Ground game under scrutiny: what it’s like to cover a marginal seat campaign

Wheelers Hill, I owe you an apology. Let me explain.

For 42 days between the election being called and polling day, my Canberra press gallery colleagues ran themselves ragged criss-crossing the country with Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese.

At the same time, The Age embarked on an experiment. We chose two Melbourne electorates and applied that same level of energy.

I covered Chisholm, where Liberal MP Gladys Liu beat Labor in 2019 by just 0.57 per cent, while my colleagues Royce Millar and Najma Sambul reported on bayside Goldstein. Along the way, the battle for Kooyong became so compelling we assigned Victorian political reporter Paul Sakkal to cover it.

The idea in all three seats? To report on “the ground game” of a local marginal seat campaign. And to cover the national campaign through the prism of a local contest.

In Chisholm for six fascinating weeks, I did little but follow Liu and her challenger, Labor’s Carina Garland, around its suburbs: Box Hill, Blackburn, Burwood, Ashwood, Chadstone, Oakleigh, Notting Hill, Mount Waverley and Glen Waverley.

I failed to visit Wheelers Hill; on days candidates were there, I was elsewhere in the seat, trying to find other stories in other suburbs. I visited them all, multiple times. Some, too many times.

Our coverage was an attempt to focus on precisely what happens in a marginal seat over the length of an election campaign.

We wanted to find out whether marginal campaigning worked. What do the parties know about you through their data sources? How do issues like national security, climate change and the cost of living play out in Melbourne’s suburbs? What are the local issues that matter? Our on-the-ground reporting – 20,000 words of which you can read below – tried to bring to life the issues that mattered locally in all their complexity.

Former PM John Howard campaigning in Glen Waverley with former Chisholm MP Gladys Liu.Credit: Eddie Jim

When the election was called on April 10, The Age’s coverage was on the bigger picture of what was unfolding nationally, but it was also in these seats.

While the leaders and my media colleagues jetted around the country, I took the more mundane daily train trip to Box Hill, Mount Waverley or Glen Waverley, then travelled by Uber to every main street of Chisholm not serviced by train (again, except for Wheelers Hill, for which I repeat my apology).

It was a fascinating ride, seeing how the major parties targeted voters.

At a bustling Baptist church in Syndal on Good Friday I met journalists travelling with Morrison and, after they left with the then PM, I hung back for a couple of hours chatting with the pastor and his congregation.

Scott Morrison (centre) and Gladys Liu (right) talk with Syndal Baptist Church pastor Chris Danes on Good Friday.Credit: James Brickwood

Pastor Chris Danes explained what an honour, and a nightmare, hosting a prime ministerial election campaign visit was. Once Morrison was gone, Danes quietly told me that, although he would never turn down a visit from the leader of the nation, he would face blowback for doing so. “We’ve got some very strong Labor supporters” at the church, Danes said. “I am going to cop it in the neck.”

A chat with some Chinese-born Australians at the church for the Cantonese service – the seat is almost one-fifth Chinese-Australians – also revealed many were deeply disturbed by the Morrison government’s rhetoric on China. A visit from the Prime Minister, as much as they liked the status it gave their church, wouldn’t win their vote.

Anthony Albanese at a press conference in Box Hill.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Later in Box Hill, I’d see my Canberra colleagues again, covering what turned out to be perhaps the campaign’s most important media scrum, where Anthony Albanese was asked if wages should keep up with inflation of 5.1 per cent. “Absolutely,” came his one-word reply.

I watched as an awkward dance was done at 7am outside Mount Waverley railway station by Liu and Garland as they approached harried voters with flyers, at a time when most commuters just want to be left alone.

I listened as volunteers in a grim Burwood campaign office on the roaring Burwood Highway called strangers and asked them to vote for their candidate.

Chisholm Liberal MP Gladys Liu, in blue, and Labor candidate Carina Garland, at Mount Waverley railway station.Credit: Clay Lucas

I saw John Howard on the hustings and witnessed Kevin Rudd in full flight, tearing strips off a Sky News reporter, who received the full force of an excoriating Rudd tirade on News Corp’s failings.

While Howard was more low-key, he retained his skills as a communicator. Rudd was manic, and a wonderful campaigner with Chinese-Australians, many of whom flocked to him for a selfie as a large press pack (for whom Rudd bought snacks from shops in Box Hill Central shopping centre) watched on.

Kevin Rudd campaigning in Box Hill Central shopping centre.Credit: Justin McManus

The Age also partnered with three Chinese community associations to run a candidate forum in Mount Waverley. Age deputy editor Michael Bachelard hosted a fascinating evening that included an invasion from anti-Chinese Community Party protestors, who showered Liu in Chinese yuan. There were impassioned speeches from community members, lengthy translations into Mandarin and a serious grilling of the Labor and Liberal candidates.

Audience members were angered at answers Liu gave over her use of Chinese messaging app WeChat, which she used to help win Chisholm in 2019. She abandoned WeChat in 2022 because of fears of political interference.

Asked whether she wanted the Chinese community to also stop using WeChat, Liu claimed she’d never said she stopped using WeChat because of Chinese government interference, contradicting a statement in January that said interference in our political processes was unacceptable.

Liu’s answers on climate change and a federal anti-corruption commission were similarly problematic, and an event like this was precisely the sort of forum where political spin on crucial issues simply didn’t work.

Protestors Drew Pavlou (rear) and Max Mok (front) are escorted from the Chisholm candidate forum.Credit: Eddie Jim

Our coverage on the use of WeChat more broadly in Chisholm included an excellent story by my colleague Paul Sakkal translated into Mandarin by Zihan Zhang, a bilingual journalist we hired as a news assistant for the campaign (Zhang was so good The Australian poached him midway through the election).

Across the campaign, I talked to hundreds of voters, at shopping centres, at churches, at debates, entering and exiting pre-poll booths, at cafes and bakeries. I sat awkwardly as a nervous woman stopped her local MP Liu at a cafe, mid-interview with me for a profile piece The Age was publishing, and told her off for failing to assist her disabled sister.

And of course there was Kim Jong-un impersonator Howard X, linked to Drew Pavlou, an anti-Chinese Communist Party Senate candidate for Queensland. He hounded Liu at several key moments in the final days of the campaign, including attempting to crash a media conference she did with Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and at polling booths.

One of the most intriguing aspects of watching the contest for Chisholm unfold was dealing with the two campaign managers from the Liberal and Labor parties. Both were young, energetic, highly professional and world-weary experts in what would “play” well for their candidates. I could fault neither, even if they didn’t always give me the access I wanted. It was like a really boring episode of The West Wing, and watching on as these two less handsome Josh Lymans tried to wield their electoral magic.

Chisholm lacked the star power of Kooyong or Goldstein, where well-known Liberal MPs were fighting, unsuccessfully as it turned out, for their political survival. This was a lower wattage battle, between Australia’s first Chinese-born MP who was criticised during her three years in office – some of that criticism racist – and a Labor aspirant who campaigned relentlessly.

But it was also free of gotcha moments and “gaffes” by candidates – not that they didn’t make them, but because covering a campaign at this level is, by necessity, more forgiving most of the time, unless the error is truly telling and indicative of a wider truth.

It was, I think, a successful experiment. Our Chisholm page had a quarter of a million page views, and helped inform an electorate no longer served by local papers arriving in their mailboxes weekly. It showed the broader electorate the lengths the major parties were prepared to go to win your vote. Most importantly, it let everyone involved in this campaign know they were under fierce scrutiny. The 2022 campaign was remarkably less notable for dirty tricks than 2019.

Perhaps my favourite part of reporting on one seat for six weeks was getting to know independent candidate Wayne Tseng, an immigrant born to Chinese parents while travelling in a boat from Vietnam to Australia.

Independent candidate Wayne Tseng at a pre-polling centre in Mount Waverley.Credit: Chris Hopkins

Tseng has previously run for the Liberal Party and for all I know, despite my repeated questioning of him and others, was really running to feed votes to Liu; his how-to-vote card preferenced her over Garland. (It didn’t matter – Liu was thumped, Garland winning with an 8 per cent swing to Labor.)

But Tseng had an enthusiasm for the electoral process and unstoppable energy, turning up to every candidate forum (there were at least eight in Chisholm). He was convinced the rise of independents in Goldstein, Kooyong and elsewhere will spread to every seat, and that this was a sign of a healthy democracy because it forced the big parties to listen more closely to their constituents.

Tseng polled just 498 votes on the night – not much of a pay-off for all his effort. But the biggest political movement has to start somewhere.

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May 21

Labor’s Carina Garland has convincingly won the ultra-marginal seat of Chisholm, with a big swing against the Liberal Party’s Gladys Liu.

With three-quarters of the vote in the seat counted on Saturday night, Garland was in an unassailable position, with a swing towards Labor of more than 7 per cent.

Newly elected Labor MP for the seat of Chisholm, Carina Garland claims victory.Credit: Scott McNaughton

Garland arrived at the Bennettswood Bowling Club in Burwood just before 9pm to chants of “Carina! Carina! Carina!” from the assembled crowd of more than 100 jubilant Labor members, volunteers and family. She waited until 10.30pm before claiming victory.

She thanked her supporters who together she said had knocked on 60,000 doors, phoned 72,000 people and had more than 25,000 conversations with voters in the seat.

She also thanked a former Labor MP in the seat, Anna Burke, who was at the bowls club. Garland called Burke – who was very popular in the seat, which she held for 18 years – “Chisholm’s favourite MP, who showed me what it means to be a really hard-working, active local member of parliament.”

Garland said faith in politics was at a low ebb, and that she hoped to help restore the trust people had in government.

“I hope to start with being part of a government that makes an integrity commission a reality. I hope,” she said, “to show people that when we say we’re going to do something, it means we’re going to do something – we’re actually going to deliver for the community.”

Garland handing out how-to-vote cards on election day.Credit: Simon Schluter

Asked by The Age before her speech what had won her the seat, Garland said: “A lot of hard work.”

The seat of Chisholm has see-sawed between the major parties over the years, with Labor’s Anna Burke holding it until 2016, followed by the LNP’s Julia Banks, then Liu from 2019.

Garland had earlier thanked her supporters for helping her win the crucial seat for Labor.

“We’re in a room full of volunteers who’ve worked really, really hard, having conversations with voters in our community about the issues that matter to them: getting that integrity commission, taking action on climate, fixing the aged care crisis, and doing more for people struggling with the cost of living.”

Among the crowd was Garland’s 87-year-old grandmother Luciana Cussigh, who was born in northern Italy and came to Melbourne in 1956. Cussigh said it was hard to express how proud of her granddaughter she was. “I feel like bursting, I am so happy and proud. I am so grateful to her because she brings honour to our family.”

Newly elected Labor MP Carina Garland with her proud nonna, Luciana Cussigh, after winning the seat.Credit: Scott McNaughton

One of Garland’s campaign volunteers, cleaner and Labor life member Sofia Floros, said she had spoken to many Chisholm residents who told her they were struggling with low wages.

“Low income – a lot of people, they struggle with not enough money and high workload,” Floros said.

A more subdued mood had settled over Liu’s gathering, which was also held at a bowls club in the electorate that covers Melbourne’s east, including Box Hill, Glen Waverley, Wheelers Hill, Blackburn and Mount Waverley.

Liu won the seat for the Liberal Party in 2019, keeping it from Labor with a margin of just 0.57 per cent, making it one of the most marginal seats in the country.

Liu won Chisholm on an ultra-tight margin in 2019.Credit: Simon Schluter

This year’s campaign has been an arduous battle between Garland and Liu. Both spent many days handing out how-to-vote cards at pre-polling booths across the electorate and campaigned until the very last minute. Twelve candidates ran in the seat, more than any electorate in Australia.

Garland was handing out how-to-vote cards in Glen Waverley on Saturday afternoon, while Liu was in Mount Waverley.

Also out and about was a Kim Jong-un impersonator, linked to Drew Pavlou, an anti-Chinese Communist Party Senate candidate for Queensland who has hounded Liu at several key moments in the final days of the campaign, including attempting to crash a media conference she did with Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

Kim Jong-un impersonator Howard X appeared at a Box Hill voting centre on Saturday afternoon.Credit: Eddie Jim

There are 109,000 eligible voters in the seat and an additional 19,000 adults living in the electorate who are ineligible to vote. Around one in five voters in Chisholm have Chinese heritage. After the 2019 election, Liu faced down a Federal Court challenge of her win over her use of signs at polling booths that had the same purple colour scheme as official Australian Electoral Commission banners. The signs said the “correct” way to vote was to put a “1″ next to the Liberal box.

No such scandal emerged from the seat at this election.

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May 19

It’s a Thursday afternoon and Gladys Liu is sitting outside a cafe in a bustling Mount Waverley mall when one of her constituents approaches. “Are you Gladys?” the woman asks nervously.

Liu confirms she is indeed the MP for Chisholm, and the woman politely explains she contacted Liu’s office about her disabled sister’s problems with the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Liu’s office never responded, other than an auto-reply email, the woman says.

Gladys Liu this week.Credit: Eddie Jim

Liu asks me to turn off my tape recorder, perhaps to protect the woman’s privacy. I comply.

