It’s 10pm on 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.
Well Sophie Scamps and team, this is a really historic moment in Aussie politics and you have been instrumental in it . So happy for all of you, thanks from an old white bloke in Whitlam..!!
Thanks Wendy! Great coverage and insight. Can be proud as an Australian overseas again!
In the 60s it was common for US youth, esp draft dodgers, in Europe to have a Canadian Maple Leaf flag on their backpacks to avoid the almost universal opprobrium due to the war on Vietnam and others.
For the last few years, pre-plague when on the kangaroo route around the Continent, a lot of our yoof have been using the NZ flag for the same reason – though few foreigners (and an unsettling number of Antipodeans) can tell the difference.
I volunteered at a polling booth and encountered a couple with the lights of zealots in their eyes, who informed me that they were voting to stop the government from signing away our health rights to the UN.
This one was a new one for me (I consulted an organizer about this weird statement and was informed this was part of Clive”s BS which will end up in a court case.) and so, I so I informed this zealot couple that I was old enough to remember when Clive was Joh’s spin doctor and I personally wouldn’t believe a word he said in a campaign.
Not to mention bilking his employees to the tune of $60 mill. Anybody who trusted this crook should be placed under a guardianship order.
I got the same story from the “freedom” parties. Along with the votes will all be changed. Seems that some people will believe anything.
Is this how the labpr movement started in politics? Regardless, Labor neess to start doing this, to overcome the mindless support for the UAP.
“Positive. Optimistic. Strong. 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.” Oh for a government like this!