Giant-slayer: How door-knocking and deals turned red Richmond Green

The battle for Richmond came down to the wire: in the end, there were fewer than 700 votes in it.

At the time of writing, just 669 votes separated the Greens and Labor on first preference votes. From there, intricate preference flows converted that narrow margin into a 57.24 to 42.76 per cent two-party preferred result.

Greens leader Samantha Ratnam and elected Richmond MP Gabrielle de Vietri arrive at the Greens’ election party.Credit: Justin McManus

The Greens’ victory came after frenetic on-the-ground campaigning by victorious party members vanquished Labor and a small team of determined Liberals.

Unlike seats like Melton, voters in Richmond weren’t inundated with automated text messages. Instead, there was an assault on the eyes everywhere you looked. Corflutes filled residential streets, and volunteers fanned out to approach voters directly. Labor, the Greens and Victorian Socialists each reported having knocked on more than 10,000 doors in Richmond.

At the end of all that, the Greens’ Gabrielle de Vietri will enter the 60th parliament a giant-slayer, having done what the party had talked up for several elections now.

She is the candidate who finally ousted Labor – which, apart from a brief spell for the Democratic Labour Party, has held Richmond for more than a century.

Residents cast their votes on polling day at the Fitzroy Primary School.Credit: Justin McManus

Richmond was one of three seats, along with Melton and Hawthorn, The Age focused on this election.

Each was fascinating in different ways. Melton, also a Labor-held seat with a diminishing primary vote, was facing a serious challenge from the Liberals’ Graham Watt.

And in Hawthorn, one-term Labor MP John Kennedy was facing a three-way fight with teal hopeful Melissa Lowe, and Liberal John Pesutto, who managed to wrestle his former seat back and is now in contention for the opposition leadership.

The seat coverage complemented The Age’s focus on Victoria’s Agenda this election – in which we shifted our approach to home in on what Victorians want to discuss, rather than what the political parties and candidates wanted to talk about.

Despite the narrow focus, readers loved them: our stories were as well-read as similar deep dives The Age undertook during the federal election for the seats of Goldstein, Chisholm and Kooyong.

How do you make a myopic focus on a seat with tens of thousands of voters relevant to a broader Victorian readership? By focusing on themes that resonate with all voters.

Here, we were helped by the extraordinary work undertaken by our colleagues working on the Agenda project. We knew readers wanted us to cover, and candidates to talk about, housing affordability; cost-of-living pressures; transport and climate.

One day I tailed Liberal candidate Lucas Moon as he received a warm reception in the North Richmond housing towers; traditionally Labor territory. Here, Moon heard from people frustrated with the effects of the neighbouring medically supervised injecting room.

One man said he had moved back to the flats to look after his ageing mother, and wanted to know whether Moon would back more police in the area.

“I mean, the injecting room’s still here, they’ll be shooting up down here later ... my mum was just robbed before, too,” the man said.

De Vietri, too, didn’t need to scratch too far to find people struggling with disadvantage in this wealthy electorate, and who felt abandoned by Labor. After she contacted The Age about raw sewage flowing into a Clifton Hill estate, workers turned up to clean it before our photographers arrived.

There was disengagement, too: one young voter, Steve, told a focus group in Richmond that he didn’t go in search for information about politics or policies. “I didn’t even know there was an election until about last week until I was at the shops,” he told pollsters. “I had no idea.”

Many years ago, I worked for a local paper, The Melbourne Times. Covering Richmond for the election reminded me of those days – the text messages from candidates and staffers at all hours of the day and night, and the relentless campaigning not just from candidates but also community groups.

Notable among them were the Overflowing Bins of Yarra group – which began as a protest against the City of Yarra changing bins collection from weekly to fortnightly, and has since morphed into a group campaigning against untidy streets and the medically supervised injecting room at North Richmond Community Health.

Soon after the election, breathing a sigh of relief, I left the Facebook group, which is faithfully populated with photographic updates of – well – overflowing bins in the City of Yarra.

I won’t miss the constant stream of inner-urban rubbish bins in my social media feed, but I will miss the passion and drive of candidates and citizens who campaigned at breakneck pace to try to make the state a better place.

Labor’s Richard Wynne, who held Richmond for 23 years, has retired from parliament but almost certainly not from public life. Labor candidate Lauren O’Dwyer bows out of an at-times bruising race, in which she fought an energetic and positive campaign, but was dogged with questions about her Aboriginal heritage and Yorta Yorta activists still demanding proof of her ties to the community.

The Greens held hopes elsewhere this election. With MPs already from Prahran, Melbourne and Brunswick, on election night its leaders dared to imagine they might also win Footscray, Pascoe Vale, Albert Park and Northcote.

Notwithstanding some slight doubt still over Northcote, election night in the end represented less of a “Greenslide” than the slow tide of Richmond’s gentrifying electorate.

That dynamic – and the Liberal Party’s decision to preference the Greens above Labor – pushed the seat from a nominally safe Labor seat to a safe Greens seat.

The Greens also won preferences from the Animal Justice Party and Victorian Socialists, while Labor won a smattering of preferences from a most interesting candidate, Meca Ho.

The day after Premier Daniel Andrews made an unpublicised visit to Victoria Street to announce $400,000 in funding for the Lunar Festival, former Victoria Street Traders’ Association president Meca Ho announced he would run as an independent.

Ho denied he was running as a feeder candidate, but told The Age he wanted Labor to win and sent preferences from his 396 votes directly to Labor.

It was a small but significant development in a seat that Andrews had warned would come down to “a handful of votes”. In the end, however, it wasn’t enough to win it for O’Dwyer.

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