Over six weeks covering the ground campaign in Chisholm, I have head repeatedly that this controversial backbencher, elected in 2019 on the slimmest of margins of just 0.57 per cent over Labor, is not always so attentive to local issues.

Norvena Lewis, another Chisholm voter who contacts The Age during the campaign, talks of a similar situation: her son was stuck in London during Victoria’s long coronavirus lockdowns and Lewis contacted Liu to try and get help. “I never received a reply.”

Another Chisholm resident, Jennifer Evans, recounts a meeting she and a local environment group had with Liu to discuss climate change issues. “She nodded, said she was learning about such things, appeared to listen, but overall we recognised she really did not have a clue what we were talking about.”

Some see things differently. One reader, who emailed The Age during the campaign, says Liu has “served the people of Chisholm well”. Independent candidate Wayne Tseng, an enthusiastic campaigner, has seen Liu up close and says she works “dawn to dusk” to win the seat.

Gladys Liu with former PM John Howard in Glen Waverley.Credit: Eddie Jim

Liu is fighting hard to keep the seat from Labor’s Carina Garland and rejects any suggestion that she has not been highly visible or easy to get in touch with during her first three years in office.

“You can see in my diary,” she says. “Every week, I will cover every part of my electorate. People say to me ‘I see you everywhere’. That’s what I hear.”

Liu has become used to attacks on her during her three years in Parliament. Soon after she was elected, her past association with organisations and people who were allegedly linked to the Chinese Communist Party were reported on, and her allegiance to Australia came under scrutiny. In a trainwreck of an interview on SkyNews in 2019, host Andrew Bolt demanded of Liu: “Are you in effect a spokesman for the Chinese Communist regime in Australia?” She replied: “The simple answer is no.”

Liu puts much of this attention down to being the first Chinese-Australian elected to the House of Representatives. “I do get a lot of attention for that reason,” she says, while also describing it as a great honour, “because it’s a breakthrough.

“When I go out and about, I have young people from ethnic backgrounds come up to me and say ‘I didn’t realise that we could get elected’. Now that they see that it is possible.”

Liu’s gentle but consistent rebuttals of the accusations against her are a theme throughout interviews over the course of the campaign. Asked how she has felt about this line of questioning, she says it has taken a toll.

“At times it did get to me and I have had some sleepless nights. It wasn’t nice, especially all of these baseless accusations that you can’t defend yourself against because you haven’t done it.”

Liu says she wants people to judge her on what she has achieved, not on her ethnicity. “It is dangerous to divide our country based on race,” she says. “Thirty years ago I pledged my loyalty to the country and if anyone judges me on my skin colour and where I was born, I think that is not only unfair, that is divisive and that is just so offensive.”

Liu grew up in public housing in Hong Kong, saying, “I do understand people who are doing it tough”. She came to Australia in 1985, aged 20, to take up a scholarship to study speech therapy.

“I knew nobody and nobody knew me,” she says, recounting the hardships of her first days here. “For the first of many years of my life in Australia, I never thought that I would become a member of parliament.”

Former Premier Ted Baillieu is among those The Age speaks to who is very fond of the Member for Chisholm. He hired her as a multicultural adviser in 2007 when state opposition leader. She remained with the state government until the Liberal Party lost office in 2014.

The mother of two says her first six months as a federal MP from 2019 were “a steep learning time”, and then the pandemic hit. “Every politician has to adapt to the new way of communicating, and in helping their constituents, and I did the same.”

Liu has a good chance of losing on Saturday. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has put Chisholm on his travel schedule several times during the campaign. But if Liu does win, she wants the next three years to be about engaging with the community. “To bring Chisholm together.” To help do that, she has promised upgrades at three sporting reserves – in Mount Waverley, Blackburn South and Box Hill, along with $1.25 million for Blackburn Cycling Club.

With Scott Morrison.Credit: James Brickwood

Asked what achievement she is proudest of in three years, she nominates the tax changes brought in by the Morrison government in 2019. She joined the Liberal Party in 2003. “And one of the main reasons was tax reform. I came from Hong Kong, and you know, [it has a] flat rate 15 per cent tax on everything. And when I came here, when I got my job, I was taxed 47 per cent, and I thought ‘My goodness it’s almost half of what I make’.”

She also says her election “has been encouraging, and you can say inspiring to other migrants and their children. Diversity in Parliament means we can better serve and better represent the community, and the country, that we live in.”

Asked at a forum during the campaign what she would do to combat racism, Liu met it with angry rhetoric, claiming a “grubby” Labor attack ad on her had led to racist graffiti on her billboards. “We should not divide our community based on race,” she said, though offered no proposals to tackle the issue.

Liu also faced heated criticism and a Federal Court case over signs that appeared outside 29 Chisholm voting booths on election day in 2019. The signs were in the colour of the Australian Electoral Commission and said: “The right way to vote on the green ballot paper: fill in ‘1’ next to the candidate of Liberal Party.”

Asked during the campaign about the signs, Liu says: “It wasn’t put out by me, it wasn’t authorised by me and I didn’t even know that it was there on the day.”

Liberal Party signs in purple during the 2019 election were designed to look like official AEC signage.Credit: Chris Hopkins

The Age also asked Liu at a candidate’s forum about the deteriorating relationship between Australia and China, and whether the current trajectory will be maintained or a reset sought by a renewed Morrison government to improve relations with the super-power. Liu responded by attacking Anthony Albanese. Asked if Australia should, as Defence Minister Peter Dutton has said recently, be preparing for the possibility of war, thanks to the global instability caused by China and the war in Ukraine, Liu simply said all countries should be prepared to defend themselves.

“America, Canada, any other country, if they have the ability, they will do their best to protect their country.”

Asked during one candidate forum to give an example of integrity in politics, Liu says she has, since being elected, “faced a lot of unreasonable questioning about my integrity. I have put up with it, I have my head down and I focus on my work to help my community and deliver what is best for them. And three years on, I still have people … putting forward questions - unreasonable questions, conspiracies.

“The best thing to do is be yourself and serve the community like what I have done in the last three years.”

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May 18

Polls, bookies and observers on both sides of politics – to the extent that any of these can be believed – appear to be in increasing agreement that Labor’s Carina Garland can take the ultra-marginal seat of Chisholm this weekend from Liberal MP Gladys Liu.

So who is she, and what kind of MP is she likely to be?

Carina Garland this week.Credit: Eddie Jim

Garland, 38, has been an assistant secretary at the Victorian Trades Hall Council, a communications officer with the United Workers Union and an academic at Sydney University.

She began campaigning last July after being selected as Labor’s candidate for Chisholm during Victoria’s rolling coronavirus lockdowns. As her epic campaign winds to its conclusion on Saturday, she spoke with The Age about issues she hopes to tackle if she wins.

She said she was concerned about the rising distrust in politics, the need for an anti-corruption commission, Australia’s relationship with countries in Asia, and racism towards Chinese Australians in her area. And she wants to be a good local representative.

Garland lives in Clayton, grew up in the area and graduated with an honours degree in English literature at Monash University. Her Italian grandfather migrated to Australia in the 1950s and became a teacher, and Garland’s father became a doctor. Garland’s mother was a nurse and the couple ran a local GP practice in Melbourne’s south east.

Garland says her one key aim if she is elected will be to demonstrate to the community “that local representatives actually do listen, and act on their behalf in Canberra”.

“There’s so much distrust in politics and politicians,” she says. “We need to go about restoring that faith.”

Garland has spoken often about the importance of Labor establishing a federal anti-corruption commission if it wins on Saturday. “But I also think people need to say see us do what we said we were going to do before we were elected,” she says.

For Garland, this means local announcements she’s made over the course of her months of campaigning actually get done during her first term. These include the creation of a Headspace mental health centre for young people in Box Hill, $6 million to plan a trackless tram connecting Caulfield railway station, Chadstone shopping centre, Monash University in Clayton and Rowville, and upgrading three local sporting ovals in Mt Waverley, Blackburn South and Box Hill.

“All those things we said we’re going to do locally we need to deliver because we need to build that trust,” she says.

Inflation and wage growth emerged as key issues in the campaign’s final weeks. Garland was standing beside Anthony Albanese in Box Hill when the Labor leader gave his one-word answer - “Absolutely” - in response to a journalist asking if the ALP would support a wage hike of at least 5.1 per cent to keep up with inflation.

“I wasn’t surprised,” says Garland, who says it is obvious the Labor Party wants wages to keep up with the cost of living. “Unlike the Liberals, we don’t have wage suppression as at the heart of our economic policies.”

Carina Garland with former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in Box Hill during the campaign.Credit: Justin McManus

The Age has heard consistently from voters during this campaign that the best local MP the seat has had was Labor’s long-term member, Anna Burke, who held the seat from 1998 to 2016.

“Being a really active local representative because the thing that comes up [when doorknocking] is that people miss Anna Burke. They miss the kind of representation they had with her,” Garland says, pointing out that over the course of the campaign there have been seven candidate forums she has attended. “My opponent has done two.”

Asked if she has found these events useful, she says, “Who cares what how I find them. It’s about voters.”

The well-educated Garland – she has a PhD in gender studies – wants an Albanese government to focus more spending on education, particularly at the tertiary level. “We have two wonderful universities in this electorate. They’ve had their funding stripped away from them. I want to make sure we have a government that values education,” she told a Chinese community forum during the campaign.

Asked about the tense Australia-China relationship that has developed under the Morrison government, Garland says the sentiment in the electorate is “that Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton’s divisive rhetoric has been very bad for the community”.

“It’s meant that people feel unsafe to go to the supermarket. They’ve told us this that they’ve been vilified going to Aldi. Attacks against Asian Australians have been on the rise and [the Chinese community] are linking the increase in incidents to the language they’re hearing from the federal government.”

Garland (right in red) with Labor leader Anthony Albanese and Victorian premier Daniel Andrews (right).Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

And she says the wider relationship between Pacific nations like the Solomon Islands, “and indeed all other islands and countries in our region”, needed to be improved via a range of measures Labor had outlined. This includes, Garland says, “engaging respectfully with our neighbours” via things like $8 million Labor would spend on funding for ABC International to expand in the Pacific and southeast and south Asian regions.

By Wednesday, there had been 20,000 votes cast at pre-poll booths in Chisholm. Garland hopes the number is so high because her electorate wants to get rid of Scott Morrison. “We’ve seen from the federal government a Prime Minister who has basically spent his whole time, instead of governing, acting as though he’s on the campaign trail for an election. People are well and truly sick of it.”

We will find out if she is right on Saturday evening.

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May 17

Sarah Newman works part-time at JB Hi-Fi, studies full-time at Deakin University and has recently added one other job to her list: campaigning as the Greens’ candidate in Victoria’s most marginal seat, Chisholm.

At the last election, the Greens won 12 per cent of the vote in this seat in eastern Melbourne, which takes in Blackburn, Box Hill, Burwood, Mount Waverley and Glen Waverley.

Sarah Newman, the Greens candidate for Chisholm, admits the seat will go to either the Liberal or Labor parties.Credit: Simon Schluter

This time, Newman is hopeful she can get 15 per cent – “Anything more than that will be amazing” – because she believes the electorate has growing concerns about climate change. “Climate is the big issue,” the 29-year-old says.

Newman talks as easily about the cost of living as climate change because she’s living the issues first-hand, struggling from payday to payday. Working between one and three shifts at JB each week, Newman lives in student accommodation in Burwood – off-campus, to help cut the rent. “On-campus is too expensive,” she says.

Chisholm has 12 candidates – the most of any seat in Australia this election – and Newman has placed Labor’s Carina Garland third, after the Animal Justice Party, among the preferences on her how-to-vote card. Last is reserved for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, which Greens candidates nationally are placing last.

Sitting Liberal MP Gladys Liu is listed ninth, and the university student wants to see her defeated. “It’s not necessarily about Gladys, it’s about the Liberal Party as a whole,” says Newman. “And the way they’ve handled being in power the last nine years.”

Newman reserves particular concern for Liu’s apparent lack of interest in environmental issues.

“She doesn’t think climate change is an issue and has no motivation to do anything about it. Both her and her as part of the Liberal Party is, ‘It’s the economy, it’s the economy’. And yeah, okay, cost of living is a massive factor. But they’re not addressing the economy and the cost of living, even if that was what people were most worried about.”

Newman says she’s running because of the federal government’s failure to tackle climate change. “It needs to happen now,” she says.

Liu holds Chisholm from the Labor Party by just 0.57 per cent, and if 545 votes had gone the other way at the last election, Labor would have won the seat. Preference flows will therefore be crucial.

Chisholm MP Gladys Liu campaigns with former prime minister John Howard in Glen Waverley on Tuesday.Credit: Eddie Jim

Newman is refreshingly frank about her chances of winning – “It’s a Liberal or Labor seat, and they’re going to have to rely on our preferences if they want to win” – and her preferred victor, Labor’s Carina Garland. “I hope that she’ll end up being a good MP for Chisholm,” she says.

Perhaps it’s the sort of candour that has meant her experience of running has been less poisonous than she’d expected.

