Victoria local government elections: Has Tatch met his match? Big red Labor bus revs up to run down independents
This is a story of how easy it is for genuine independents to be knocked over by the major parties who swing into local government areas, bring their money and their armies of T-shirted disciples who spit venom on social media along with them.
Local government elections will take place in a locked down Victoria on October 24, exclusively by postal vote. Dan Andrews’ Labor is pushing hard into shires it had previously all but ignored. Genuine independents with stellar records in public administration are under threat, out gunned and out spent by the big party machines.
It is happening right now in the Moorabool Shire in western Victoria, a semirural shire that takes in Melbourne’s seemingly endless urban sprawl in its west into Bacchus Marsh and beyond. It is a cynical exercise not just designed to increase Labor’s reach beyond the cities but to cover the many mistakes the Andrews Government has made.
A survivor named Tatch
I first met Paul Tatchell in 2015 when I was recording Ballarat’s Children for The Australian. Tatchell was a significant figure in the survivor community, a man with a compelling story to tell.
He didn’t spend a lot of time dwelling on his experiences because he doesn’t want to be defined by them. But his story, told on the podcast and later given in evidence to the Royal Commission, should be repeated over and over for no other reason than the sheer audacity of it.
Tatch had only been at St Patrick’s College, Ballarat for a week and in that short time he had fallen asleep in the Year 7 dormitory every night to the whimpers and cries of his fellow students. They’d been battered and raped by an especially brutal and sadistic Christian Brother, Ted Dowlan. That was Dowlan’s MO. He’d beat kids senseless and then comfort them and then rape them.
It was only a matter of time before it was Tatch’s turn. It happened to him, too.
Rather than go back to his bed sobbing, an 11-year-old Tatch decided to make his tormentor pay. He wound up and decked Brother Ted Dowlan, with a big right cross. He didn’t knock Dowlan out, but he did knock him down. All hell broke loose at the school and Tatch was expelled.
Dragged before the principal, Brother Paul Nangle, Tatch explained that Brother Ted “was a poofter.” They were the only words he had to explain what had happened to him and so many other little boys.
Nangle had no memory of that exchange when quizzed about it in the Royal Commission. There was no documentary evidence of the expulsion although there should have been and when quizzed under oath, Nangle and other Christian Brothers babbled unconvincing answers or fell prey to acute memory loss. Dowlan’s crimes were ignored for years but he was convicted and jailed on two separate occasions for raping children, the last in 2014.
I’ve stayed in touch with Tatch. By any measure he has made a good fist of things. His success in business is borne of hard work. He runs a water trucking company and the local newspaper, the Moorabool News circulated throughout the shire.
Or he did.
Tatch’s Moorabool Shire landslide
That all came to a halt when Tatch decided to run for council in the Moorabool Shire as an independent. He decided to run in a fit of pique. The then Liberal government had decided to sell off the caravan park which would have left hundreds of fringe dwellers homeless. In the middle of a drought, one of the local footy teams had been unable to host games due to the condition of their ground and was on the verge of collapse. These things were fixable, but no one was fixing them.
Tatch didn’t hit the hustings and plaster his mug all over the shire. He didn’t campaign. After the election, he was surprised to receive a call from the Victorian Electoral Commission telling him he had won the election for the central ward with 67 per cent of the vote.
He walked away from his business interests. His wife now runs the local paper.
When he became a councillor, Moorabool Shire was burdened with debt. The shire hadn’t received a commonwealth or state grant in living memory and its sport and recreation facilities hadn’t been upgraded since Betty Cuthbert won gold in Melbourne in 1956. Bacchus Marsh had been originally designed as a hamlet for 300 people but by then had 17,000. Critical infrastructure didn’t exist. Developers came in with their bulldozers and left in Armaguard vans. Rates rose by eight per cent a year and farmers paid over the odds at residential rates.
