WITH less than two months to go until the expected Federal Election on May 10 or May 17, the Australian Labor Party, the party in government, this week finally chose to nominate a candidate for the seat of Bowman.
This silence was not only bewildering but spoke volumes about how the ALP views this electorate – clearly, as an afterthought, one in which it’s not worth investing time, resources or energy.
The ALP announced the fresh-faced Darcy Brown just 54 days out from the latest possible election date of May 17 (or 47 days if Albo calls it this weekend for May 10).
The previous record for the shortest amount of time a Labor candidate has had on the ground after being preselected in Bowman was in 2010 with Jenny Peters.
She was preselected 162 days before the Federal Election so had three times longer than young Darcy to lay out her vision for the community.
With Donna Webster in 2004, it was 160 days, however, she was taking over from a sitting Labor member in Con Sciacca.
The fact that the ALP has only put forward a candidate for Bowman this week reveals a lack of engagement with the community.
It’s as if the party elders decided the seat was too challenging to win, or, more troublingly, simply not worth their attention.
The ALP appeared content to focus its efforts elsewhere, writing off Bowman as one of those “safe” Liberal seats it can afford to ignore.
Bowman is held by the LNP’s Henry Pike with a 5.5 per cent margin.
Meanwhile, just across the border in neighbouring Bonner, the ALP preselected Kara Cook for Bonner on January 31, and she has hit the ground running with a strong presence in the community.
Bonner, with a margin of 3.1 per cent, is now very much in play thanks to Cook’s dedicated campaigning.
This sharp contrast between the proactive approach in Bonner and the near total inaction in Bowman highlights a troubling trend within politics – parties are only willing to engage in seats they deem “winnable”.
Until this week, voters in Bowman were left without any clear sense of who will best represent their interests.
The Greens put forward Kristie Lockhart.
We have a brave independent in Shaun Holloway wearing out his shoe leather, and he even addressed a Redlands senior citizens – sorry, I mean Redlands2030 – meeting.
The ALP’s failure to wait until Monday to announce a candidate gives the impression that it views this seat not as an opportunity to serve, but as an inconvenience.
Meanwhile, Pike, has been in campaign mode for weeks.
He’s leaving no stone unturned and no photo opportunity missed, covering as many street fences as possible with his
“I Like Pike” signs (not forgetting the subtly different “We Like Pike” signage for couples and families) as he takes early campaigning to a whole new level.
I even witnessed an early morning walker at Raby Bay wearing a billboard, all but turning himself into a living, breathing advertisement for Pike.
While Pike is actively campaigning (he claims to have personally door-knocked 25,000 homes – can anyone disprove it?) and demonstrating that he’s in the fight to win, the ALP’s lazy approach to Bowman could not be starker.
It has been happy to focus its efforts elsewhere, leaving voters in Bowman to wonder why they’ve been so clearly disregarded.
The ALP must ask itself: How can it hope to retain the trust of voters when it was unwilling to nominate a candidate in a seat like Bowman until the eleventh hour?
The voters of Bowman deserve better than to be treated as an afterthought.