“I haven’t been particularly targeted. Nothing personal, which is what I thought would happen. I mean, you get the occasional troll on your social media pages but otherwise, it’s been really positive.”

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May 17

First ultra-marginal Chisholm got to see Kevin Rudd, Australia’s 26th prime minister, campaigning in Box Hill with Labor’s candidate for the seat, Carina Garland.

On Tuesday morning, it was the turn of the nation’s 25th prime minister, supporting incumbent Liberal MP Gladys Liu in Glen Waverley.

Former prime minister John Howard and Liberal MP Gladys Liu enter Win Sam Seafood and Butcher in Glen Waverley on Tuesday morning.Credit: Eddie Jim

And John Howard, 82, was in fighting form, insisting the Coalition could win Saturday’s election — although also noting he was making no firm prediction.

“Except to say it will be tight. I’ve been saying that for ages, and it will all depend on the quality of the local candidate — and that’s why I’m very confident about Chisholm,” Howard said alongside Liu as the pair walked up Glen Waverley’s largely empty Kingsway shopping strip.

Australia’s relationship with China is a key issue in the seat, where some 20 per cent of people speak Mandarin or Cantonese at home.

Howard was asked about Defence Minister Peter Dutton’s warning that the only way Australia could “preserve peace is to prepare for war” because of the uncertainty of the relationship with China. Howard said Australia’s relationship with the superpower was only damaged because of the actions of China.

“The damage has been caused by the Chinese leadership, not the Chinese people. We have 1.4 million Australians of Chinese heritage. The Chinese leadership is different now from what it was some years ago. I had good relations with two Chinese presidents but it’s harder now because the attitude of Xi Jinping is different,” Howard said as he and Liu entered Win Sam Seafood and Butcher.

Liu, speaking Cantonese, ordered some sea perch and Howard quizzed owner Due Huu Vi — who was also visited by Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne and Liu last week — about coming to Australia.

Due came as a refugee from Vietnam in 1980, during Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s time in office.

Glen Waverley fish shop owner Due Huu Vi (left) with former PM John Howard and Liberal MP Gladys Liu.Credit: Eddie Jim

“Australia under the Fraser government took more refugees from Indochina on a per capita basis than any other country,” Howard told him.

Outside the seafood store, Howard got to a key reason he was in the seat: to try to win over Chinese voters for Liu.

“The bond between the people of China and the people of Australia is very strong. There is a lot of history, warm history, between the people of China and the people of Australia and if there’s a quarrel and there are difficulties in there it’s not the fault of the Chinese people.”

Liu said she was honoured to have Howard campaigning in her seat and that he was “very popular and very respected”.

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May 15

Liz Watterson was one of half a dozen early childhood workers in the office of Carina Garland, Labor’s candidate for Chisholm last week, hitting the phones to cold-call voters and talk to them about the election. The previous week it was aged care workers at the regular “phone banks” the union is running to support Garland.

When political parties talk about the importance of the “ground campaign” in marginal electorates, it’s unglamorous scenes like these they are referring to.

“It’s not easy,” Watterson says, “you know, like, I could be with my daughter right now, she’s two.” But she feels committed to the task because “this is about her future”.

Liz Watterson on the phone at Labor’s East Burwood campaign office for candidate Carina Garland.Credit: Darrian Traynor

Over the six weeks of the official campaign, and for many months beforehand, people like Watterson have been working with the parties to try and help their favoured candidate win.

This sort of phone bank run by Labor supporters is not unique; the Liberal Party is doing it too.

Over the course of the campaign for Chisholm, Victoria’s most marginal seat, Liberal volunteers and Liu herself will make what the party estimates to be 100,000 calls to voters.

Gladys Liu campaigning with Scott Morrison in April.Credit: James Brickwood

Then there are the robots. One Chisholm voter, who asks not to be named, says she has got “almost daily robo-messages from Gladys Liu in English and Mandarin.

Both parties contract outside companies to do “data-harvesting” – taking the electoral roll and adding details like mobile phone numbers. The parties also make dogged efforts to update their own databases as they knock on voters’ doors.

These databases are exempt from privacy legislation to allow the politicians to more closely target political messages to residents.

Carina Garland (foreground) is Labor’s candidate for Chisholm. Inside her office on Wednesday night, volunteers were making calls to voters in the seat.Credit: Darrian Traynor

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May 13

Australia’s third-most marginal seat, Chisholm, is held by Hong Kong-born Gladys Liu and with a population in the electorate where 20 per cent of people speak Mandarin, the Morrison government’s tough stance on China was always going to draw strong debate.

On Friday, Morrison made his fourth campaign visit to Chisholm alongside Liu. The pair toured Extel Technologies, a Mount Waverley business specialising in the design and production of microchips and computer boards.

Kim Jong-un impersonator Howard X gatecrashed the end of the prime minister’s media event at Extel Technologies in Mount Waverley.Credit: James Brickwood

Pressed by journalists on the issue of how his government had handled Australia’s relationship with China, Morrison defended his and his ministers’ use of aggressive language towards the country.

Morrison said he drew “a sharp and distinct line between the actions of an authoritarian government” that was seeking “to interfere in our region and the wonderful Chinese people”.

Liu, who holds Chisholm for the Liberal Party by a margin of just 0.57 per cent, said Chinese-born Australians were no different in their view of the government’s approach to China than anyone else.

Morrison was asked at the event whether his and defence minister Peter Dutton’s strong rhetoric on the Chinese government would lose him votes at next Saturday’s poll.

On ANZAC Day last month, defence minister Peter Dutton said Australia should “prepare for war” because of a looming threat from China and global insecurity spurred by Ukraine’s invasion.

“I’m always very careful to make this distinction and talk about the assertive and aggressive nature of the Chinese government. Not the Chinese people. Chinese Australians are the greatest patriots you could hope for in this country,” Morrison said.

Scott Morrison with Chisholm MP Gladys Liu in Mount Waverley on Friday.Credit: James Brickwood

Liu migrated to Australia 37 years ago and has faced criticism from Labor over her links to Chinese donors to the Liberal Party.

Asked if she had concerns about the rise of China, Liu said: “If anyone suggests that Chinese-Australians are not Australians that still have the loyalty and want to do things that are bad for Australia, I think that is offensive, divisive, and un-Australian.”

Liu was told by one reporter that many Chinese-born Australians in her seat of Chisholm, which she holds from Labor on a margin of just 0.57 per cent, were concerned about rhetoric from the Morrison government directed at China. This rhetoric had made them less likely to vote for her, the reporter said. “What do you say to them?” they asked Liu.

In response, Liu said: “I have been the pre-poll for four solid days, and I can tell you, when you talk to the Chinese people in Australia, you don’t start by asking whether they are holding a Chinese passport, visiting this place, or come to help their children to look after their children because we do have a lot of Chinese people living in Australia at the moment, but they still hold a Chinese passport. And I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about those who pledge loyalty to the country. I have seen a lot of people throughout my three years as a member of parliament at citizenship ceremonies, and I hear them pledge loyalty to Australia. So if anyone suggests Chinese-Australians are any different from all other Australians, whether they were born here or not, I think this is offensive, divisive and Australian.”

After the media conference had concluded and the prime minister and Liu had left, a man impersonating North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un gatecrashed the event.

“Gladys Liu is the communist candidate for Australia,” said the impersonator, whose stage name is Howard X.

“I support Gladys Liu, she supports [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping, and now she is going to support the North Korean regime. So thank you for supporting this great, great candidate for the area.”

One of the prime minister’s media advisors told Howard X to leave, that his visit was “the most offensive thing I’ve ever seen on a campaign”.

“You don’t tell the Supreme Leader what to do,” Howard X replied. A journalist demanded to know who Howard X was and, unsatisfied with the impersonator’s response, said: “That’s not good enough, just tell us who you are.”

“Tell me your family, where they live and their routes to work and I will get them taken care of,” the impersonator responded.

The Prime Minister tries his hand at some soldering on Friday morning.Credit: James Brickwood

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May 10

The Chisholm candidates’ forum at the Mount Waverley Community Centre, organised by three Chinese-Australian community groups and hosted by The Age, was a lively affair, complete with protests, claims of racism and questions about the incumbent, Gladys Liu’s record on election advertising. This is how we reported it on our national live blog on Tuesday night.

Protesters interrupt candidates’ forum

The Chisholm candidates’ forum at the Mount Waverley Community Centre has gotten off to a dramatic start.

Hong Kong independence activist Max Mok is tackled by forum organiser Jimmy Jian-Min Li.Credit: Eddie Jim

Incumbent MP for Chisholm Gladys Liu had her opening remarks briefly interrupted by activist Max Mok, a Hong Kong-born Australian who attempted to run as an independent in Chisholm but failed to correctly enrol with the Australian Electoral Commission.

The Hong Kong independence activist had planned to run as a candidate solely opposed to Liu.

Mok and senate candidate Drew Pavlou, who is also running on a stridently anti-Chinese government platform, entered the hall screaming: “Gladys Liu is taking money from the Chinese government.”

Mok then scattered Chinese yuan before the crowd of around 120 people, a near-full house at the community centre.

They were tackled by organisers and members of the crowd and quickly bundled out of the hall.

The candidates have assembled at the centre tonight to talk about why they are running for the seat and answer questions from The Age and the audience. The discussion is in English but being translated into Mandarin for the electorate’s large Mandarin-speaking population.

Opening statements from the candidates saw independent candidate Wayne Tseng, a former Liberal member who is preferencing Liu above Labor candidate Carina Garland, say he wanted to establish a national holiday for First Nations people and introduce a way of better reporting racism to authorities.

“It would be a valuable deterrent [to racism],” Tseng said.

Liu spoke next, saying that voting on a tax-reform bill after winning Chisholm in 2019 was her proudest moment in federal parliament.

“The very first bill that I voted on … was tax reform, which has benefited more than 11 million Australians. That means you’ll have more money, your hard-earned money, in your own pocket.”

She said the election in Chisholm was “a choice between a local member who always wants to work hard and do more for our local community versus someone who basically is an unknown”.

Drew Pavlou (rear) and Max Mok (front) are escorted from the hall.Credit: Eddie Jim

Garland, who grew up in nearby Clayton, said she had seen her parents work hard, and they had managed to get ahead. “I know so many families in our community work just as hard as my parents did. But the opportunities aren’t there for their children anymore,” she said.

“It’s really a pleasure to be with so many Chinese Australians tonight,” Garland said. “My mother is from Italy and I know how special the diversity in our community is. And I want to make sure that we embrace them and we have a united community rather than a community that, unfortunately, has been subjected to divisive language due to the poor leadership from Scott Morrison.”

Candidates respond to questions about racist attacks

Candidates at this evening’s Chisholm candidates’ forum have been asked about racist attacks on Chinese people.

Liberal MP Gladys Liu said she condemned racist attacks on Chinese people.

“We should be working with the whole country and condemn racism,” she said. She said the day after the Labor Party had launched its attack ads on her, she had experienced racism.

Chisholm candidates Carina Garland (left), Wayne Tseng and Gladys Liu.Credit: Eddie Jim

“The day after the Labor Party launched the grubby attack on me, there was graffiti [saying] ‘CCP’ [the Chinese Communist Party] … on my billboards, and that is dangerous. We should not divide our community based on race. It is dangerous, it is offensive and divisive.”

Labor candidate Carina Garland said that Chinese people had told her that they had experienced racism because of “destructive and divisive” comments in recent years by Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Defence Minister Peter Dutton.

Attack ads and election day signage

The Age’s deputy editor Michael Bachelard, who is moderating tonight’s forum in Chisholm, has asked Labor’s candidate Carina Garland if Labor’s attack ad against Liberal MP Gladys Liu’s integrity were racist.

Both Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said within moments of the ads’ release that it was racist. Labor has said privately that Liberals branded the ads as racist before they could have even seen them.

Garland said the ads were not racist and had simply pointed out facts about Liu.

Chisholm candidates Wayne Tseng, Gladys Liu (centre) and Carina Garland.Credit: Eddie Jim

“I think it’s perfectly reasonable in a democracy like ours to demand accountability from elected representatives.”

Bachelard also asked about purple signs that Liu’s team put up at 29 polling booths in Chisholm on election day in 2019.

The signs were in the same purple as AEC signage and told voters that “the correct voting method” was to put a one next to the Liberal candidate. Liu’s narrow election win was later challenged in the Federal Court but no action was taken to review it. If 545 more people had voted for Labor in the electorate of 100,000 people, Labor would have won the seat.

Liu said that this issue had been addressed. “It [the signage] wasn’t put out by me, it wasn’t authorised by me. I didn’t even know it was there on the day. The court never asked me to attend. So it is basically a grubby attack on me,” she said.

‘Dangerous’: Concerns about Australia-China relationship

Candidates at the Chisholm forum tonight have now been asked about Australia’s deteriorating relationship with China.

Liberal MP Gladys Liu said that Anthony Albanese was always “flip-flop, flip-flop” on China, blaming Australia for ruining the relationship with the country at times and blaming China at others.

