Matthew Abraham: Georgina Downer has big shoes to fill in her bid to win Mayo - but is no shoo-in

GEORGINA Downer is no certainty to win the SA seat of Mayo, writes Matthew Abraham.

• How the latest chapter in the Downer dynasty was written
• Georgina Downer versus Rebekha Sharkie in Mayo

JUST outside the red doors of Mr Happy’s Chinese Restaurant in Canberra’s glum Garema Place, a naked father and son are frozen in bronze in a small fountain.

The fountain is the work of the late sculptor John Dowie, who also created the Victoria Square fountain.

It is the Downer Fountain. And, just like our relocated Victoria Square fountain, its relocated home in Canberra’s CBD is a bit of a downer.

Sorry, couldn’t help myself.

The bronze dad with wet feet honours Sir John Downer, an outstanding South Australian.

In 1878, and in his mid 30s, he became a QC and MP, Premier by 41, was a force behind drafting the Australian constitution at the 1891 and 1897-98 federal conventions, and a senator in our first Parliament in 1901.

The boy reaching for the chalice held aloft could easily have been his son, Sir Alexander “Alick” Downer, who grew up to grasp the cup as a federal minister, after first surviving three years as a Japanese prisoner of war in Changi.

In the camp, gunner Downer cobbled together a library for fellow PoWs and ran classes in law, politics and elocution.

His son, Alexander, also grasped the chalice, as the Liberal MP for Mayo, and Australia’s longest-serving Foreign Minister.

Now, another Downer child is reaching for the bauble dangled just outside of her reach.

Georgina Downer wants to be the next Liberal MP for Mayo, in the Adelaide Hills political landscape owned in varying guises by her father, grandfather and great-grandfather for more than 60 years.

But like the Garema Place fountain, Mayo has become an increasingly slippery place for the Liberals.

Inexplicably, Georgina did her first Hahndorf media walky-talky event as the Liberal candidate with the bombastic Senator Michaelia Cash, the federal Jobs and Innovation Minister, a politician who’d need a GPS to find her way around Adelaide.

In an innovative moment, Senator Cash told journalists Georgina was “born right here in the seat of Mayo”. Wrong.

Downer had to immediately correct her, on camera. She was born in the Old Country.

This blunder played right into the hands of those that say while Georgina is a Downer, she is also a blow-in who not only wasn’t born here but left the state because she thought it wasn’t good enough to educate her, works for a conservative think tank in Melbourne, thinks we get too much GST cash and is only “coming home” after missing preselection for a Victorian seat.

Being a Downer makes her the Liberals’ greatest asset in Mayo, and their biggest liability.

She is young, super smart and has instant name recognition.

Liberal powerbroker Chris Pyne said it didn’t matter whether she was “a Downer, a Smith or a Jones”. Bollocks.

In SA politics, the Downer brand carries the same clout that the brands of a Cornes, Kerley or Modra bring to sport. If the Downers branched out into selling used cars, they’d make a motza.

She was an irresistible choice for the Liberals, and the right one.

But the Downer dynasty tag plays nicely into the songbook of the well-entrenched Rebekha Sharkie, forced to quit as MP and fight the by-election as yet another citizenship casualty.

Sharkie easily took Mayo off embattled Liberal Jamie Briggs in 2016 as a rolled-gold Nick Xenophon candidate.

Xenophon once joked that former Liberal Premier John Olsen had the Midas touch – everything he touched turned into a muffler. It’s a taunt that’s come back to bite him.

The once Goldfinger of national politics seems to have decided that now everything he touches will turn into a muffler, too.

But has he really abandoned Sharkie? I don’t buy it. Her initial shots at Downer were pitch-perfect, painting herself as the local battler up against the toffs. Pure Xenophon.

And only two months back, Xenophon’s now-defunct SA Best went within a whisker of winning Heysen, which seriously overlaps Mayo.

The voters of Mayo have demonstrated before that if they get half a chance to smack a Downer, they’ll take it.

In 1998, the former Redgum singer and my sixer at 1st Torrens Park Scouts, John Schumann, almost toppled Downer.

So hold the Mayo, this should be a beaut by-election. It doesn’t take much for a Midas touch to turn into a muffler or a bronze cup to become a poisoned chalice.