2022 federal election: Liberal MP Katie Allen fights to hold on in left-moving seat
It’s Dr versus Dr as the battle heats up for the once blue ribbon Liberal seat of Higgins in Melbourne’s leafy inner southeast.
Liberal MP and former paediatrician Katie Allen has labelled her Labor opponent Michelle Ananda-Rajah a “national disgrace” for comments the infectious diseases expert and general physician made last year about the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Dr Allen’s spray comes as the battle for her inner-southeastern Melbourne seat of Higgins heats up, with Labor strategists adamant they can win the electorate once held by Harold Holt, John Gorton and Peter Costello, despite criticism of their candidate’s comments.
Higgins extends from inner-city South Yarra across to Glen Iris and Ashburton in the east, and Ormond, Carnegie, Murrumbeena and Hughesdale in the southeast, taking in some of Melbourne’s most prestigious addresses in Toorak, Malvern and Armadale.
It was one of the last stops on the final day of what Bill Shorten thought was his election day victory lap in 2019, but Dr Allen held on against barrister Fiona McLeod, withstanding a 6.08 per cent swing against her to retain a 3.88 per cent two-party-preferred margin, following the resignation of Turnbull government minister Kelly O’Dwyer.
A Higgins resident since her teenage years, Dr Allen is adamant she can see off another high-profile Labor recruit, but even Liberals privately concede that demographic change – particularly in the west of the seat, which overlaps with the Greens-held state electorate of Prahran – is making her task more difficult.
At her electorate office in Malvern Road, one of Dr Allen’s staffers looks slightly uneasy as she goes to town on her opponent’s professional record.
“He’s about to say I’m being too loudmouthed about this, but I’m actually quite shocked that (Dr Ananda-Rajah) can say what she said on Q&A,” Dr Allen says.
What Dr Ananda-Rajah said on the ABC TV show in February 2021, as AstraZeneca was beginning to be rolled out to vulnerable and older Australians, was that it had “failed in terms of its efficacy” and that the rollout was “a population-level experiment”.
“I think it’s a national disgrace what she’s done, and I’ve seen Labor have tried to back-pedal on her position,” Dr Allen says.
“Vaccine hesitancy being fuelled by potential leaders, and having a background like she has, I think it’s appalling. She crossed a professional line in my view.”
Dr Ananda-Rajah tells The Australian her views had “always been consistent with the official health advice, and with the evidence that was circulating at the time, which as you know shifted quite a bit during the pandemic”.
“I’ve seen first-hand, particularly during the Omicron wave, the lifesaving reach of vaccination,” she says.
“I was recalled from leave during the Code Brown in January and I was asked to stand up a Covid team at The Alfred (hospital), and I basically left my family who I hadn’t seen in two years and legged it back to The Alfred.
“These attacks really began after my candidacy was announced. They’ve served to divert attention away from the monumental failings of the Morrison-Joyce government with respect to vaccine procurement and distribution.”
For her part, Dr Allen says she sees the Morrison government’s handling of the pandemic as a positive for her campaign. While she admits voters in her patch “don’t necessarily like ScoMo”, they “certainly don’t like Albo”.
“And then I say to them ‘Is ScoMo delivering for you?’ And they say yes, so I talk about all the deliverables, the fact that, yes, it was messy, the vaccine rollout was messy, but we achieved higher vaccination rates ahead of time with one of the lowest mortality rates in the world, and we’ve delivered a strong economy, low unemployment, high female participation, and that we’ve kept a triple-A credit rating,” Dr Allen says.
“People in Higgins understand the fundamentals. They can look past the character assassinations, the mud-slinging, and see this is a strong, consistent government that’s been making decisions in what has been a very uncertain world, and it’s made them look easy when in fact they’ve been difficult decisions.”
Around the corner at her campaign office in Glenferrie Road, Dr Ananda-Rajah says she’s hearing very different things from the voters she meets.
“I think that there are quite a few disaffected people in Higgins, people who feel affronted by this government and their values,” she says.
“They perceive Scott Morrison as a failed leader, a man who does not take responsibility.
“They’re sick of the spin and the gimmicks and the doublespeak, and they want action.
“They sense they’re not going to get it under this government and it’s time for a change.”
A mother of two teenage children who was born to newly arrived Sri Lankan Tamil parents in the UK and spent much of her childhood in Zambia before moving to Sydney at the age of 11, Dr Ananda-Rajah lives just outside Higgins in Josh Frydenberg’s neighbouring seat of Kooyong, but says she feels connected to the Higgins community, having worked as a senior clinician at The Alfred for the past 13 years.
A political newcomer who did not join the Labor Party until last year, she was uncontested in her preselection, having been hand-picked by the Labor MP for nearby Macnamara, Josh Burns, who liked what he saw of her advocacy early in the pandemic as the leader of activist group Health Care Workers Australia.
Dr Ananda-Rajah says the key issues voters are raising with her include action on climate change and intergenerational inequality.
Both issues rate highly with the voters The Australian meets on South Yarra’s Chapel Street.
Recruiter Rhys Carman and his marketing manager partner Danielle Paton, both 31, are representative of a left-leaning younger demographic increasingly moving to the area, or reaching voting age under their more conservative parents’ roofs.
“I will probably be preferencing the Greens and Labor, taking a vote away from the two major parties but still preferencing a more left-leaning vote, a more progressive vote. I don’t believe in the Liberal Party or any conservative-based parties,” says Mr Carman.
Ms Paton says she will vote similarly.
“Greens and Labor. Definitely not Scott Morrison,” she says.
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