A full house at the Mount Waverley community centre.Credit: Eddie Jim

“I guarantee you that the next time when Albanese comes to the Chinese community, he will say it’s Morrison’s fault. Does he have a position on the Australia-China relationship or does he have a position that he doesn’t want you to know?”

Labor candidate Carina Garland, however, warned that it was “really dangerous to try and create a division between the two major parties on national security as Gladys has just done”.

“What Gladys has said is actually really dangerous. We [Labor] have been really clear that we have a bipartisan approach [with the Liberal Party on China]. What isn’t helpful in our relationship with China is the beating of the drums of war from Peter Dutton.

“That is unhelpful, and I know, personally, I would feel much safer with someone like Penny Wong engaging in calm and measured, responsible dialogue with our biggest trading partner than I would having Peter Dutton anywhere near national security.”

On Anzac Day, Dutton warned Australia needed to prepare for war in light of increased aggression from China and global insecurity spurred by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Asked if Australia should be preparing for war with China, Liu said: “I believe all countries in the world should be prepared to protect their own country. Australia will do the same. China will do the same, America, Canada, any other country, if they have the ability, they will do their best to protect their country.”

Garland was asked if Albanese was the preferred candidate of the Chinese government. “All I hope on the 21st of May we confirm that Anthony Albanese said preferred candidate of the Australian people.”

Audience anger over WeChat answers

Some audience members event became angry at a series of answers Liberal MP Gladys Liu gave, under questioning over her previous use of WeChat. Liu used WeChat to help win her seat in 2019.

In January this year, Liu said she would stop using the Chinese messaging app because of fears of political interference.

Her announcement followed Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s WeChat account being hijacked.

Liberal member for Chisholm, Gladys Liu, greets an audience member.Credit: Eddie Jim

Asked whether she wanted the Chinese community to stop using WeChat, given she had abandoned it, Liu claimed she had never said that she had stopped using WeChat because of Chinese government interference.

“The reason I stopped using WeChat was I found it was more efficient to communicate with my constituents [other ways].”

In January, Liu said: “In an election year especially, this sort of interference in our political processes is unacceptable, and this matter should be taken extremely seriously by all Australian politicians.”

Labor’s Carina Garland said that she used WeChat because so many members of the Chinese community were on WeChat, but she said if intelligence agencies gave advice not to use WeChat, Labor would follow the advice.

“But that advice has not been issued,” she said.

During questioning from the audience, Liu was also asked about her past voting on climate change issues during her three years in parliament.

Liu side-stepped the question, responding to the audience member by saying that investing in technology was the key to tackling climate change.

“Both parties have both committed to 2050 zero emission, and we don’t want to sacrifice a section of the community to have unreliable and not affordable energy and that’s why we take a very careful measure to reach this goal and we invest in technology.

“If you don’t have technology, what you have to do is to increase taxes or you have to increase energy price and that means those who are doing it tough will suffer.”

She was also asked by an audience member about the Morrison government’s failure to establish a federal anti-corruption commission in the past three years.

She claimed that “Labor has been playing political games” and that this was why a federal ICAC had not been established.

She returned to a claim she has repeatedly made, that the Coalition had “350 pages of the policy” and that their attempt had been thwarted by Labor.

The Coalition’s model was widely criticised by legal and transparency experts for lacking teeth and being overly secretive.

The government went to the 2019 election promising to set up the new agency, and released a draft law for public comment, but never tabled a bill in the last Parliament for a debate.

Lively candidates’ forum has ended

The candidates’ forum for the ultra-marginal seat of Chisholm has wrapped up.

More than 120 people attended the event at the Mount Waverley Community Centre where the two key candidates, Liberal MP for the seat Gladys Liu and Labor’s Carina Garland faced more than two hours of solid questioning by the three Chinese community associations who helped organise the event, by The Age, and by audience members.

Gladys Liu at the Chisholm candidates forum.Credit: Eddie Jim

It was a lively forum, beginning with a loud protest by Hong Kong independence activist Max Mok, who had planned to run for the seat.

Candidates then faced questioning about issues ranging from climate change to WeChat to Australia’s relationship with China.

All of it was translated into Mandarin, or at times from Mandarin into English, by master translator Professor Charles Qin.

Good night from the Mount Waverley Community Centre.

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May 10

The upside of federal Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese appearing alongside Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews was it nullified claims by Liberal Party MPs, including the seldom-seen MP for Aston Alan Tudge, that “Andrews is certainly on the nose” federally.

The downside? Andrews showed why he is renowned as one of the nation’s best political communicators.

Anthony Albanese was joined in Box Hill by Victorian premier Daniel Andrews (right) and Labor’s Chisholm candidate Carina Garland (red jacket, right).Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Albanese batted away aggressive questioning from the large assembled press pack, in Box Hill on Tuesday morning to hear about the planned rail line, which runs through the ultra-marginal seat of Chisholm, and its busiest suburb, Box Hill.

Through a mix of reasoned explanation and jovial pleading for support for federal Labor, which is tipping in $2.2 billion into Andrews’ pet project, Albanese hit a range of his key talking points without embarrassment.

“Nation building infrastructure can change the country. It builds productivity, it builds efficiency, it grows the economy,” Albanese said. “This project will transform the way that Melburnian’s can get around the city. If you think about the great cities of the world – London, Paris, New York – you don’t have to go into the centre to get around those cities. What the Suburban Rail Loop does is improve the efficiency of the entire rail network.”

However, the devastating cut-through that saw Andrews win the 2018 election in a landslide made the comparison between the two leaders’ abilities on the stump noticeable.

Andrews was asked whether there was any hint of a souring of the bromance between the pair, an idea the Liberal Party was attempting to sow even as the press conference was underway. “Andrews pulls Albo’s puppet strings on Suburban Rail Loop” screamed a Coalition media release headline on Tuesday morning.

Andrews stepped up to the plate and used it as a chance to take a baseball bat to Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s lack of funding for Victorian infrastructure.

Daniel Andrews with Anthony Albanese behind him on Tuesday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“Every federal dollar that Victorians get from the miserable Morrison government, it’s [as if] we ought to bow our head and treat it like it’s foreign aid,” Andrews said. “I’ve had a conversation with the prime minister about the Suburban Rail Loop, and zero dollars. Zero dollars. The contrast could not be clearer. Anthony Albanese is about building things.”

Asked about claims by Morrison that the project did not stack up, Andrews said this was what “desperate people who have built nothing and done nothing – [who have] got an excuse for everything and a plan for nothing – this is the sort of stuff that comes out of prime ministers who have just run out of time.”

Andrews went on to renew attacks he made during 2020’s harsh coronavirus lockdowns about the lack of support coming to Victoria from Morrison and his Treasurer Josh Frydenberg

“When Victorians were in their darkest time, senior federal Liberals proved to be Liberals first and Victorians second. They thought they were bagging our government, but they were bagging every Victorian who was following the rules and doing the right thing. And that might be one of the reasons why they’re in a bit of trouble in their seats.”

Federal Labor’s $2.2 billion for the Suburban Rail Loop opens up a point of difference with the Morrison government.

The huge new train line, the most expensive transport project in Victorian history, was announced in 2018 out of the blue and without analysis by state or federal infrastructure bodies meant to assess multibillion-dollar public commitments.

Andrews (left) and Albanese at a level crossing removal project in Surrey Hills on Tuesday morning.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

It has proved electorally popular, and Andrews has dead-batted accusations it was not properly audited before billions of dollars were dedicated to the project.

“We’ve had an audit – it’s called an election,” he said, referring to Labor’s landslide 2018 win when the loop was among his party’s pledges.

While the home run of the media conference went to Andrews, Albanese managed to get in a base hit or two of his own, focusing on the dubious funding of infrastructure – railway station car parks in particular – by the Coalition.

Before the media conference began, Albanese and Andrews had walked through the site of a level crossing removal project underway in the Melbourne suburb of Surrey Hills.

“Surrey Hills was one of the four commuter car parks that were promised in Josh Frydenberg’s electorate at the last election, but will [be cancelled] at a cost of some $65 million,” Albanese said. “I don’t know where they’re going to put the car park at Surry Hills, I got to say, but at least there is a train station there. Because in some of the projects that were announced, there’s not a train station for a commuter car park. It makes no sense. But it stands in stark, stark contrast to Labor [which] will always support nation building projects.”

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May 9

The Age is partnering with three Chinese associations on Tuesday night to run a candidate forum featuring three of the hopefuls ahead of the May 21 federal election.

Sitting MP Gladys Liu, Labor candidate Carina Garland and independent Wayne Tseng, a former Liberal Party member who is giving his preferences to Liu, will attend. Tseng was invited because of his Chinese background, and Liu and Garland as the major-party candidates.

Deputy Labor leader Richard Marles hands out how-to-vote cards on Monday with the ALP’s Chisholm candidate, Carina Garland, at a church in Mount Waverley.Credit: Chris Hopkins

The Greens’ Sarah Newman was also invited, but the university student who works at JB Hi-Fi declined to attend.

A party spokesman told The Age she couldn’t fit the event in.

“The skyrocketing cost of living is really impacting Sarah’s ability to make ends meet and putting pressure on her to work even more than she already is,” the spokesman said.

The forum has been organised by three Chinese-Australian associations, the Chinese Australian Accord, the Chinese Community Council of Australia’s Victoria branch, and the Chinese Australian Multicultural Association, in partnership with The Age.

Chisholm is one of the country’s most multicultural electorates, with about 43 per cent of people speaking a language other than English at home (the national average is 21 per cent).

About 20 per cent of the population in Chisholm – which covers suburbs including Box Hill, Blackburn, Mount Waverley and Burwood – speaks Mandarin.

The event will be in English and translated into Mandarin. All voters in the seat are welcome to attend.

Liberal MP for Chisolm Gladys Liu also hands out how-to-vote cards at a pre-polling centre in Mount Waverley on Monday. Credit: Chris Hopkins

The forum starts at 7.30pm, is expected to run for two hours and is at the Mount Waverley Community Centre main hall, 47 Miller Crescent, Mount Waverley.

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May 6

If you’re a candidate running for a seat in Parliament, how do you convince Australians, in the privacy of the voting booth with their stubby pencil, to write the number 1 next to your name on the ballot paper?

One of the ways in the ultra-marginal seat of Chisholm might be by attending candidate forums of one type or another – and there has been a proliferation of them in this seat, held by Liberal MP Gladys Liu by a margin of just 0.57 per cent.

Gladys Liu (in blue) at an event in Chisholm with Prime Minister Scott Morrison last week.Credit: James Brickwood

Four forums have been held so far, and another three have been planned before election day.

MPs and candidates in neighbouring electorates say they will have one, or perhaps no forum to attend.

Independent Chisholm candidate Wayne Tseng will attend them all, and was even the sole attendee on the ballot at a Scouts event on Thursday.

“It wasn’t political, it was more like a, y’know, show-and-tell thing. Like, ‘What we do in an election?’ Because it was only kids,” he said.

Independent candidate Wayne Tseng at a pre-polling centre in Mount Waverley.Credit: Chris Hopkins

The Age is partnering with the Chinese community on the evening of Tuesday, May 10, to host The Chisholm Candidates Forum for the Chinese Community.

But among the forums held so far, a theme is emerging: the absence of Liu.

ABC Radio Melbourne held a forum last Friday, at which Liu agreed to attend, then declined, then agreed after host Raf Epstein said she’d pulled out.

The Eastern Community Legal Centre held a candidates forum on Thursday night that Liu didn’t attend.

Chief executive Michael Smith said Liu’s office said in April the MP was unlikely to be able to make it. Two subsequent emails to Liu went unanswered, he said.

“If you’re too busy that’s fine, but where else are you [during an election campaign]?” Smith asked.

Last Saturday, the Chisholm chapter of School Strike for Climate put on a candidate forum. Tseng, Labor’s candidate Carina Garland, the Greens’ Sarah Newman and another independent went. Liu was an apology.

Labor’s Carina Garland (in red) with Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese and shadow education minister Tanya Plibersek in Chisholm last week.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The Chinese Interpreters and Translators Association of Australia last Sunday also hosted a candidate’s forum that Liu did not attend, angering organisers as they had ensured specialist translators were there for the 80 or so crowd members. Garland was quizzed for an hour on a variety of issues.

Perhaps the most important forum Liu will miss is St Luke’s Uniting Church candidates forum in Mount Waverley, held every election since 1990 and planned for next Thursday night.

“It’s less like a debate than just giving people a chance to ask some questions,” the church’s reverend, James Douglas, said.

But the church has abandoned the event this election because neither Liu nor the Greens’ candidate can attend.

At the church’s 2019 event, Liu and the Labor and Greens candidates all came. “This time, we would only have had Carina Garland,” Douglas said.

“In 2019 I got accused of spruiking for the Liberal Party because they got one or two more questions in than Labor,” Douglas recalled ruefully. “So if I ran an event only including Labor, it wouldn’t look good.”

Garland will go to almost all the forums (though she too was an apology to the Scouts). Asked what the events were like, Garland said they were “a real pleasure”.

“I prioritise these events because I think it’s really important to speak to the community, particularly after the pandemic where we’ve been really limited in the way we’ve been able to reach people. The people that run these events put in so much effort so it’s just a matter of respect.”

