studied at Melbourne University and has a PhD.
She has lived in the Brunswick area for 15 years since first coming here as a share house renter in her early-30s, and is the mother of a pre-school daughter.
She said after often feeling disconnected in suburbia as a teenager, moving to Brunswick reminded her of the kind of community she remembered as a child in Sri Lanka.
“I never lived in Brunswick before, but as soon as I moved in, I just knew that it was a place that I never wanted to leave and the reason for that was I saw the diversity in this community and the inclusivity that was offered by everyone.
“There is actually a really strong sense of community and you feel welcomed. And I felt welcomed because it looked like everyone was welcomed, and so I didn’t feel like I stood out.”
As the interview draws to a close, Ratnam admits she sometimes worries about the direction politics in Australia and around the world is heading, but she remains convinced Wills and Brunswick will remain a safe haven for progressive values.
She accuses opposition leader Peter Dutton of fanning fear and anxiety in the community, but she is confident that style of politics will be rejected by Wills voters, whether they elect her or Peter Khalil.
“What we’re finding when we go to talk to people, is that they are really tired of that, and they want to feel hopeful again … I think at a time of great fear, the antidote is connection and trust, and that’s what this campaign is based on. And I think that’s why we’re getting a very warm reception in the community.”
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