Wentworth federal electorate profile: A Teal seat of wealth and power
Inside the Sydney seat of Wentworth sits one of the ritztiest suburbs in all of Australia. But the nation’s cost of living crisis is hitting home there too, says Teal MP Allegra Spender.
NSW
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Toyota is the most common car brand in almost every suburb in Australia, except Double Bay in the ritzy eastern suburbs electorate of Wentworth where Mercedes-Benz tops the driver polls.
The harbourside suburb is colloquially known as “Double Pay” because that’s what you need to live there, and the assumption is that a cost-of-living crisis there means downgrading your French champagne from Bollinger to the cheaper, but equally quaffable, Mumm.
Not so, says Wentworth Teal MP Allegra Spender.
“It is so different and so much more varied than that,” Spender says. “It’s not fair to my community. Forty to 60 per cent of my community live in apartments and so cost of living affects people here, really, in different ways.
“If you do have a house, you’ve got a whacking big mortgage and so people are really hurting.”
We are sitting at a new cafe called Ruma in Double Bay where Spender – a Teal independent who won the traditional Liberal stronghold from Dave Sharma in 2022 – is warmly greeted by locals.
She is not, let’s be very clear, wearing a teal-coloured jacket.
“It’s baby-blue,” she says.
And who is going to argue pantones with the daughter of the late fashion designer Carla Zampatti.
The Wentworth electorate has been expanded to include parts of Potts Point, Woolloomooloo and Darlinghurst, whose high-rises and public housing blocks are just a few kilometres (but several tax brackets) away from tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes’s $100m mansion Fairwater at Point Piper.
Just down the road, Gladiator star Russell Crowe has put his $42m apartment at Woolloomooloo up for sale.
In fact, doorknocking for votes can have its surprises among the plastic surgeons and CEOs living in Wentworth.
“I doorknocked Tim Minchin,” Spender says of her surprise at meeting the famous singer and comedian.
“I knocked the door and there he was!”
But among the glitz and glamour of Hollywood A-listers running into the surf at Bondi and Clovelly, there is a very real issue affecting the electorate with the largest Jewish population in Australia – the ugly rise of anti-Semitism.
“This is a huge issue for the community,” says Spender, who advocated for tough new laws on anti-Semitism following recent arson and graffiti attacks in the electorate.
That’s something her Liberal rival Ro Knox also knows something about, after five of her corflutes in Woolloomooloo were daubed with swastikas last weekend.
“It’s very violent, aggressive and unpleasant,” Knox says. “It makes the Jewish population so upset. We’ve got Holocaust survivors here.”
Knox’s RAAF-serving grandfather told her years ago that the Holocaust happened because no one spoke up about the rise of the anti-Semitism in the 1930s.
She has vowed not to be quiet about it now.
“It matters because we cannot allow the normalisation of this sort of violence,” she says.
Knox has broad shoulders.
“I don’t mind the jokes – the other day someone wrote ‘Botox’ on one of my posters and I thought that was funny,” she says. But sending a death threat to her “already very needy” labradoodle Auggie is “a step too far”.
Knox has secured the support of the traditional older Liberal base in Wentworth.
At Twenty-One Espresso, 78-year-old owner George Schiffer reflects on the politicians he has seen come through the door since his father, fresh off the boat from Hungary, started the restaurant more than seven decades ago.
“Bob Hawke used to come in here with his golfing buddies, Paul Keating too,” Mr Schiffer says. “Ro Knox has been in, but not Allegra Spender. Nor Malcolm Turnbull.”
For his part, Turnbull – the former PM and Wentworth MP, whose son Alex donated to Spender’s last election campaign – did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr Schiffer said he would bite his tongue if Spender did pop into his diner. “I’m sure she’s a clever young lady, but I disagree with her about pumping so hard for climate change, because I just don’t think we make any difference whatever we do in this country,” he says.
However, down at Vaucluse’s Shark Beach, surfer James Page from Woollahra disagrees.
“I voted for Allegra at the last election because she made it about the environment when the Labor Party dropped the ball on that front,” he says.
Sitting on a blanket nearby at Nielson Park with her son Jasper, 1, Polly Ireland says she also voted for Spender at the last election. She would again but she and her husband have since moved out of the electorate, limited now to day trips to their old neighbourhood.
“We cannot afford to buy where we want to live,” Ms Ireland said.
“I want whoever gets into government to make life cheaper and sort out interest rates.”
Originally published as Wentworth federal electorate profile: A Teal seat of wealth and power
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