Liu was contacted on Friday about her attendance at forums but did not respond by deadline.

She will attend the Chinese community event on Tuesday, although she initially told organisers she would be unable to attend.

“Unfortunately, Ms Liu is unable to attend due to clashing commitments she has already made a while ago,” her office told organisers of The Chisholm Candidates Forum for the Chinese Community.

Liu changed her mind when approached by The Age on Thursday, with her campaign confirming she will be there.

Tseng, a former Liberal Party member who has given his preferences to Liu ahead of Garland, said it would have been a bad look for Liu not to be there, before adding that he’s looking forward to all the forums. “I’ll be there.”

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May 5

With just over a fortnight before polling day, it’s time to look back at what’s been promised so far by both major parties in Chisholm during the election campaign. And the answer is: sports facilities.

By Thursday, the Liberal and Labor parties had promised to spend $35.5 million in the ultra-marginal electorate, with $33.4 million of it going towards sporting reserve upgrades.

The seat, where the result at the last election was decided by just over 500 votes out of 99,000, has seen both sides promise generous renovations at two local reserves.

First cab off the rank was Mount Waverley Reserve, followed by Mirrabooka Reserve, a popular park in Blackburn South. Both parties then pledged to upgrade Box Hill City Oval.

Liberal MP for Chisholm Gladys Liu promised $7.5 million to make the ground wheelchair accessible, create community rooms and build women’s change rooms for Hawthorn’s AFLW team. But the money was dependent on state Liberal leader Matthew Guy winning November’s state election, at which point the Victorian government would chip in another $5 million.

Labor’s candidate for the seat, Carina Garland, promised a bigger upgrade, coming in at $13.6 million and not dependent on state funding.

The strangest funding announcement in the seat thus far was $1.25 million for Blackburn Cycling Club, quietly announced by Liu on a Sunday morning with no media present, but with Angus Taylor there, for no apparent reason other than that the Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister was in town and a cyclist himself.

Political parties focus on local sporting organisations because their reach across the community through hundreds of members, and across various age and multicultural groups, is second to none.

But that doesn’t mean it’s money well-spent amid the many competing pressures on public funds. The Age asked Liu and Garland’s campaign teams if each project had any sort of business case or quantifiable means of justifying its need in the community.

Garland said Labor had done extensive consultation with tenants of the grounds and councils.

Carina Garland speaks at a candidate forum in Mount Waverley on May 10, with Liberal MP Gladys Liu (seated) and independent Wayne Tseng.Credit: Eddie Jim

“Our investment is based on master plans for each facility that have been endorsed by [Whitehorse and Monash] councils. Importantly, these projects focus on increased participation, particularly of women, in sport and are focussed on areas of clear community need,” she said.

She said the Mount Waverley Reserve funding was part of a Monash council master plan, while the Mirrabooka Reserve and Box Hill upgrades were part of a Whitehorse Council plan.

Liu said that all the projects that had won Coalition support during the campaign were responding to specific needs in the community.

“Project proponents provide a range of details to support their requests for support, including plans, costings and letters of support from other project partners,” she said.

Kate Griffiths from the Grattan Institute will release research from the think-tank this year on the use of grants programs for political ends.

She said it was far-fetched that upgrades such as the ones promised to Chisholm were a federal government responsibility.

Election promises too often pre-empted legitimate grants programs, “or they are directly providing funding for something that is, in this case, clearly not a Commonwealth responsibility at all”, she said.

Griffiths, Grattan’s deputy program director of budgets and government, said Canberra should provide funds to state or local governments through a considered and open process.

“Why is the Commonwealth getting involved at local or state-level activities? That’s never very clear in these announcements. Sometimes after the fact, they force-fit them into a grants program, because that’s a means to allocate public money.”

She said promises made during election campaigns were at least transparent, unlike many confidentially decided grants programs.

“It’s overt, out-in-the-open vote-buying,” she said. “But it’s still got the question of whether the Commonwealth should be doing it at all.”

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May 3

Billionaires and babies do mix, it turns out – even in an ultra-marginal seat in the heat of a close election campaign. Billionaire philanthropist Nicola Forrest was a special guest at Goodstart Early Learning in Box Hill on Tuesday to help boost the profile of childcare and kindergarten in an election campaign that has not had much to say about education.

Forrest, the co-chair of philanthropic organisation the Minderoo Foundation, had invited Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese to attend. In their honour came Liberal senator Sarah Henderson, Labor MP Ged Kearney and the woman who hopes to make the seat of Chisholm her own, Labor’s Carina Garland. No sign of sitting member Gladys Liu.

Philanthropist Nicola Forrest and Thrive by Five CEO Jay Weatherill in Box Hill on Tuesday.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui

Forrest’s Thrive by Five campaign seeks a revamp of Australia’s early education system, including better pay for educators, higher childcare subsidies for families and 15 hours a week of funded kindergarten for three- and four-year-olds.

So, what does she think of the Coalition and Labor policies?

“Look, I think there have been some good moves by the government and some announcements by the opposition, but you know, we’re not going to go away until we see this actually becoming a major part of the social infrastructure of this country,” Forrest said. “I think the disappointing thing is that we’re not seeing long-term vision and leadership for this country.

“And one of the biggest investments that we need to make is in our most important asset, which is our children, and the future productivity of this nation.”

Henderson said the government was proud of its early education policies and the country’s high workforce participation rate.

“In the next budget, we’ll be providing almost $11 billion for childcare for families, and our focus remains on targeting low- and middle-income families,” she said. “In the last two budgets, we’ve spent some $5.5 billion in our women’s economic statements, across women’s economic security, women’s safety and women’s health and, of course, childcare.”

Labor has promised to boost the wages of poorly paid early educators and to rejig the childcare subsidy to make 96 per cent of families better off.

Kearney said early education was a major cost for families battling low wage growth and rising inflation.

“One of the major costs for families is early childhood education and childcare. We know Australia has one of the most expensive childcare sectors in the OECD,” the Labor MP said.

“I’m sure with Tanya Plibersek as education minister – which I know she will be, and it’s her absolute passion – there will be lots to say on education.”

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April 29

When Julia Banks became the only Liberal candidate to snatch a seat from Labor in 2016, her then community engagement chairwoman, Gladys Liu, credited a WeChat campaign for mobilising the Chinese community to vote conservative.

Six years later, Liu has taken over the seat of Chisholm, where she is defending one of the smallest margins in the country, without the aid of WeChat, even though a quarter of her electors are from Chinese-speaking households. Liu pledged to stop using her account after Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s profile was taken over without notice in January, fuelling fears of Chinese influence on Australian politics.

Gladys Liu used WeChat extensively in previous campaigns, but has now withdrawn from it.Credit: Joe Armao

Labor’s Carina Garland is now said to be winning the WeChat debate with pithy summaries of Labor lines on the Chinese-based social media platform.

The super-app, which features functions such as messaging, large group chats, posts from public figures and financial payments, is the main source of news and community information for 60 per cent of Mandarin speakers in Australia, according to an Australian study.

However, the official absence of Liu and other Liberals does not mean they are silent on the platform. At least two of Liu’s local supporters post information about the MP and her work, and invite locals to events such as visits from federal ministers.

One prominent community member – Michelle Zhang, who has been photographed at party events with Liu – posted fake news stories in December about Premier Daniel Andrews being tried for treason and facing the death penalty.

Post from Tom Ma, campaigner for Michael Sukkar, on WeChat.Credit: WeChat

In the neighbouring seat of Deakin (centred on Ringwood) held by Liberal MP Michael Sukkar – where almost 10 per cent of voters have Chinese ancestry – Liberal operative Tom Ma has been recruiting volunteers to the campaign via an account, registered in China, named “Dark Blue Wilderness”.

“From Blackburn to Mitcham, there are many Chinese people, so we need Chinese volunteers to participate,” he posted during the election campaign.

The ABC reported last week that Liberal Party supporters, including Ma’s father, had last month pushed a disinformation campaign on WeChat accusing Labor supporters of being investigated by intelligence agencies for election interference.

An advertisement for Josh Frydenberg on a Chinese-language finance news account on WeChat.Credit: WeChat

“The Australian Intelligence Bureau is closely monitoring and investigating Chinese media and individuals who received foreign funds, media and individuals who fabricated and distorted facts,” the post falsely claims.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, whose electorate of Kooyong has 11.5 per cent of its population with a Chinese background, has advertisements on a Chinese-language finance news account called Australian Financial News.

A spokeswoman for the treasurer acknowledged the banner ads but said his office did not pay for any articles.

“Josh Frydenberg has deep links into the local multicultural communities, and works hard to represent their interests in the Australian parliament,” Frydenberg’s spokeswoman said.

In a written statement, Liu said she “engages with all media, including Chinese language media, to communicate and engage with local residents.”

Labor’s candidate for Chisholm, Carina Garland, is said to be winning the WeChat debate.Credit: Paul Jeffers

Haiqing Yu, an expert on Chinese digital media and communication platforms at RMIT, said Liu and other Liberals were disadvantaged by being largely absent from WeChat, which she said was being used in Chisholm to organise election forums and host events to teach Chinese-Australians about Australia’s voting system.

Yu said Labor’s Chisholm candidate, Carina Garland, was using WeChat to recruit volunteers and simplify key Labor messages into easy-to-understand language. “We need a prime minister who won’t disappear at important times,” an April 12 post from Garland reads.

A post by Carina Garland on WeChat.Credit: WeChat

After a street-walk with Labor foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong, Garland posted: “[I] had the honour to meet many workers who have contributed to Australia’s multicultural development. I have heard everyone’s voice: build a prosperous Australia for a better future.”

Melbourne-based WeChat researcher and PhD candidate Fan Yang has analysed 2500 articles posted on WeChat to gauge the topics being discussed relating to the federal election. Yang said the main themes included Australia-China relations, immigration, permanent residency, property prices and interest rates and Chinese-Australian candidates.

She said Liu’s move off WeChat was unwise.

“We know of the surveillance issues … but I think Australian politicians having official accounts and exposure on WeChat enables them to directly communicate across the diaspora, instead of forcing them to consume policy announcements from second-hand translated news stories which can be sensationalised and potentially include misinformation.”

Liu claimed partial credit for a running a WeChat campaign in the 2016 election that focused on state Labor’s controversial Safe Schools program, which taught young students about LGBTQ issues in an attempt to lower bullying rates. These messages were mostly shared in private groups, which hold up to 500 people and usually focus on specific policy issues or geographical areas. These groups are separate from public figures’ official accounts, which are public and can be viewed by anyone.

She told the Guardian in 2016 that “Chinese people come to Australia because they want good things for the next generation, not to be destroyed – they use the word destroyed – [by] same-sex, transgender, intergender. All this rubbish”. Liu says she was explaining some Chinese-Australians’ views, not hers.

She said her campaign, run by volunteers, had focused on safe schools, same-sex marriage and economic management. And in the same 2016 interview, she also said she had raised the issue of immigration saying: “If Labor is going to open the gate and let refugees in, that will affect people here and their lives here”.

Answering questions from The Age last week, Liu said she shared the views of NSW candidate Katherine Deves that the fairness of womens’ sport needed to be protected. Yang said she had not seen evidence of discussion of trans rights in WeChat groups around Chisholm in recent weeks.

“I know she [Deves] is very strong in supporting women and girls in sports. That’s what I do, too,” Liu said. “What I’m doing now is talking to everyone including [transgender people] and the LGBTI community … I invited a transgender woman to my International Women’s Day morning tea and I intend to work with everyone to make sure that everyone is respected.”

A Lowy Institute survey published in April showed 86 per cent of Chinese-Australians who use WeChat do so for news and information, but less than half of them believe the news shared on the platform is reliable – a much smaller proportion than those who think Australian media is fair.

Some of this suspicion stems from a view that the Chinese government censors and monitors WeChat. When Morrison’s account was taken over, Commonwealth sources told The Age repeated requests to restore the account had gone unanswered by WeChat and Chinese tech giant Tencent, which owns the platform, fuelling suspicion it was not a third-party hack but involved Chinese state interference.

Canadian analytics company Citizen Lab published a paper in 2020 arguing users outside China were surveilled and content was used to build capacity for a system that censors users registered in China

Zihan Zhang contributed to reporting through translation and assistance with interviews.

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April 29

Is a federal anti-corruption commission important to voters in Chisholm? If so, a key moment on the campaign trail in the ultra-marginal seat, held by Liberal Party MP Gladys Liu by just 1100 votes, came on Thursday evening at The Glen shopping centre.

In a forum hosted by the ABC’s Raf Epstein, Liu was asked repeatedly to explain an element of her government’s proposed integrity commission. This is how it went.

EPSTEIN: The government’s corruption commission wants to have ministers deciding whether or not investigations go ahead. Is there anybody outside of the Coalition who thinks it’s a good idea for a politician to have any say in an investigation?

LIU: What we don’t want to see is having the media and the public to judge before …

EPSTEIN: That’s not an answer in any way to what I just asked you. Can you really stand before me as a sitting MP and tell me a politician should help determine if an investigation goes ahead, because that’s the government’s model.

