Veteran political strategist Fiona Scott, driving Pocock to his next appointment, advises the man to take the right exit.

“Thanks,” the man shouts. “You know 10 kids have dropped dead after taking the vaccine?”

In today’s jungle of misinformation, where disingenuous roots have begun sprouting tinfoil clumps, politics is acting as both poison and fertiliser, and the average citizen smells manure.

Enter Pocock.

Running for one of the two Federal Senate seats in the ACT, he plans to create history
by becoming the first independent candidate to prevail.

As Australians grow stale of fearmongering and self-centred politics, it feels as though the emergence of Pocock and the rise of independent candidates represents a landscape shift.

But up against the two major parties, with a fraction of their resources, this is rougher than any rugby field, and Pocock isn’t here to play around.

His founding campaign manager was Melanie Poole, who worked on Barack Obama’s 2012 US re-election campaign and was the Anne Wexler Fulbright public policy scholar at New York University from 2013-15.

“I’m not going to tell you to spend half a million bucks on polling companies and focus groups,” Poole told Pocock in their first meeting.

“And I’m not going to script everything you say, and I’m not going to advise you to water down anything about your past and things that you’ve stood for.”

It’s why Pocock remains unmoved by images of his arrest protesting the expansion of the Maules Creek mine in NSW in 2014, now being circulated to discredit him.

Poole has mapped out the path to victory, and it means taking out Liberal incumbent Zed Seselja, who has held the seat since 2013.

“Katy Gallagher, the Labor senator, will definitely get over quota, there is no risk to her,” Poole says.

“So it’s Dave versus Zed. You obviously have to do a baseline electoral analysis. I looked at all the booth-by-booth data and looked at what the pathway to victory would be.

“To win this seat, you need people who previously voted for every party to vote for Dave, including people that have previously voted for Zed Seselja.

“There’s no way you can win this second Senate seat unless you pick up votes from every party.

“So I drilled into what number those votes would have to be, and where are the people who we would really be needing to engage with in terms of demographic and population spread in Canberra. It was so validating that on launch day, when we got 4000 people in one day, that they did cover every single suburb.”

Pocock is bullish. “We want more integrity in politics, and integrity is standing next to your voting record,” he says.

“Zed now has a decade of voting record, on record, and if you look through it I don’t think it represents a lot of Canberrans’ values.

“There are a lot of people really unhappy with the way they’re being represented. As a territory we only get two Senators, so you have to make those two Senators work for the ACT.

“We’ve been leading on renewables, we led on marriage equality, Canberrans want territory rights – they want to be able to legislate on voluntary assisted dying. And we’ve got a Senator who is arguing against all those things.

“If you’re elected by the people of the ACT, you’ve actually got to advocate for them.

The plot to land this burly backrower one of the most influential seats in the country is being hatched out of the Pocock’s loungeroom, where in large print on a whiteboard it says, “80 days until 7 May”.

Like during the 80 minutes of a Test match – Pocock represented the Wallabies 78 times and was World Player of the Year nominee twice – the 33 year old is not leaving any gas in the tank.

His battle to win the hearts and minds of the ACT is being forged by a dedicated team of 10 staff working from his dining table and bedrooms, while Pocock is relentlessly wearing out the soles of his Vivobarefoot walking shoes across the pavements lining Canberra’s streets, meeting locals to discuss their pressing concerns.

“All these people in safe seats don’t get a lot of attention,” Pocock says.

“If you’re in a safe seat, you actually want to try and make it marginal, because as we’ve seen, that’s where the attention goes, that’s where people actually listen to you.”

Pocock has taken cues from successful independents.

“You see what Cathy McGowan and Helen Haines have done for Indi [Victoria], and the amount of attention and infrastructure they’ve got because they’re actually a voice for their community,” Pocock says.

“That’s what I hope to do, take issues people in the ACT care about, take them into the Senate and get good outcomes for Canberrans, because in many ways we get a raw deal given all the seats here are so safe.”

The activist mentality runs deep

Born in Zimbabwe to farmers, Pocock and his family were forced to flee to Australia in 2002 when President Robert Mugabe began a bloody land redistribution campaign.

They moved to Brisbane and Pocock attended Anglican Church Grammar School (Churchie), where he played GPS rugby, graduating in 2005.

“Growing up in Zim, you realise just how important democracy is,” Pocock says.

The activist mentality runs deep.

Few picked up that when Pocock made his Super Rugby debut for the Western Force in 2006, and through his domestic and international career, his boots were painted black because of his concerns about the sweat shops they were potentially manufactured in.

Australia certainly took notice in 2010 when Pocock and partner Emma Palandri took a stand for same-sex marriage, holding a small ceremony but refusing to sign their marriage certificate until gay couples could do so. They then married officially in 2018.

