Tom Minear: Once upon a time in the west
The uproar channelled at Treasurer Tim Pallas over the contaminated soil dumping ground in the western suburbs won’t dissipate overnight, so Labor MPs better get ready for a duel, writes Tom Minear.
Opinion
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Once upon a time, the local Labor MP would be on safe ground in a Werribee pub.
But after last week, Tim Pallas must be wondering if the party’s heartland is turning into the wild west.
The Treasurer showed up at the Park Hotel to reassure locals worried the government was about to dump contaminated soil from the West Gate Tunnel near their homes.
He barely had time to get a word out before the crowd booed and jeered. One resident yelled at him to “get out of Werribee”, while another interjected that Pallas was “an a--ehole”.
The good people of Werribee have voted in Labor MPs at every election since 1979.
In Altona, Footscray, Kororoit, Melton, Niddrie, St Albans, Sunbury, Sydenham, Tarneit and Williamstown, voters would only remember Labor representatives in state parliament.
The electoral maths mean Labor’s red wall is unlikely to come crashing down any time soon. But anyone keeping an eye on state politics in recent times will have noticed more and more bricks falling off.
It’s now three years since the Andrews Government was forced to dump plans for a new youth jail in Werribee South, after angry rallies in the streets again targeted at Pallas.
Residents warned they would come after the Treasurer at the ballot box, and in 2018, they did. His primary vote slumped from 56.6 per cent to 45.4 per cent — a serious aberration in a Labor landslide across the state.
From a standing start, Werribee doctor Joe Garra ran as an independent and received a healthy one in five votes.
In Melton, Labor candidate Steve McGhie just scraped home with a primary vote of 34.9 per cent.
The demographics of Melbourne’s western suburbs are changing.
Wyndham City — including Werribee, Hoppers Crossing and Tarneit — was home to about 220,000 people in 2016. By next year, that will be almost 270,000, and in two decades’ time, Wyndham is expected to have almost half a million residents.
A lot of young families are moving in, attracted to more affordable house prices, and the migrant community is growing quickly.
These people may not necessarily be conservatives, in the Liberal Party’s definition of the word, but many are conservative about their place in an economy where wage rises are flat and bills keep climbing.
Speaking to MPs in the west, some recognise a refrain from residents both old and new about not wanting to be taken for granted or left behind.
For the state government, that boils down to building infrastructure — schools and hospitals, roads and railway lines — and while that is happening apace, previous governments have made it harder by failing to adequately plan for this growth.
New projects offer hope for residents, but that may not satisfy those squeezing on to packed trains every day.
This goes some way to explaining why Labor MPs from the west last week raised their concerns about the airport rail project with Transport Infrastructure Minister Jacinta Allan.
They questioned Allan about how the government’s preferred design — sending airport trains through the Metro Tunnel — would improve rail services to growth corridor suburbs and regional hubs.
The government maintains it can make this happen, but it is yet to demonstrate exactly how, prompting a growing sense of unease on the backbench.
It’s not as though Allan is facing a full-blown revolt.
However, some Labor figures raised their eyebrows at the willingness of their colleagues to push back against the senior minister.
The other factor behind that, according to party insiders, is the shifting factional sands that have Premier Daniel Andrews’ Socialist Left group outnumbered by a coalition between the Industrial Left and Right-aligned unions.
This is especially evident in Melbourne’s west, typically not an SL stronghold.
Further pressure was heaped on the government last week by federal Labor MP Joanne Ryan, whose intervention in the West Gate Tunnel soil furore stoked community anger. She said she was not confident the proposal — to use government land in Wyndham as a temporary holding site for soil contaminated with PFAS — would be safe for residents.
In my view, the rhetoric around PFAS is out of control, and the state government has failed to handle that. These chemicals can be deadly in some forms, like the firefighting foams linked to at least 16 deaths at the CFA’s Fiskville training base.
But PFAS can also be found in furniture, carpets and even pizza boxes.
As Emergency Services Minister Lisa Neville pointed out, you would have to eat kilos of soil with PFAS in it to get sick.
It is also curious that the possibility of a back-up soil storage site for the West Gate Tunnel is causing such concern, when a temporary facility for the Metro Tunnel hasn’t even been used.
Nevertheless, the uproar faced by Pallas won’t dissipate overnight, despite his efforts to clear up the misconceptions fuelling the anger.
The bigger question in all of this is whether the Liberal Party — or even the Greens in the inner west — can capitalise on this unrest.
Despite the political opportunities, both parties have long had problems with candidates and campaigning in the west.
In other states, Labor’s heartland has been similarly threatened when MPs failed to pay enough attention to their communities right when they were being transformed, although in those cases, voters have wandered off to the likes of Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer.
Those outlaws are yet to ride into Melbourne’s wild west, but either way, Labor MPs better get ready for a duel.
Tom Minear is state politics editor.