Labor MP’s surprisingly buff bod
Campaign Confidential: Emmanuel Macron bared his hairy chest and won the French election. Now a Labor MP has given us a serving of his ‘Macron moment’.
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The sex factor
Emmanuel Macron’s thumping win in the French presidential election raises the inevitable question: was it the chest hair photo what won it for him? For those who haven’t seen it, the 44 year old was snapped a week out from polling day relaxing on a sofa with his crisp white shirt unbuttoned to reveal a frankly startling abundance of chest hair. “Lumberjack tier,” is how news.com.au described the carefully-edged but luxuriously thick Flokati-rug style expanse. While we urge our political leaders to resist the temptation to do something similar, we note that sex appeal very occasionally makes a difference in Australian politics, most recently when SA Labor leader Peter Malinauskas posed shirtless in an Adelaide pool, revealing a pretty tidy rig, and promptly got himself elected premier.
Bowen buffs up
It’s maybe not quite in the same league as Malinauskas or Macron, but Campaign Confidential has noted some recent videos posted on social media by Labor’s Chris Bowen. Putting aside his suits and open neck check shirts, the MP for McMahon has been opting for some noticeably tight and stretchy T-shirts in a few of his recent clips. In an interview last year, Labor’s climate spokesperson revealed he was motivated to start going to the gym when he turned 40, and he now goes “almost every morning between 5am and 6am”. He also boasted that he has some “impressive calf muscles” these days – a claim we’re happy to take on trust.
Electorates – now with 30 per cent more voters!
Some seats in play at the 2022 federal election have more than 20 per cent more voters than they did in 2019, and one is nearly 30 per cent bigger, analysis of AEC official enrolment data reveals. The seat of Tangney in WA, held by Ben Morton for the Liberals, has gone from 94,365 enrolled voters last election to 122,303 this time, a massive jump of 29.6 per cent. While Morton received more than 61 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote in 2019, and Tangney is not considered in the first clutch of seats that Labor could pick up in the west, the Coalition’s hold on it is starting to “appear shaky,” according to a recent report in The Australian. Other seats in WA have also boomed, thanks largely to the abolition of the division of Stirling: Durack by 22 per cent, and Swan and Perth by 20 per cent. Some of the Queensland electorates are also much bigger in 2022, after huge internal migration to the Sunshine State. Longman and Fadden are both 12 per cent bigger than they were in 2019 and Blair is 11 per cent bigger. But the nation’s biggest seat remains Macarthur in NSW, which is bursting at the seams with 12 per cent more voters than it had in 2019, and an official enrolment of 133,501.
Clinging to power (poles)
Complaints about the use of power poles for candidate corflutes have been flooding in to NSW electricity distributor Ausgrid, and Campaign Confidential hears the lion’s share of the calls have been coming from Wentworth. Posters for Liberal Democrats candidate Daniel Lewkowitz went up in huge numbers recently, virtually blanketing some streets, only to be taken down just as quickly, while sitting Liberal MP Dave Sharma has slammed his rival, Climate 200 independent Allegra Spender, for being tardy in removing her offending signs. Ausgrid says it is an offence to interfere with electricity assets without approval as it’s a safety risk. A spokesperson told Campaign Confidential when they hear of an offending poster, they give the candidate seven days to remove it, and if they fail to do so, Ausgrid does it themselves. Apparently Wentworth has not been a hotbed for complaints about this sort of thing in previous campaigns, but three weeks in, it’s pretty clear there’s nothing normal about the 2022 federal election.
Missed it by that much
With the close of candidate nominations last week comes the sad story of Gold Coast property investor Kevin Young, who missed out on his chance to stand after a series of mishaps when lodging forms.
Young was racing to the office of the Divisional Returning Officer last Thursday – deadline day for nominations – after securing the endorsements he needed to stand in Moncrieff.
But he ended up missing the noon deadline after his GPS instead directed him to a cricket club and he discovered that his forms were incomplete.
“I am shattered,” Mr Young said. “I missed out on my nomination by 10 minutes.
“I had to wait until (Thursday) for 10 endorsements. I set sail to lodge at Robina. My GPS delivered me to a cricket club.
“Long story short, I arrived with five minutes to spare. When I got there they asked, ‘Where is your form 44?’ I didn’t know I needed one.
“The staff were good, they got the multi-page form, but time beat me. They rang Head Office for a dispensation, but the answer was ‘no’.”
Mr Young said he was disappointed he would not be able to take his plan for affordable housing to the electorate.
Nine candidates have been declared for the seat of Moncrieff, which is held by Angie Bell of the LNP.
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Originally published as Labor MP’s surprisingly buff bod
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