Des Houghton: Greens support for pro-Palestine activists, disdain for flag to propel Dutton to victory

The LNP must win back the Brisbane battleground seat of Ryan, held by the Greens, if Peter Dutton is to claim victory, writes Des Houghton.

Leader of the Opposition Peter Dutton. Picture: Martin Ollman

I’m hoping the Greens support for pro-Palestine activists and the party’s disdain for the Australian flag will help Peter Dutton claim victory at the next federal election.

The Greens are also campaigning for massive cuts to the Defence budget and the scrapping of AUKUS, the trilateral partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

And they want to renegotiate the ANZUS treaty. How? Why?

The Greens cockamamie defence policy would leave Australia vulnerable at the bottom of the world.

This may place Brisbane Greens MP Elizabeth Watson-Brown in a precarious position.
I sincerely hope so.

National attention will focus on Ryan because it is a key battleground seat. The LNP must win it back if Peter Dutton is to claim victory. Watson-Brown holds the seat of Ryan with a margin of 2.6 per cent.

Greens MP Elizabeth Watson-Brown at Kangaroo Point. Picture Lachie Millard

She faces a formidable LNP challenger in Maggie Forrest, 37, a barrister and Chinese language scholar who studied at the University of Queensland; later achieving a master’s in criminology from Cambridge University where her focus was counter terrorism.

“I was curious to know how people could become so radicalised by social media that would go and blow themselves up for their cause.’’

Before Cambridge she went to work in the prosecutor’s office at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague in the Netherlands. After two decades the tribunal successfully locked up war criminals. The evidence, she said, was “harrowing”.

Forrest is married to Christopher Doyle, a commercial law barrister at Level Twenty Seven Chambers in George St, Queensland’s largest group of barristers. They have a two-year-old boy, Henry. Her father, John, a Master of Economics from the University of Queensland was a lecturer in local government at QIT.

Maggie Forrest Picture: Des Houghton

Her mother Ruth worked at UQ in admin.

Ryan is home to more than 113,000 voters and Forrest needs to win back 2500 of them to claim victory.

The seat straddles Brisbane and Moreton stretching from the western suburbs on the northern side of the Brisbane River to Auchenflower, Toowong, Indooroopilly, Fig Tree Pocket, Kenmore, Brookfield and Moggill, and north to include Mt Coot-tha, Ashgrove, The Gap, Ferny Grove and Keperra all the way to seat of Dickson held by Peter Dutton.

The electorate takes large tracts of national parks.

If Watson-Brown is in trouble, so too are her left-wing comrades Max Chandler-Mather in the seat of Griffith and Stephen Bates, the Member for Brisbane.

All three could lose their seats if swings against the party in recent state election are repeated federally.

Forrest’s worst fear is that Albanese ends up in a minority government with the Greens, with some of their “disastrous and ruinous policies becoming a reality”.

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