LIU: This is exactly what I mean. These 350 pages detailed the content of the policy. It will go down to what is important, and we will see what will be done.

EPSTEIN: I will try that question once more. Do you, as a sitting MP in the federal parliament, think it is a good idea that a politician determines the course of an investigation? Because that’s in your government’s proposal.

LIU: I don’t think that is in there. Let us get back to you on that one. What I am saying is that there are 350 pages that will be a lot of details that you can go to.

Liberal MP for Chisholm Gladys Liu (left), ABC journalist Raf Epstein, and Labor’s candidate for the seat Carina Garland at The Glen shopping centre in Glen Waverley on Thursday afternoon.Credit: Clay Lucas

The exposure draft outlining the Coalition’s proposed integrity body nominates the federal attorney-general as being able to make referrals to the anti-corruption commission if they “reasonably suspect” an offence is being committed. Government ministers would also be able to make referrals to the agency, but it would ultimately be up to the integrity commissioner under the Coalition’s plan to decide whether to pursue a corruption allegation.

Research last year for The Age by Resolve Strategic found that more than two-thirds of Australians supported the creation of a powerful federal anti-corruption watchdog, with Coalition voters slightly more in favour than those who support other parties.

And the failure of the Morrison government to establish a federal anti-corruption commission has helped fuel the campaigns of independent candidates in seats like Kooyong and Goldstein.

On Friday morning, Liu gave The Age a statement saying Epstein’s line of questioning was not accurate.

“Whether a matter is investigated will be a decision for the Commonwealth Integrity Commission and would depend on all of the available facts,” her statement said. “Under the Government’s model, the Commonwealth Integrity Commission will receive referrals from all of the existing integrity agencies, such as the Australian Federal Police and the Commonwealth Ombudsman.

“This will ensure that only the most serious types of criminal conduct are considered by the Commonwealth Integrity Commission – ensuring that the Commonwealth Integrity Commission resources are not wasted on referrals which are purely used for political purposes.”

“The Commonwealth Integrity Commission will also be able to investigate a matter on its own motion where it discovers suspected criminal conduct in the course of an existing investigation,” she said in the statement. “The law enforcement division will still be able to take direct referrals from the public.”

A spokesman for Labor’s shadow Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, however said that the ABC’s line of questioning was accurate.

“When politicians decide who gets investigated it’s not an integrity commission, it’s a cover-up commission,” he said. “The fake integrity commission Gladys Liu is backing would not be independent, would not be able to hold public hearings, and would not be retrospective.”

“Gladys Liu knows this and, like all Liberals, is terrified of what a genuinely independent anti-corruption commission would uncover about the scams, rorts and dirty deals for Liberal mates the Morrison government has been indulging in for years.”

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April 28

It was a case of on, off and then back on again for Chisholm MP Gladys Liu on Thursday afternoon at a live candidate’s event being hosted by ABC Radio Melbourne’s Raf Epstein in Glen Waverley.

Epstein said in the early afternoon that the Liberal Party MP had pulled out of the broadcast of his afternoon show, live from The Glen shopping centre. Liu then agreed to come on, although her campaign disputed the details of whether she had ever fully agreed to attend the event. Her spokesman confirmed she would debate Labor’s Carina Garland from 5pm.

The Age is holding its own live event in Chisholm on May 10, in partnership with a number of Chinese community organisations, at the Mount Waverley community centre, next to the railway station.

Four candidates from the field of 12 – the most crowded field in an Australian lower house electorate at the 2022 federal election – have been invited to the forum: Liu, Garland, the Greens’ Sarah Newman and independent Wayne Tseng, the only other candidate besides Liu who was born overseas (Tseng was born to Chinese parents on a boat to Australia from Vietnam, but that’s another story).

The forum will be moderated by Michael Bachelard, The Age’s deputy editor, who was once a foreign correspondent in Indonesia and is also a former world editor. The event will give key candidates a chance to talk to voters from the Chinese community and answer their questions.

Among those at Thursday’s event was Ranju, who declined to give her surname. She moved to Australia from India in 1990 and said while she had voted for the Liberal Party many times in the past, she was not sure who to vote for in Chisholm this time. She said she had emailed Liu “about vaccination for chickenpox or something about, you know, the federal government’s response to COVID”.

“I never got a response.”

In fact, she said she had emailed her local MP several times in the years she had been in Australia. They always responded, Ranju said.

“Then we met her at one of the cafes last year when all the lockdowns had lifted. My husband told her ‘You didn’t respond’. So she [Liu] said ‘What do you mean I didn’t respond? Give me your name and number’. And she didn’t respond even then.”

Also in the crowd was George Euripidou, who has lived in Wheelers Hill for more than 30 years and is a member of the Greek community.

In the latest boundaries drawn up by the Australian Electoral Commission, Euripidou will now be in the seat of Chisholm for the first time. He stopped by the event because he wanted to hear both candidates, and said after listening to them both he was still undecided.

“Over my time I’ve voted for both parties. But this time I’m still undecided. I mean I’m concerned about the cost of living, that’s my top priority.” He said Liu had attended a Greek Easter event last week that he was at.

Epstein asked Liu repeatedly why the Prime Minister had broken a promise to introduce a federal anti-corruption commission. Liu said she did not think one aspect of the bill that Epstein repeatedly put to her - that the Coalition’s model would allow politicians to determine the course of an investigation - was not in the laws the government had proposed. “I don’t think that is in there, but let’s get back to you on that one,” she told Epstein.

Liu was also asked about signs that were put up at 29 polling booths around Chisholm on election day in 2019 that were in the same purple as official AEC signage. The signs instructed voters in Chinese that putting a “1″ next to the Liberal Party candidate was the “correct” way to vote.

Polling day signs in Chinese instructing voters to put a 1 next to the Liberal Party in the electorate of Chisholm.

She said they had been authorised by Liberal Party headquarters, not her. “And when I was asked that morning at the polling booth, I didn’t know it was signed with anything that would violate [the rules],” she said.

The signs were later challenged in the Federal Court. “I didn’t have to go to court because it wasn’t authorised by me,” Liu said. Asked if it was the wrong thing to do, she said: “I think it has been dealt with and there will be no sign in any other colour other than blue [at May’s election].“.

Labor’s Carina Garland struggled to answer a question put to her about how an Albanese government would have any impact on increasing peoples’ wages.

“Anthony Albanese keeps on saying he can help people’s wages go up … It’s a bit of a con isn’t it?” Epstein asked. “Well, there are a lot of things we can do to reduce those pressures on families and on all people across our community,” Garland said. “I think that is a very complicated question.”

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April 26

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd joined the campaign trail in the ultra-marginal seat of Chisholm on Tuesday and dismissed Defence Minister Peter Dutton’s Anzac Day warning that Australia must prepare for war as little more than “sounding off”.

Rudd also said the Morrison government had badly damaged Australia’s relationship with Pacific Island nations.

Joining Labor candidate Carina Garland at Box Hill shopping centre in Victoria’s most marginal seat, Rudd was warmly greeted by store owners and shoppers, many of whom stopped him for a selfie.

Kevin Rudd with Labor candidate for Chisholm Carina Garland in Box Hill on Tuesday.Credit: Justin McManus

Rudd said the Morrison government had “messed up in the Solomons by doing a whole bunch of silly things like cutting Radio Australia, cutting foreign aid, not standing up for climate change, turning your back on the Pacific Island countries for nearly 10 years.

“Guess what? Doesn’t turn out so well.”

The Solomon Islands recently signed a security pact with China and, on Monday, Dutton warned that Australia needed to prepare for war and “stare down any act of aggression” from China.

“You can sound off as much as you like about China,” Rudd said when asked about these comments, “but unless you’ve got your defence lined up, which he hasn’t, and unless you’ve got your foreign policy lined up, which the Solomon shows he hasn’t, then people are just scratching their head.”

Among those with an itch over Australia’s relationship with China was Mount Waverley resident Robert Chen, who stopped Rudd in the shopping centre and demanded of him: “Why should we vote for Labor as opposed to Liberal?”

Rudd said Labor, if elected, would “stand up for Australia’s national interest and stand up for Australia’s national values”, before moving on.

Mount Waverley resident Robert Chen questions Kevin Rudd on Labor’s China policies.Credit: Justin McManus

Chen later told The Age that Australia’s relationship with China was terrible as a result of developments in recent years.

“Obviously, we have different policies, different value systems, but that doesn’t stop us from being friendly to each other and having a working relationship. We should have at least a working relationship with China, but to get where we are today, the mismanagement of the government is incredible,” Mr Chen said, adding that this didn’t make a decision on how to vote easier. “Labor and Liberal, they are amazingly similar on China.”

Rudd also met with Labor campaign workers who were involved in calling voters with Chinese background to discuss Labor’s stance. “In their conversations with a lot of the local Chinese community, one of the questions near the top is corruption,” Rudd said. “They want clean government.”

Kevin Rudd hands out treats to shoppers and the media pack, bought by the former PM from stores in Box Hill Central shopping centre on Tuesday.Credit: Justin McManus

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April 25

Victoria’s most marginal seat, Chisholm, is also the nation’s most crowded for candidates at next month’s election.

Twelve people have nominated for the seat, which the Australian Electoral Commission said was the biggest field running in Australia’s 151 electorates.

The ballot, finalised on Friday, has seen the Liberal MP Gladys Liu selected in the lucky first spot on the ballot paper while her Labor opponent Carina Garland is last.

“Being at the bottom of a list of 12 makes it tough,” said ABC election analyst Antony Green, who also noted that the donkey vote – simply voting for candidates in the order in which their names appear on the ballot paper – is generally estimated to be about 1 per cent of the final tally.

Liu won the seat by a margin of just 0.57 per cent at the 2019 election and later faced down a Federal Court challenge to the result over her use of signs at all 29 voting booths in the seat in the same purple colour scheme as official AEC banners. The signs told readers the “correct” way to vote was to put a “1″ next to the Liberal box.

The signs outside a polling booth in Chisholm in 2019.Credit: Luke Hilakari

Labor has nominated Chisholm as its chief target in Victoria at the May 21 election.

Along with Labor, Liberal and the Greens, other parties to field candidates in Chisholm’s crowded field are Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party, One Nation, the Animal Justice Party, the United Australia Party and independent and former Liberal Party member Wayne Tseng.

In all, across Australia, 1200 candidates nominated for the lower house – on average, eight people per seat. The award for the seats with the lowest number of candidates enrolled – five – was shared by eight electorates in NSW and Queensland (Barton, Blaxland, Cook, Kingsford Smith, Watson, Bonner, Griffith, and Oxley).

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April 24

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has chastised Labor for an advertisement highlighting Liberal MP Gladys Liu’s links to donors suspected to be risks to Australia’s national security, claiming the opposition was engaging in racist campaigning.

“They go after Gladys Liu because she’s Chinese,” Morrison said on Sunday. “They’re engaged in what I think is a sewer tactic here.”

On Sunday, Labor released a new attack ad targeting the Hong Kong-born MP’s record, including her involvement in a campaign against the LGBTI Safe Schools program and her campaign’s use of controversial signage at the last election that appeared to mimic the Australian Electoral Commission.

One component of the ad stated that the Victorian division of the Liberal Party reportedly handed back $300,000 in donations because then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s office was told the Chinese donors, invited to the 2015 event by Liu, were potential national security threats.

“What do we know about Liberal Gladys Liu?” a male voice says in the ad, with an ominous-sounding background track.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg told reporters in Melbourne on Sunday that Liu was a “proud Australian citizen” and admonished the “desperate, dishonest, racist attack ad by the Labor Party” without specifically outlining why he believed it was inappropriate to reference Liu’s links to the donations.

Read the full story here.

April 21

It’s a cliche in politics that every vote counts. But in Victoria’s ultra-marginal seat of Chisholm, where the result at the 2019 election was decided by just over 500 votes out of 99,000, the phrase rings true.

In these circumstances, the importance of big local sporting organisations cannot be underestimated. Their tentacles spread across the local community because of the hundreds of club members in local, senior, women’s and multicultural programs. For political parties, getting these people onside can harness the cultural capital associated with the sporting club – the kind of resonance that trumps a pamphlet in the mailbox.

Gladys Liu at Box Hill City Oval.Credit: Joe Armao

For this reason, both major parties are keen to promise a major upgrade for the Box Hill City Oval used by the Box Hill Hawks football club and Box Hill Cricket Club in the heart of the electorate.

But the Liberal Party beat Labor to the punch.

On Thursday morning, Liberal MP for Chisholm Gladys Liu was beaming, yellow Sherrin in hand, as she announced $7.5 million in federal funding for the site to make it wheelchair accessible, create council-run community rooms around the oval and build women’s change rooms for Hawthorn’s AFLW team.

“The Morrison government’s strong economic management enables us to invest in local communities,” she said on a wintry morning, standing on the wing of the pitch near female football players.

“Thank you to the girls for giving me a few tips on how to do the handballs and the kicks … Go Box Hill Hawks!”

