Who will win the hearts of progressive Melbourne?

Explore more of our in-depth coverage of the seat of Richmond this state election.See all 21 stories.

Next door to the Greens’ slick campaign office in Smith Street, Collingwood, half a dozen people are sitting on the footpath beneath a pungent cloud of marijuana smoke.

Inside the building the party’s candidate for the state seat of Richmond, Gabrielle de Vietri, shrugs. “Legalise it!” she laughs.

Gabrielle de Vietri, outside her Smith Street campaign office.Credit: Justin McManus

Richmond is the scene of one of the November state election’s biggest battles. It takes in the progressive heart of Melbourne – Fitzroy, Collingwood, Clifton Hill, Richmond, Burnley and Cremorne (after redistribution, North Fitzroy becomes part of the neighbouring seat of Brunswick).

Labor has held Richmond for more than a century, but the Greens are throwing everything at this seat, the party identifying it as its number-one target to win at the November 26 state election.

Party leader Adam Bandt, whose federal seat of Melbourne covers the area, launched 39-year-old de Vietri’s campaign, and one of his media advisors has been seconded to run her communications. A small army of volunteers is aiming to knock on 15,000 doors in Richmond during the campaign.

Over on Bridge Road, Richmond, Labor candidate Lauren O’Dwyer’s volunteers hit the phones in a former bridal shop-turned campaign office. Glitter is still embedded in the walls and purple velvet curtains frame the front windows.

Posters of Labor giants including Julia Gillard and Lindsay Tanner line the walls; a reminder of just what is at stake at this election.

Richard Wynne, who has held Richmond for 23 years, is about to retire. In his place Labor has preselected 37-year-old O’Dwyer, associate director of First Nations programs at the Arts Centre and a former Labor staffer.

Labor candidate Lauren O’Dwyer.Credit: Darrian Traynor

Both leading candidates are women who identify as queer and work in the arts. O’Dwyer, who hails from Yorta Yorta country, is proudly of Irish and Aboriginal heritage. They are canny choices for this young and highly mobile electorate.

According to the latest Census data, 53 per cent of Richmond residents rent their homes, compared with the state average of 28.5 per cent. This is a similar number to the neighbouring Greens-held seats of Melbourne (67 per cent) and Prahran (57 per cent).

The average age in Richmond is 33.

The seat hosts three large public housing estates in Collingwood, Fitzroy and Richmond. But, on average, residents enjoy incomes 40 per cent higher than the Victorian average.

Some 65 per cent of people here are white-collar professionals or managers.

The biggest issues for the dozens of voters The Age has spoken to are climate, housing, and – for a section of the community in North Richmond – the medically supervised injecting room.

For years, the Greens have talked up their chances of taking this seat from Labor. This election, the party is closer than ever.

Richard Wynne has represented Richmond for 23 years.Credit: The Age

Redbridge director Kosmos Samaras, a former Labor strategist, says polling electorates like Richmond is notoriously difficult.

“They don’t answer their phones, and they don’t want to participate in polling,” he says. This means many young voters likely to vote for the Greens are not captured in single-seat polling, he says.

He predicts the Greens will win Richmond and Albert Park – which is on the other side of Prahran – on November 26, creating a five-electorate-wide Greens bloc across the inner suburbs of Melbourne.

“The brand loyalty for the Greens there is very strong,” he says. “It doesn’t matter who the candidate is, unless there’s a scandal ... But in absence of that, you will see the sorts of swings to the Greens that we saw at the federal election.”

De Vietri says she can sense growing support for the Greens among the people she’s speaking to.

“We know that if everyone who voted Greens at a federal level votes Greens at the state level that the Greens will take Richmond this election,” she says.

“I can feel on the ground that there is a huge support for progressive politics, action on climate and for the Greens.”

It’s a message that will resonate with voters such as wedding videographer Lachy Henry.

“I care a lot about the environment, so that’s huge. [I want to see] more conservation,” he said.

Labor, too, is pouring more resources into Richmond than any other seat this campaign, so O’Dwyer cautions the Greens shouldn’t take anything for granted.

“There’s a real knowledge from many in our ranks that the inner cities are absolutely still in need of people that understand what a social safety net looks like, and the need for a social safety net and an ecosystem of supports for people,” O’Dwyer says.

“And particularly with the proportion of low-income housing and social housing in the electorate, and younger people that are growing up that need access to those public services, we should in no way be abandoning a seat like this.”

She’s had federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek helping her campaign. At state level, frontbenchers including Lily D’Ambrosio and Gabrielle Williams have lent their support, attending events and hitting the phones to urge residents to vote Labor.

Labor’s Lauren O’Dwyer says the Greens should take nothing for granted in Richmond.Credit: Darrian Traynor

If she is elected, O’Dwyer – who grew up in Echuca and moved to Melbourne to attend university (the first in her family to do so) – expects to be the only parliamentarian who rents their home.

“What’s cutting through is how refreshed people are to see someone who goes, ‘yeah, I was an adviser for a little bit, but I’ve also done all these other things outside the party, and I have lived experience that’s a lot different to other candidates’,” she says.

