Miranda Live: Conservatives’ Kevin Bailey’s ‘Tet Offensive’ on Batman by-election
HE’S a former SAS trooper turned philanthropist, says he plans to “charm” the Left’s voters and compares his campaign in the Batman by-election to the North Vietnamese Army’s Tet Offensive. Meet Australian Conservatives candidate Kevin Bailey AM.
HE’S a former SAS trooper turned philanthropist, says he plans to “charm” the Left’s voters and compares his campaign in the Batman by-election to the North Vietnamese Army’s Tet Offensive. Meet Australian Conservatives candidate Kevin Bailey AM.
Mr Bailey is facing extremely long odds in the Melbourne seat of Batman — a Labor stronghold with a growing Greens population — but told Miranda Devine’s online radio show Miranda Live he was excited to be “behind enemy lines” to “stick a stake in the heart”.
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“I think the Greens think they have it in the bag,” he said of the by-election, triggered by Labor MP David Feeney’s inability to prove he wasn’t a dual citizen.
“But if people don’t see us (the Australian Conservatives) fighting here, they’ll think we only belong in the leafy suburbs — and we need to have the debate of ideas right here, where they think they own the space.”
Mr Bailey, served in the Australian Army from 1977 to 1985 — including seven years in the elite Special Air Service, before embarking on a career in financial planning and compared the Conservatives’ Batman campaign to the 1968 Tet Offensive carried out by the North Vietnamese Army and Vietcong.
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While the offensive was ultimately a failure for the Communist forces, it seized the “hearts and minds” of the South Vietnamese populace and changed popular opinion of the war.
But he said he’d been initially reluctant to go into politics.
“What drove me — I looked at the toxic soup that our culture was becoming and I thought “I’m not leaving this to my grandkids”.”
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