The same-sex bill became a lightning rod for Australia in 2017, and two years later Pocock’s Wallabies teammate Israel Folau, who opposed the bill, was sacked by Rugby Australia over homophobic social media posts.

The legislation was passed and in December 2018, David and Emma officially signed their marriage certificate.

Pocock also began speaking out over climate change concerns early in his career.

Taking a stand is one thing. Taking a stand for office brings about an inherent propensity for personal attacks.

“I’m a pretty calm person at the best of times,” says Emma Pocock, 33.

“It’s not like we haven’t been in the public eye before, or had people stretch the truth about us,” she says.

“I know this is a whole new level, politics is more hairy than sport. It can be really uncomfortable, but if you behave with integrity and make choices with the best information you have, that’s all you can really do.

“The sledging is pretty sad, it is a statement about where our democracy is at. And we want to be a part of changing that.

Is her husband ready for the onslaught?

“Having seen the way Dave has acted in public with so much integrity over a really long career, how engaged he’s been on so many issues – and as a footballer you only get bandwidth to talk about one or two things you care about off the field – how deeply he thinks about a range of issues important to people in Canberra, yeah,” Emma says.

“And we are at this junction point where there is a lot of chaos around the world, and in Australia, from Covid to the climate crisis to geopolitical stuff, we just felt like we don’t have another three, six, nine years to make these kinds of decisions.

“We need people in there who are thinking about what the future looks like in 10 and 20 years, not just making decisions for the next election and how they satisfy their donors and hold onto power.”

Pocock is reliant on Emma’s input – she runs a company for athletes who want to alleviate climate change, but has previously worked in politics as a senior policy and strategy adviser for Sarah Hanson-Young.

“In our own way, we’ve been working on things that feel meaningful, and for me, that’s the key,” Pocock says.

“Things get really hard, but as long as they actually feel right and meaningful for you, you can push through. There’s so many examples through human history, when people actually feel like what they’re doing is meaningful, they can keep going and stick with it.

“Em’s pretty grounded, maybe doesn’t get as caught up on things as me, can have a bit more perspective at times, which is great.”

Shaping destiny, gathering support

While it felt throughoutPocock’s rugby careerthat politics was part of his destiny, he often rejected the idea to reporters.

His apathy towards the established parties – who Pocock believes have become crippled by ideology over ideas – made it seem an unlikely path when he retired from the game
in 2020.

Instead, Pocock went on a seven-month trip to Zimbabwe to work on the Rangelands Restoration project, while Emma remained in Canberra due to Covid restrictions.

In that time, community group ProACT, made up of frustrated locals in the national capital who feel ignored by their politicians, set about finding a figure who could represent them as an independent at this year’s election.

The one name that kept coming back was David Pocock.

“We had a large number of people who used to vote for the major parties who were coming to us saying they were fed up, people who are retired and had never been part of a political campaign saying they can get behind this man,” says Sarah Reid, a ProACT member who is now a volunteer for the Pocock campaign.

In a run-off, Pocock prevailed against a rival with more than 80 per cent of votes and was installed as the independent candidate.

He’d hoped to be back in Canberra for the announcement, however caught Covid in South Africa as he tried to return, so announced his candidacy from there.

It was perhaps fitting, given the region moulded him so, and how the promises of a rich life in Australia failed to materialise for all in his family.

“My parents have no superannuation, my brother can’t afford to get into the property market, and these are issues so many Australians are facing,” Pocock says.

There are varying reasons for the support Pocock is gathering. Canberra resident Nicole Robertson says: “I’ve always followed David as a rugby player, as well as his views on marriage equality which was big for me, I don’t think marriage should just be for
one cohort.

“That got me interested in what Dave’s policies are and what he stands for, but the thing for me is territory rights. At the moment we’re not getting what we deserve as Territorians, the government is holding back on that.

“I lost my dad in January to cancer, and if he was allowed he would have taken advantage of voluntary assisted dying. And he wasn’t given that opportunity as a Territorian because we haven’t got that right at the moment.

“I’d been voting Liberal for a long time, I actually left the Liberal party when my dad died and joined Dying With Dignity instead because it became quite clear to me, having gone through losing someone to cancer, what impact it actually has on a family.

“And Dad would say to me, ‘I just want to die’, and you’re asking people, ‘Please do something’ and they’d say ‘We can’t do anything’.

“It was just terrible, no one should have to go through that. Somebody should be able to decide for themselves what they want to do. So I won’t be voting for any of the major parties anymore.”

Another young mother, Minky Faber, has abandoned her traditional allegiance to Labor.

“I’ve always been Labor down the line. When I was first voting, independents were on the fringe and I didn’t agree with what they had to say,” Faber says.

