High Steaks: Ali France opens up on her election night win and beating Peter Dutton
Federal Member for Dickson Ali France has opened up on her historic victory over Peter Dutton and addressed the infamous fundraiser where she was accused of bullying. WELCOME TO HIGH STEAKS
It was around 7.30pm when she looked up at that bank of flickering screens with their multi coloured pie graphs and the calm, measured voice of Antony Green providing the main soundtrack, and thought:
“I might win this!’’
Ali France was at the Kallangur Memorial Bowls Club in the heart of the north Brisbane federal seat of Dickson.
A few cheers were going up about the prospect of her becoming the first Australian political contender to unseat the Opposition Leader in a federal contest, but this wasn’t Ali’s first rodeo, and she said nothing.
“When you get to election day, you are working towards that day but you are not too concerned about what happens at the end of it, especially if you have lost two times before,’’ she recalls over steak and chips at the Arana Hills Leagues Club.
“All you can think about is, ‘I just want to get to the pub, I’m exhausted, I want to get a beer and some chips, I just want to start to exhale a bit.
“So I got there, and I got my drink, and well I was just jibber jabbering as I normally do and having a few drinks.
“And some people started cheering and I was thinking, ‘well that looks positive’ but just left it at that.
“I was so engrossed with talking to the volunteers and everyone, you know there is a lot of people to talk to and thank, and then I heard them cheering again and I went up to one of the volunteers, and this is about 8pm or quarter past eight, and I said to one of the volunteers:
“I think we might win this.
“And they grab me by the shoulders, and they say:
“We have won this!
“Keep up!’’
Then she went into the adjoining tally room where the state member for Murrumba and former Queensland Premier Steven Miles and Labor Senator Anthony Chisholm and her campaign managers were taking calls from the booths scattered throughout Dickson.
“And I burst through the door and I said: Have we won this!’
“And their faces were like… Yeeesss!’’
“I have never seen Steven (Miles) so excited.
“He is a good friend, and has always been so incredibly supportive of me.
“He was like, ‘you’ve done it!’’
What happened next was an extension of the good grace with which the sitting member and then Opposition leader Peter Dutton accepted his defeat in that admiral concession speech.
He called her on her mobile to congratulate her and wish her the best.
“And he was lovely - he said you will be a really great member, you should be proud of yourself and Henry (her recently deceased son) would be proud of you.
“And I told him, ‘thanks for your service because 24 years of politics can be really hard’ - it’s a hard road for anyone.’’
“You did call him Mr Potato Head during the campaign,’’ I remind her.
A news story emerged during the campaign that her campaign sent out email invites to supporters for a “Potato Night” fundraiser with potato-themed activities, riffing off the nickname bestowed on the bald Dutton.
”Well that was not actually me, it was a branch member,’’ Ali explains.
“It was a branch thing that somebody got hold of. I didn’t organise that and we cancelled it afterwards.
“If I had seen him over the campaign I would have explained that but I didn’t really see him.’’
She’s 52, with a lifetime of tragedies and extraordinary successes behind her, but a career in politics never really occurred to her until her mid 40s.
Gazing back upon her ancestry she has no hesitation in singling out her Irish Australian grandmother Mary Lawlor as a key sculptor, shaping not merely her own life, but that of her father Peter Lawlor the former Queensland Cabinet Minister and Gold Coast City Councillor.
Fifty years ago Mary Lawlor scandalised the Gold Coast’s Catholic community when she stood up at Sunday Mass and began roaring her disapproval at a startled priest for suggesting the congregation should vote any way but Labor.
It was after the election of Labor’s Gough Whitlam in 1972 and Mary, the daughter of County Mayo immigrants, and her husband, a house painter, were struggling working class people with five kids when Whitlam arrived on the scene.
One of her children had cystic fibrosis and when Medibank was introduced by Bill Hayden it was the first time the family was able to get real medical assistance for the boy.
One Sunday in church (“and my grandmother was more involved with the Catholic Church than she was with the Labor Party”) the parish priest lectured his congregation on voting for the Liberal Party.
“And, in front of this packed church, my grandmother stood up and said - ‘how dare you!
“She just berated the priest in front of everyone, just went at him as a traitor to working people.
“I mean she just went off the deep end, saying ‘how can you turn your back on Medibank and free university and all the things that working class people really needed’.’’
Decades later, Peter Lawlor was still being stopped in the street to be reminded of the day his mother Mary blew up the priest.
Yet out of that somewhat combustible progenitor grew two political success stories, with Mary planting the seeds of her social justice views in son Peter and granddaughter Ali, encouraging Ali to take an interest in politics and get into journalism.
Peter, who has always been close to his daughter Ali, recalls Mary, who died in 2000, as an extraordinarily positive force in not only the family’s lives but in the wider community - a woman always determined to do some good in the world.
“But she was never actually a member of the Labor Party, just a supporter.’’
Ali, as has been well documented, has confronted more than her share of tragedy in her life.
She listened to her grandmother and began working life as a journalist on the Courier Mail more than a quarter of a century ago.
She soon headed overseas to work on the Hong Kong Standard as a senior High Court reporter before moving to London and working on the Westminster Council and later with the British Healthcare Commission where she worked in communications.
Married to Clive and with two kids and living in a tiny terrace in London she pined for the Queensland lifestyle and came home.
Then one of those defining moments in life occurred in 2011 when she and her son Zac were hit by a car driven by an elderly man in the car park of an Ashgrove shopping centre.
Seriously injured, her leg was amputated, then her marriage broke down and her husband Clive died in 2023 while son Henry died of leukaemia in 2024.
Yet she has not merely endured but triumphed over adversity, making her life a succession of wins including representing Australia in paracanoeing and winning two team gold medals and a silver at the Outrigger Canoe World Sprint Championships.
And it was the loss of the leg and the experience of living with a disability which helped turn her mind to a political career.
Now her future is all blue sky and filled with opportunity but don’t expect her to be clamouring for ministerial leather in the next three years.
She remembers a stint as a journalist in the Courier Mail’s Townsville bureau where, away from the glamour of the capital cities, she began to see more clearly how journalism could impact positively on ordinary people’s lives.
“I loved it, talking to people, listening to their stories,’’ she said.
“It was the social justice impact of it, being able to expose something and put some pressure here or there and maybe get some justice for that person.
“If you can have some impact on individual lives as a politician, I think that is such an achievement.’’
That will be her approach as the Member for Dickson.
“I want to be there, at all community events, I want to be there for the people who elected me,’’ she says.
Other than being a good local MP, she admits to one other clearly defined ambition.
“My big goal is to hold the seat for longer than Peter Dutton did.’’
Meal. Wagyu Eye Fillet, chips salad. 9/10.
Originally published as High Steaks: Ali France opens up on her election night win and beating Peter Dutton
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