The footy club got its water. The caravan park was saved. Tatch piggy backed that campaign to create a shelter for victims of domestic violence. Council started applying for grants based on shovel ready projects. Developers had to pay their way, in infrastructure – roads, parks and community facilities. Rates increase now only by the CPI.
He was re-elected in 2015 with 61 per cent of the vote. Again, he didn’t bother to campaign.
The mayor of Moorabool
Tatch has been mayor now four times.
In 2016, when the Melbourne Port was leased to the Lonsdale Consortium – a myriad of institutional investors including the Future Fund, the Queensland Investment Corporation and one of China’s biggest sovereign wealth funds, CIC Capital for $9.7 billion, rural Victoria was due to receive just six per cent back in infrastructure spending despite providing eighty per cent of the revenue to Melbourne Port.
Tatch got on the phone and spoke firmly with Andrews’ Government ministers.
“I am not going to put up with you taking country people for granted,” he told them.
The Andrews Government wavered and gave rural Victoria nine per cent.
“It’s not enough. They just came up with that figure to shut me up.”
That’s what Paul Tatchell does. He understands how governments work, how bureaucracies operate, and he knows how to make them work for the people he represents. When Tatch goes to Canberra doors open to him that are generally shut to the parade of people who wander around the parliament with their hands out.
It’s a talent rarely found in local government anywhere across the country.
He’s up for election again in a couple of weeks. You’d reckon he’d romp it in, but the Big Red Labor bus has rolled into town and with a nasty little preference deal stitched up, Tatch’s position is under threat.
Labor’s match for Tatch
The Labor candidate is a time server, Ben Davison. His partner is Van Badham, one of the shriller spokespeople of the Labor Party army and one who would never let a media appearance go begging.
Davison’s mother has lived in Ballan for many years and Davison comes to the election as a local resident albeit a relatively new one.
Social media has been down and dirty around the election. Tatch has been accused of all manner of sins. It’s a standard roll call of epithets and vaguely defamatory nonsense. It hasn’t come from Davison but anyone with any knowledge of the machinations of party politics and the workings of social media will tell you that Labor hangers-on are at the heart of what is a fairly nasty misinformation campaign.
Tatch has been pigeonholed as a conservative based on his one time candidacy for the National Party in the 2016 federal election, a decision he made reluctantly as a quid pro quo after the Deputy Prime Minister, Warren Truss agreed to fund a bypass in the shire that cost ratepayers nothing.
I would regard Paul Tatchell as being virtually ideology free. He describes himself with a laugh as a “right wing socialist” and as a “loudmouth who cares”.
Davison and Labor are preferencing against him. Tatch will need around 50 per cent of the primary vote to be re-elected.
The Labor push is no surprise because there remain big problems in the Moorabool Shire. And most of those problems are of the Dan Andrews’ variety.
Massive electricity pylons are set to be built that will stretch from Ararat to Campbellfield in Melbourne’s north. They will transport electricity from the wind farms in the west to a city almost starved of it. The high voltage lines should have been running underground. Instead they will run above ground through bushfire territory in a bizarre defiance of the state’s own bushfire Royal Commission recommendations. The impact of the pylons will be most acutely felt in the Moorabool Shire.
What better way to placate angry ratepayers than have a few Labor people on council wallpapering over the cracks and playing their tedious games of blame shifting and whataboutery?
Ultimately this is a story about how those with the talent, the political means and the best of intentions get run down by partisan influences.
Those with good memories should note Moorabool Shire is now debt free and operates with a surplus. If Labor gets in, how long would that last and how long before ratepayers get stiffed again?
Slips and trips in the tight race for Kooyong
Undisclosed investment properties and pinched signs; it’s been one hell of a tough election in these well-to-do streets.
Sugar hits now distract from bitter pill awaiting us
Dismal productivity growth has cost each Australian $11,000 a year in lost income.
Local governments rarely make the news in the national sphere. But dig deep enough and there are important lessons to be learned. Lessons particularly on the bastardry of the major parties and how they regard public money as their own.