Cold shoulder for Bowen on his home return

Chris Bowen has returned to his childhood roots in western Sydney to make his pitch for the Labor leadership.

Labor Treasury spokesman and leadership contender Chris Bowen outside his childhood home in Smithfield, Sydney, yesterday. Picture: AAP

Chris Bowen grew up in a fibro shack on Braemar Street, Smithfield, in Sydney’s western suburbs, opposite soccer player Harry Kewell.

He made his way there yesterday to make his pitch for the Labor leadership: “I can connect with suburban and regional Australia,” he said. “I come from the suburbs, from here.”

The only problem is, many voters in his old stomping ground — including on his old street — reject his signature policies.

With about 76 per cent of the vote counted, the opposition Treasury spokesman appeared to have suffered a 5.1 per cent swing against him in Saturday’s poll.

Only one man on his old street — Noel Stribling, 67 — told The Australian yesterday he voted Labor, but the retiree said he was “disappointed with politicians in general” and had no great love for his local member, Mr Bowen. “I do not trust any of them,” he said.

Others, who did not wish to be named, were scathing of Labor’s policies — its proposed changes to negative gearing, capital gains tax and franking credits and others, many of which bore Mr Bowen’s stamp.

“They are socialist policies,” one said. “Many people in this area came to Australia to escape socialism and communism in their home countries. Why would they want to go back to that?”

The retiree said he had worked hard to pay for his own house and believed Labor had “misjudged” the electorate by trying to take money from people’s pockets to redistribute to those who were less fortunate.

 

Another said she had feared a Shorten government would mean “the end of Australian life”.

Her husband said he had previously voted Labor but no longer supported the party.

“They are trying to take everything away from working people and they are supposed to be for the working person,” he said.

Mr Bowen, 46, has always been ambitious. At 10, he told his teacher at nearby Smithfield Public School that he wanted to be prime minister. By 15, he had joined the Australian Labor Party and at 25 he became mayor of Fairfield, his local government area.

As a teen, he was studious, and in his ministerial portfolios he has always had a reputation for being across his brief — but his policy instincts have not always been good.

In his first role as assistant treasurer under Kevin Rudd, he presided over some clangers: FuelWatch, GroceryChoice and then a crackdown on employee share schemes that even had his former employer, the Finance Sector Union, up in arms.

Yesterday, he admitted responsibility for designing Labor’s disastrous franking credits policy, which angered retirees across Australia — but denied it was the reason his party lost the election.

“I designed it. I designed it to invest more in schools and hospitals, to give Labor a good program of investment,” he said. “Franking credits was a controversial policy. A controversial policy, for which, no doubt, we lost some votes. But I don’t accept that it is why we lost the election in its entirety.”

If Mr Bowen is to have any hope of leading Labor to victory in 2022, he will have to be able to convince Australians, like those who live on his old street, that he can pick the right economic policies for the country.