“But gradually it’s become apparent that independents are a voice for their electorate. We’ve had candidates that don’t represent the community and just toe the party line.

“Mask-wearing for us came not during the pandemic, but the 2019 bushfires. I have a background in ecology, and seeing the way that impacted life was unbearable.

“The most critical issue to me would have to be climate change.

“I would be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about our generation. When the Boomers start to go into aged care and the shift of resources goes there, what’s going to be left for our generation?”

The future

Monetising clean energy is one of Pocock’s major policies.

“It’s so exciting that of all the places in the world, Australia could be the place that shows the world, this is how you do it, this is how you have the lowest electricity prices in the world, this is how you reduce household bills, this is how you build all these industries that the rest of the world desperately wants in a decarbonised economy,” Pocock says.

“And we’ve got to get on with that now. Other countries are already shipping green steel. We should be doing that.

“You look at Andrew Forrest talking about hydrogen, it’s the future. We’ve got all these businesses banking on it, but we don’t have the government actually giving us the certainty that takes us in that direction and facilitates households actually benefiting.

“We are used to watching sport, the Olympics, and for a country our size we punch well above our weight, and yet when it comes to climate action we’re dead last in the UN rankings, dead last.”

Pocock also wants to enact truth in political advertising legislation, and hopes to cap political donations to $2000.

“We need different voices in politics,” Pocock says.

“We need people who aren’t career politicians, who have other life experience, who can actually represent different parts of Australia better.”

As Poole has learned in her forensic studies of Australian politics, nine out of 10 members of parliament used to be lawyers.

“I think that’s a big part of why this whole independence movement has risen up,” Poole says.

“If you look at the early 80s, back then around 90 per cent of Australians were members of trade unions, and those unions were accountable to their membership through a number of structures.

“I’m not saying it was perfect, but today we have the inverse, like only 10 per cent of Australians are members of unions. And we used to have hundreds of thousands, huge chunks of the population that were members of both of the parties.

“And now the party memberships have never been lower. It’s something like 50,000 people for each major party. These parties are representing 25 million people, and each of them has about 50,000 members. I mean, most football clubs have more.

“What was powerful about both of Obama’s campaigns is that it was the first time ever that the whole strategy was built around not just how do we use the power of a small number of very wealthy and powerful individuals, but how do we build power across a huge number of everyday people and communicate a message that makes everyone feel engaged?

“Even if you’re an African-American single mum living in a housing project on minimum wage, you actually bring power to being a part of this campaign. And I had those conversations with really low income people who were just so screwed over in America by how bad their wages are and how bad the health system is, they were engaging with this campaign and playing a part in it and getting fired up.

“And they would openly tell you that they had never seen a reason to even think about politics before.

“So I think that’s the lesson, the power of relational organising. I’m not naive about it. We’re up against two major parties that have significant vested interests behind them, significant resources. There’s absolutely no way we can match those resources.

“It sounds cliche, but people actually are powerful. You can build a structure that does activate the power that people have.” 

Poole has used the same methodology with Pocock – getting him in front of as many voters as possible in the 80-day plan, anticipating that other candidates will only begin face-to-face campaigning in the final fortnight.

Poole says she didn’t want to run a typical party-political style campaign.

“The way I want to do it is that we have really genuine conversations with people, and the way that we will win is through people actually believing in us, and talking to their friends and their families, their neighbours and their colleagues,” Poole says.

“It’s not going to be through some kind of multimillion-dollar advertising campaign. It’s not going to be through just trying to run negative stuff about Zed,” she says.

“While I may not know a lot about rugby, I know that in any sporting code it’s not easy to take a stand on issues. How many political candidates do we have that we can say have that character trait, how many paid a price to stand up for something, especially to stand up for a community that they personally aren’t a part of or a cause they’re not personally impacted by?”

Frederica Heacock, owner of pet grooming business Wooof in Manuka, is one vote in the bag.

“This is the sort of energy Australian politics needs, someone young, someone focused on real issues and someone who can influence change,” she says.

“Not just world politics, but Australian politics, has become a joke. It’s disheartening.

“So hopefully David can get a few more interesting people on board – if he can cope with it, because it’s so divisive.

“I can see David’s focus on the environment – I just told David we use all environmental products here, we don’t use chemicals in our services, that’s a big thing for us.

“All of our treatments and products we sell are 100 per cent natural, so I think business owners have got the opportunity to contribute to change.”

A group of men spots Pocock near the shopping strip in Manuka.

They want to chat rugby. He turns the conversation to politics, but they advise him they’re from Sydney and can’t vote for him.

“But here’s what I’ll do,” one man says. “I will wear out the carpet beside my bed praying for you to win.”