Liu’s rival for the seat, Labor candidate Carina Garland, a former union official, would have been gutted. Two party sources have confirmed that she and her federal Labor team were due to make a funding announcement at the ground in early May.

Liu and Guy, with Menzies candidate Keith Wolahan behind.Credit: Joe Armao

At the planned announcement, Labor would have restated a funding commitment made before the 2019 election, when it was defeated in Chisholm.

“People are right to be angry that it has taken three years and an election to be called before Gladys Liu bothered to finally do her job,” Garland said in a written statement.

The near miss comes after, earlier this month, Liu made funding commitments to local reserves just days after Labor pledged money to the same places.

Liu’s millions promised to the Box Hill oval were almost matched by a $5 million pledge by Opposition Leader Matthew Guy, who welcomed Liu and Menzies candidate Keith Wolahan as he made one of his first forays into the federal election campaign.

The state opposition also needs to win back the seat of Box Hill, to be contested by Liberal candidate Nicole Werner, and surrounding seats that it held before its 2018 election drubbing.

“The state government is apparently only invested in big projects. They want to build big things but they’re forgetting what is so important to so many and that is our backyards, our neighbourhoods, our communities,” he said.

Guy filming a video for his social media channels with Liberal candidate Nicole Werner after the funding announcement. Credit: Joe Armao

Ed Sill, president of the Box Hill Hawks, said he had been campaigning for money for the oval for five years but had not yet received money from the Andrews government.

Former Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett, president of the Hawthorn Football Club whose VFL team is Box Hill Hawks, last year claimed the Andrews government was withholding funding from Hawthorn because of Kennett’s frequent and dramatic criticism of Premier Daniel Andrews’ handling of the pandemic. The state government denied this.

“I’m not going to speculate,” Sill said when asked if Kennett’s presence at the club was a reason the state had not allocated funding.

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April 20

Emily Kah doesn’t pay much attention to politics, but the 18-year-old engineering student, who will vote in her first election next month, has heard enough to form the view that the Australian government “just doesn’t like China”.

“It makes me kind of uncomfortable,” she told The Age outside the bustling Box Hill shopping centre.

Voters from Box Hill in the electorate of Chisholm discuss what is swaying their vote in the Federal election.Credit: Scott McNaughton

Kah, a second generation member of a migrant family is one of the thousands of residents of the ultra-marginal seat of Chisholm who lives in a Chinese-speaking household. This cohort makes up more than a quarter of the electorate in the must-win seat for Labor, and they are described by one expert as “collateral damage” in Australia’s diplomatic feud with Beijing.

Like any cohort, they will vote on different issues. Some of the dozen Chinese-Australian voters approached by The Age, are, like Kah, put off the government by suggestions from Coalition ministers that Australia could go to war with China over Taiwan. Alan Qu, who moved from the mainland 15 years ago and now sells apartments in Box Hill, said he’d vote Labor “because the Liberal Party is not friendly to China”. Others are more interested in hip-pocket issues, although for those whose business interests are tied to Australia’s relationship with China, these are intertwined.

Read the full story here in English, here in simplified Chinese characters, and here in traditional Chinese characters.

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April 17

Natalie Rabey lives in Chadstone – best known for its enormous shopping centre. But as all sides of politics talk about the cost of living, this 72-year-old pensioner and resident of the electorate of Chisholm, says mere survival is becoming tough.

“The cost of food has skyrocketed.” She had her family over for lunch on Sunday and “It cost me $240,” she says. “I didn’t buy much. Cold meats, dips, carrots, not much else. I nearly died. What the hell? It’s my entire pension once my bills come in too.”

Natalie Rabey at her home in Chadstone on Sunday.Credit: Wayne Taylor

Chisholm, held by the Liberals’ Gladys Liu on a wafer-thin margin, sits within Melbourne’s eastern suburbs mortgage belt, with an average weekly wage and home ownership rates that reflect the national average. But its western corner contains pockets of entrenched poverty.

The polling booths in this part of Chisholm – suburbs such as Ashwood, Burwood, Chadstone and Oakleigh – vote Labor. Last election, 11 out of 12 booths in the electorate’s west went to the ALP.

In this part of the electorate, inflation, housing, rental availability, petrol prices and the rising cost of food are likely to be real factors influencing people’s votes.

Rabey lives in public housing in a unit she got 20 years ago and says that having a home is the single most important cost-of-living issue. Having learned how much public housing helped her two decades ago, she is part of a housing group that tries to assist other people in the area in desperate circumstances.

She acknowledges there has been some social housing construction in the area in recent years and both state and federal governments have put money into building public and social housing. “But we need more.” Whoever wins the next election should use empty land in her suburb to build more cheap housing, she says.

Liu won Chisholm in 2019 by just 0.57 per cent. Rabey, a self-described “one-eyed Labor voter,” has encountered Liu in meetings with housing advocates and is scathing.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison visits Wallies Lollies in Box Hill South with MP Gladys Liu on Saturday.Credit: James Brickwood

“‘If you need anything just let me know,’ she says to us. We never hear from her again,” says Rabey, “It’s all talk and no action.”

She sings the praises of both Liu’s predecessor until 2016, Labor’s Anna Burke, and former Liberal state MP for the area, Graeme Watt. “He was such a good advocate.”

Liu says she takes housing affordability seriously, noting she was born and raised in public housing in Hong Kong before coming to Australia as an adult. “I am always available to talk to local residents about their concerns and advocate on their behalf,” she says, also pointing to almost $7 billion in rent assistance the federal government provides each year.

Labor is promising to create a Housing Australia Future Fund, which over five years would build 20,000 social housing properties, 4000 of them for women and children fleeing domestic and family violence and older women at risk of homelessness.

Labor’s Carina Garland.Credit: Paul Jeffers

Labor’s Carina Garland says the rising cost of housing is a big concern to voters in the seat and that housing affordability has got worse under the Morrison government. It needs to be a focus for the federal government, she says. “There is no easy fix, but it does require leadership.”

Rabey regularly pops into Ashwood’s Power Neighbourhood House, which The Age visited during the campaign’s first week. There, manager Carol Berger has just finished giving out $1200 worth of free food to people in the suburb who can’t afford to feed themselves or their families.

Carol Berger manages Power Neighbourhood House in Ashwood, which does a weekly food giveaway each Tuesday.Credit: Paul Jeffers

“We didn’t do it prior to COVID,” says Berger as she packs up food left over from that day’s giveaway. During the pandemic, she says, “lots of people couldn’t go anywhere and a lot of people lost jobs”.

“We thought we have to do something. People needed us more than ever.” The extremes of the pandemic are fading, but the centre has kept the food parcel service going. “The need for the food assistance was growing,” Berger says.

Berger has run the Power Neighbourhood House for 15 years in Ashwood and lists food prices, the lack of access to bulk-billed health care and – most of all – affordable housing as the most pressing issues in the neighbourhood.

Consultant Kos Samaras, a former Labor assistant state secretary who now runs consulting firm RedBridge, says the cost of living is raised constantly at focus groups he runs for clients.

The vote in this part of the electorate is changing. At the last election at the Ashwood voting booth, while Labor’s primary vote dipped by 1 per cent and the Liberal vote fell by 8 per cent, right-wing and independent candidates got a swing of 9 per cent towards them.

Monash University politics professor Paul Strangio says while the cost of living is the economic terrain most elections are fought on, there is little governments can do about it in the Australian system.

“It’s not like we have price controls,” he says, noting the one area it’s very directly controlled is JobSeeker. “On that, we have a bipartisan agreement that they’re not going to increase it.”

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April 15

Good Friday was a holy day on the campaign trail and Prime Minister Scott Morrison made a quick visit to Melbourne to perform some religious observances – Christian in the morning and Jewish in the afternoon (Passover is coinciding with Easter this year), but the day was not entirely devoid of politics.

His first stop was in the ultra-marginal electorate of Chisholm, where he hopes to woo enough voters to keep incumbent Gladys Liu in her seat as she battles Labor’s Carina Garland. To that end, Morrison visited the Syndal Baptist Church, which sits within an area the 2016 census shows has 28 per cent of residents with Chinese ancestry (the Australian average was around 4 per cent).

Scott Morrison (centre) and Gladys Liu (right) talk with Syndal Baptist Church pastor Chris Danes on Friday.Credit: James Brickwood

Chris Danes, senior pastor at the church, gave some insight into the scramble to organise events on the prime ministerial campaign roster. “They rang yesterday and said, ‘Would it be OK for the prime minister to come’?” Danes told The Age.

“We’re inclusive, anyone can come. If Albo rang up, we’d say come on over.”

It was, Danes thought, the first time a prime minister had visited the congregation in its 65-year history. However, he insisted to the political minders that the PM and his entourage of media and minders not take away from Jesus on Good Friday.

The scrum was respectful, Danes says, though he will face the real problem on Sunday: “We got some very strong Labor supporters and some strong Liberal supporters. We’ve got Greens too. That’s why I am going to cop it in the neck,” at Sunday’s service, Danes said.

During the Friday service, Danes sat next to Morrison. “I leaned over and said to him, ‘This is as quiet as it’s going to be all day for you’, and he said ‘Yep.’ ”

Danes says Morrison was focused on the service. “The phone was in the pocket.”

As for speaking, Morrison made only one short statement after stepping outside. “Easter is about faith. It’s about hope,” he said.

“It’s about being able to look forward to the future with confidence encouraged by your beliefs. It’s a very personal thing for me, and I really enjoyed the service this morning.”

Church manager Clara Yeung on Friday was helping organise the first of the day’s Good Friday services being run in both Mandarin and Cantonese. She says around 200 people regularly attend the Mandarin and Cantonese services the church holds on Sundays. Asked whether the church leaned either way politically, Yeung laughed and said: “We don’t tend to talk about this at church.”

Morrison later joined Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, the member for Kooyong, at a Passover service in Hawthorn East.

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Outside the church doors, debate was raging over Morrison’s decision to abandon a pledge to set up a corruption watchdog, blaming Labor for not supporting his preferred plan.

While integrity in politics has been a major campaign point for “teal” candidates in other Victorian seats including Kooyong and Goldstein, the heat has been less intense on the federal Liberal MP Gladys Liu.

After the church service with Morrison, The Age asked Liu why her side of politics had not established an integrity commission during the term of government now coming to an end.

“[We had] 350 pages of our policies and we really want to have bipartisan support for this very important issue,” Liu replied. “Unfortunately, Labor, they only came up with two pages. There is bipartisan support needed for this very important bill to pass.”

Morrison did put forward a proposal for an anti-corruption commission, and Labor and others in the federal Parliament rejected it. But Morrison never introduced legislation to the parliament or attempted to negotiate a way forward with Labor, the minor parties, or the independents.

Liu is running in Chisholm against Labor’s Carina Garland, who says Morrison “hates scrutiny”, and that if she wins the seat, she hopes to be part of a Labor government that introduces “a powerful, transparent and independent National Anti-Corruption Commission”.

Garland says the anti-corruption commission proposal Morrison floated “was almost universally denounced as being so weak it would cover up corruption”.

Labor candidate for Chisholm Carina Garland.Credit: Paul Jeffers

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April 14

Talk about awkward. It’s just gone 8am on Thursday morning at Mount Waverley railway station and the Liberal MP for the seat of Chisholm, Gladys Liu, and Carina Garland, the Labor candidate trying to replace her, have just met for the first time.

Both are on the hustings, handing out flyers.

“We said hello, we are civilised,” says Liu, handing a brochure to a voter, asking him to re-elect her in the marginal seat she has held for the last three years.

Chisholm Liberal MP Gladys Liu, in blue, and Labor candidate Carina Garland, at Mount Waverley railway station.Credit: Clay Lucas

Two or three metres away stands Garland, handing out her flyers. “I’m Carina, I’m the Labor candidate,” she tells a commuter strolling up to catch the 8.06 from platform 1.

Most greet her, and Liu, warmly enough. “People I think are really very friendly,” says Garland. “They’re very happy to have someone wish them good morning.”

When The Age asks Liu and Garland how often they’re campaigning at railway stations, both respond – within earshot of the other – that their opponent is seldom seen.

“After the last three years, people want to see someone on the ground,” says Garland. “That’s why we’re here, so people can see an active political representative in the community.”

“This is the first time I’ve seen my opponent,” says Liu, a backbencher with a high profile because of the controversies that have surrounded her since she was elected.

Commuters appear more generous to the pair than they are to each other. “Every time I come, once a week, one of them is here,” says Stephen Mackay after he arrives to board his city-bound train, and is handed a flyer on the way into the station by both.

Alongside the candidates is ABC Friends volunteer John Presley, also handing out leaflets supporting the national broadcaster. “It’s a good cause,” he says while handing a flyer to another distracted worker dashing for the train.

The candidates with John Presley from Friends of the ABC.Credit: Clay Lucas

Presley got a call the night before from the ABC Friends, asking him to hand out at Mount Waverley. He loves that both candidates are there.

“One of you is going to be the local MP once this is done,” he tells Liu and Garland, gathering them together for a picture. They oblige, perhaps a touch reluctantly.