ABC political analyst Antony Green says the Liberals haven’t won a seat to the north or west of the Yarra River this century, and can’t see them doing so in Richmond. But he says Wynne’s retirement could lead to a significant drop in Labor’s vote.

“The Labor Party would have a lot of the votes in the housing commission flats locked up, but his retirement will have a big impact. It’s going to be a really tough seat for Labor to hold,” Green says.

An open question is the effect an energetic Liberal candidate would have in Richmond.

The Liberals haven’t held Richmond since 1907, and the last time the party ran a candidate here was at the 2014 state election, when Weiran Lu amassed 20.7 per cent of primary votes.

This time, businessman, veterans’ rights campaigner, former ADF soldier and Hawthorn RSL president Lucas Moon is the endorsed Liberal candidate.

Moon is running an active and well-resourced campaign, putting in about $45,000 of his own money.

His slick and entertaining YouTube campaign advertisement had amassed almost 7000 views on YouTube at the time of writing. Party leader Matthew Guy launched his campaign on October 13, and David Southwick is among Liberal frontbenchers out on the hustings with Moon.

Liberal candidate Lucas Moon, at the Retreat Hotel in Abbotsford.Credit: Darrian Traynor

Will he do better than the 21 per cent the Liberals polled last time an endorsed candidate ran in this seat?

“Absolutely the intent is to do better than that,” Moon says.

“If we want to compare it to 2014. There’s been a redistribution, North Fitzroy has been taken out, and Richmond has gentrified ... the demographics have changed significantly.

“To me, they’re aspirational, they’re driven, [they’re] professionals. They want to own a home. They want to start a family or the choice to start a family. And we’re offering the Liberal product ... we’re intending to win the seat.”

At Moon’s campaign launch on a wet Thursday night, party leader Matthew Guy tells Liberal supporters to keep the faith.

“In the last 20 years, Melbourne has added the population of Perth,” he says.

“What that means is there are great changes in the electoral map and, yes, there are places where that doesn’t help us, like Kooyong for instance, and Higgins.

“But it also advantages us in places like the western suburbs ... If I told you 20 years ago that the vast majority of Western Sydney would be represented by the Liberal Party, you’d laugh at me. [But] politics doesn’t stay the same for ever.”

Lucas Moon says the Liberals can “absolutely” win Richmond.Credit: Darrian Traynor

Moon is campaigning hard on moving the medically-supervised injecting room at North Richmond Community Health, which is next door to Richmond West Primary School. If Guy’s Liberals form government in November, Moon vows, the injecting room would be moved. Where would it go? “It won’t be next to a primary school!” he says.

De Vietri is campaigning on stronger climate action, ending subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, opposing gas exploration near the Twelve Apostles and housing affordability.

Some of her policy announcements jar – for example, she posts on Instagram that the Greens have “committed” $25 million to upgrading community health centre CoHealth, “with more free nurses, GPS and dentists, and funding to cover 50 co-located social housing units” – given governments, not crossbenchers, deliver funding.

But others, such as the push for a permanent cap on rents, will resonate in an electorate in which the majority of residents rent their homes.

O’Dwyer nominates climate action, health, education and community issues as the main concerns voters are raising locally.

“Education is huge,” she says. “Early on, I had some feedback about how the major parties are stale and old ... But the amount of doors that you knock on, and their number one priorities are education and health, is huge. Those things are never unsexy. We can walk and chew gum at the same time, to be able to have conversations about climate action, about Treaty, about local community, but let’s also make sure that people have got a roof over our heads, are healthy, have food in their bellies, and a decent education.”

Moon and O’Dwyer are relative newcomers to the political game. Both have been party members for years, but neither has run for office before.

It’s a different scenario for de Vietri, who was elected to Yarra Council in 2020 and served as mayor the same year (she remains on council, but has taken a leave of absence during the campaign).

Almost a year to the day before this year’s election, Local Government Minister Shaun Leane appointed a municipal monitor to Yarra, citing concerns about its governance and capacity to make decisions in the best interests of the local community.

Leane’s move came after the Greens unsuccessfully tried three times to have de Vietri voted in for a second term as mayor, while the non-Greens councillors blocked her appointment (the fifth Greens councillor whose vote would have secured de Vietri’s election, Anab Mohamud, was on extended leave).

After a 10-day impasse, the matter was resolved when de Vietri did not put herself forward and fellow Greens councillor Sophie Wade was elected.

At a community forum held in the early stages of the campaign in Richmond, de Vietri was scoffed at by several audience members when she insisted the Victorian government placed the Greens-dominated Yarra City Council under a municipal monitor for political reasons. That monitor has since concluded his task.

The extent to which voters will judge de Vietri’s record on the Greens-majority council depends on who you ask here. Labor’s O’Dwyer and the Liberal’s Moon, unsurprisingly, say Yarra City Council is on the nose among voters. For her part, de Vietri says the council has achieved great things.

“It’s [Labor’s appointment of a monitor] one in a series of attacks that have been made because our political opponents are terrified that there has been the first-ever Greens majority government in the world here in this electorate,” she told a community forum a fortnight ago. “And that can be pretty confronting.”

The question now is whether the local Greens wave will continue its advance into Richmond.

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