Wandering past next is Mount Waverley resident Steve Pewtress, out walking his son’s red heeler Razzle. The Liberal Party member stops to say hi to both candidates. He’s president of the Waverley Blues Football Club; in the opening week of the campaign, both Labor and the Coalition have promised millions to upgrade the team’s clubrooms. “We’re somewhat pleased we live in a bellwether seat in Chisholm,” he says.

For more than an hour, this scene plays out in front of Shila Patel. She runs Café Away, in a tiny nook on the railway station’s city-bound side, each weekday from 6am to 10am.

Shila Patel in Cafe Away, which she runs at Mount Waverley railway station.Credit: Clay Lucas

She took on the cafe two months ago, when she was selling just one or two coffees a morning. Now, as people return to the office, she’s selling 15 coffees on a good morning. “Before the pandemic, the previous owner would sell 50 a morning.”

Patel has seen the candidates there on previous days and says people are happy to take a flyer, and sometimes stop and talk to them. “If they are running late, they don’t want to speak to anyone. Or buy coffee,” she says ruefully.

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April 13

• Chisholm vital to Labor’s poll puzzle. By Stephen Brook and Clay Lucas

It’s difficult to overstate how much Labor needs the ultra-marginal seat of Chisholm to fall its way if it is to form government. In Labor circles it’s known as the 76th seat – the seat that gets them over the line in federal parliament’s 151-seat chamber.

“It’s not even a bellwether; it’s a necessary seat,” says pollster Peter Lewis, of Essential Media Communications. “If it doesn’t fall, they don’t win.”

With a wafer-thin margin of 0.6 per cent in favour of Liberal incumbent Liu, both sides are struggling to predict what will happen in the seat and are reluctant to make a call publicly. One Liberal Party elder doesn’t expect his party to hold Chisholm, pointing to a predicted statewide swing against the Coalition that would eclipse Liu’s advantage.

“We don’t know what the Chinese vote will do,” he adds, “And we can’t find out.”

A large portion of Chisholm’s voters have Chinese heritage – under the seat’s previous boundaries, 17.6 per cent of this electorate spoke either Mandarin or Cantonese at home. It was why the ferocious battle for Chisholm in 2019 included the first-ever candidate debate conducted in Mandarin, between the Liberal Liu and her Labor challenger at that time, Taiwan-born Jennifer Yang.

On election night it looked like Labor had won the seat until Liu pulled ahead on pre-poll and postal votes to emerge victorious. If 545 votes had gone the other way, Yang would’ve been elected. There was also controversy over a Liberal Party sign. Printed in Chinese and in the same purple colour as Australian Electoral Commission signage, it appeared to translate as saying the “correct way” to vote was Liberal.

On the trail with Gladys Liu

As the election campaign kicked off, The Age joined Liu at Box Hill Central shopping plaza, where she mingled easily with voters. Some she approached, others sidled up to her for a chat after recognising the MP, who has a particularly high profile among Chinese-born voters. Among them was a self-confessed fan, Jennifer Teng, who asked The Age for an introduction to the Hong Kong-born MP.

Teng, from the Gold Coast but in Box Hill visiting family, moved to Australia from Singapore 26 years ago. She can’t vote for Liu but recognised her – one of the few MPs with Chinese heritage – from TV. Teng wanted to meet Liu “because she is a fighter” who helped represent “one of the minorities in our community, and, of course, we have Penny Wong too”.

Jennifer Teng, a Gladys Liu fan. Credit: Wayne Taylor

“Gladys, she’s fighting very hard for us. I wish we had a voice like her in the Gold Coast as well. She works very hard for our Asian community, especially the Chinese community,” says Teng, who also, without prompting, raises the issue of what she terms “scandal” surrounding Liu being a pro-Chinese “spy” before dismissing it. “It has to be supported by evidence. If there’s no evidence, you have to leave people alone,” she says.

Liu, 58, has weathered controversy over claims she used WeChat to air anti-LGBTQ messages and persistent allegations over her links to Chinese organisations. Her membership of a Coalition that has stridently condemned the Chinese government also adds to the unpredictability of how this electorate might vote.

“She could be caught as a victim of government-friendly fire as Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison attempt to wedge Labor on China,” says Essential pollster Lewis.

Even former Labor campaign workers respect Liu’s skill, particularly her at-times controversial use of Chinese-language social media. “Despite her air of incompetence, she is a pretty brutal operator,” says one former ALP operative. “You have got to respect the hustle.”

Gladys Liu at Box Hill Central shopping centre on Monday.Credit: Wayne Taylor

The challenger

One certainty in Chisholm is that the winner of this seat will be a woman. Liu faces a challenge from Labor’s Carina Garland, a former Victorian Trades Hall Council assistant secretary who holds a PhD in gender and cultural studies.

Garland, 38, lives in Clayton. Her Italian heritage mirrors another aspect of this area’s ethnic diversity. Her grandfather migrated from Italy in the 1950s and trained as a teacher at Burwood Teachers College. It paved the way for her father to become a doctor. Together with Garland’s mother, a nurse, the couple ran a local GP practice in the south-east.

“It’s a positive migrant story that mirrors others in this area,” says Garland, who graduated with an honours degree in English literature at Monash, and worked as an academic at the University of Sydney.

Garland says Labor also stands shoulder to shoulder with the Chinese-Australian community against racism and racially motivated attacks. “I will work to unite communities, not divide them,” she says.

The Greens candidate is Sarah Newman, a full-time university student who works at JB Hi-Fi. The party has no chance of winning the seat, but last election it polled 12 per cent of the primary vote. If Newman can maintain that, the preferences of her voters will be key to deciding the result. Liu and the Liberal Party must suppress the Greens’ vote to avoid Labor taking the seat.

The candidates will be seeking the support of voters not particularly engaged in the electoral process, and many voters who don’t care about government. Thus, the campaign will be fought at shopping centres, weekend markets and during the morning commute along the two major train arteries, the Lilydale and Belgrave train lines that pass beneath Box Hill Central, and the Glen Waverley line that terminates at the giant The Glen shopping complex to the south.

Labor candidate for seat of Chisholm Carina Garland. Credit: Paul Jeffers

Apart from transport and road arterials, the electorate is also divided geopolitically, the Liberal-majority Whitehorse City Council in the north and the Labor-dominated Monash Council in the south. Adding to the uncertainty is a redistribution that slashed Liu’s majority from 0.6 per cent to a nominal 0.2 per cent. Polling is even more difficult because, while there are 109,000 eligible voters at the time of writing, there are an additional 19,000 adults living in the electorate who are ineligible to vote.

A sample of modern Australia

This electorate’s wealth falls squarely in the middle, according to the 2016 census. The average weekly wage for the area in 2019 was $1472 – marginally above the national average at $1431. A third of voters own their home outright, also in line with the national average.

Housing affordability and the cost of living, along with national security, will form the key concerns for voters, says Theo Zographos, a Liberal councillor on Monash Council.

“It’s a good sample of modern Australia, and it’s obviously a very competitive seat. It’s multicultural Australia,” he says. While close to one-fifth of the electorate has mainland Chinese or Hong Kong heritage, almost 8 per cent were born in India and Sri Lanka, and 4 per cent Malaysia.

Issues like fuel prices will be front of mind, he says. “In a seat like Chisholm, which is more a mortgage-belt type of seat, these are the issues that voters have been expressing.”

Let’s not forget the impact of the pandemic. Christo Christophidis has been the force behind local cafe Mocha Jo’s on the Kingsway at Glen Waverley for more than 20 years.

Christo Christophidis from Mocha Jo’s in Glen Waverley.Credit: Simon Schluter

“In the last couple of years, the business community has taken second place to people’s lives. They have not been focusing on their neighbours. It has been all about you,” says the president of the Glen Waverley Traders Association.

The pandemic took its toll and there is an undercurrent of fear among local shop owners. There are 12 vacancies out of 58 shops on the local strip and in a sign of how a key local issue can impact on a federal campaign, traders worry about how the looming Suburban Rail Loop will further hurt trade when a massive construction tunnel opens at the end of the street. Labor is banking on the transformational multibillion-dollar state government project being an electoral asset as it will improve transport links in the area.

The old high street shops on the Kingsway are still well patronised. Two locals nominate Mocha Jo’s as the place to meet when The Age visits, and his cafe is humming. Outside, a Buddhist monk sits sipping a cup of tea. But there is no denying the impact of the massive shopping complex The Glen, and its three gleaming luxury residential towers, fresh from a $490 million redevelopment. “It’s like Singapore; you can go shopping there and live upstairs. It’s amazing,” says Christophidis.

Opposite Mocha Jo’s at the Piatella Cafe, real estate agent Ming Xu sits outside and orders a green smoothie. He moved from China to study IT at Monash University about 20 years ago and never moved back to China.

In those days, Ming says his Chinese language skills were a disadvantage when he was starting out in the industry. But now, as a director of the Biggins & Scott real estate agency in Glen Waverley, catering to a clientele that includes Chinese, Indian, Malaysian and European, the opposite is true.

Ming Xu in Glen Waverley this week.Credit: Simon Schluter

So, how does he describe himself? “In terms of being part of the community, to that extent I am Australian, but at the same time I still have Chinese blood in my body,” he says.

“We are looking for a government that can keep our community safe, that’s why people are coming here,” he says, also nominating education and small business assistance as priorities.

First-generation immigrant families move to the area attracted to high-achieving schools such as the state Glen Waverley Secondary College. They have helped to push the premium for houses in the school’s central Glen Waverley catchment area by up to anywhere between $100,000 and $1 million. “It’s amazing – some of these houses behind the Kingsway go for $2.3 million or $2.6 million. You can still find a house on the edge of Glen Waverley for $1.3 million,” Xu says.

A bridge to the community

To the north of where Xu sits lies The Glen, and a series of modern residential towers dominate the skyline. In 2012, the Village Cinemas near The Glen provided the stage for the launch of the 267-apartment Galleria development. And when the complex’s developer, John Castran, needed a bridge to the Chinese community to sell the off-the-plan scheme, Gladys Liu stepped forward.

Then a multicultural adviser to Victorian Liberal premier Ted Baillieu after working as a speech pathologist, “she was certainly an incredible cohesive force in the Chinese community”, Castran recalls.

While some electors will vote against the government for its rhetoric against the Chinese government, many Hong Kong-born Chinese will support Liu for her criticism of the China-sponsored crackdown in Hong Kong, accusing Beijing of undermining its autonomy.

Real estate agent Xu says, while he does not want to get too political about the Australian government’s relationship with the Chinese government, many Chinese-Australians like what Liu represents. “It is good we can see that the parliament accepts an Asian voice,” he says.

“With a Chinese background, I also wish the Australian government and Chinese government will be friends – that will be more beneficial for the economy.”

The Age asked Liu how she would win the seat again, and whether she would campaign this time around using WeChat, in particular, to reach Chinese voters. Liu said she had been in or near the electorate of Chisholm for three decades and knew its issues well. She had a plan, she said, that would “deliver local jobs [and] better local facilities”.

She would be “using every means available to communicate the benefits of my local plan”, she added.

By Tuesday, both Liu and Garland had promised millions of dollars to rebuild pavilions at two reserves, one in Blackburn South, the other in Mount Waverley. In both cases, Garland made her promise to sporting clubs first, only to see Liu days later make the same offer – but with an extra million dollars in funding thrown in.

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April 11

The battle for Chisholm, Victoria’s most marginal seat, has begun with both Labor and Liberal candidates promising millions of dollars to rebuild sporting clubrooms at a popular Blackburn South park.

Chisholm is held by the Liberal Party’s Gladys Liu, on a margin of just 0.6 per cent. Labor’s Carina Garland is trying to take back a seat held by the ALP for the six elections until 2016.

On Saturday, Garland met cricket and soccer clubs at Mirrabooka Reserve and promised $2 million to rebuild clubrooms there. On Monday, Liu met the clubs and promised $3 million.

“If it’s a tie, we will take $5 million,” joked Drew Sinclair, the president of the Blackburn South Cobras cricket club.

Stuart Baird from Blackburn Newhope Football Club, which also plays at the reserve and uses the clubrooms, also joked that members of the two sporting clubs were “all single issue voters; our fear is a hung parliament”.

Whitehorse Council has been in discussion with both clubs about rebuilding the rooms for several years, and Liu met the football club last November to discuss funding for the project.

“The local clubs in our communities have been so persistent in their requests for funding and so passionate about the needs of their members,” she said.

Garland, however, said that despite knowing the request for new clubrooms had been around for some time, it had taken Liu three years since being elected to make the promise.

Liu was “scrambling to fix three years of inaction, not because she cares about locals, but because she is desperate to hang on to her job”.

Labor has also promised $3 million to upgrade the Mount Waverley Reserve, also in Chisholm and home to 38 cricket and 16 Australian rules teams. Garland said it would improve the sporting pavilion there, providing men’s and women’s change rooms, more storage space and better social facilities.

Email Clay Lucas ([e-mail]) and Paul Sakkal ([e-mail]) to tell them what’s happening in Chisholm during this election campaign.

Jacqueline Maley cuts through the noise of the federal election campaign with news, views and expert analysis. Sign up to our Australia Votes 2022 newsletter here.