An interview with the Democrat candidate for Lilley – Jennifer Cluse

As part of a continuing exercise in interviewing all candidates for the Queensland Federal seat of Lilley, this time it is the turn of the Australian Democrats. The Democrats stronghold is the Senate where they hope Andrew Bartlett will retain the seat he has held since 1997. However they are also contesting every House of Representative seat in Queensland. In 2004, the Democrats took one 1.5 percent of the vote in Lilley and the candidate this time round is Jennifer Cluse. Woolly Days interviewed Jennifer Cluse yesterday.

By her own admission, Jennifer Cluse is not a politician. She is a retiree who worked in the air force as a radio technician and then as a commercial pilot. She is a mother of two sons and lives in Chermside where her dream is to make her home completely carbon neutral. Cluse said she was compelled to put her name forward as a political candidate after John Howard won control of the Senate in 2004. Since then she has seen “appalling legislation” pushed through such as workchoices and the anti-terror laws passed almost without debate. She compared the current situation to when the Democrats had the balance of power. “We checked every line and queried every problematic bit of drafting,” she said.

Cluse said she was the classic swing voter and had elected the government in the lower house in every election for the last 40 years, except in the last one. She said she voted Democrat each time in the Senate. “Don Chipp rang all my bells and pushed my buttons,” she said. She denied that the Democrats were a spent force. “[The media] were saying we were finished after Cheryl Kernot left,” she said. “They were wrong then and they are wrong now”.

Cluse praised the Democrat Senate candidate Andrew Bartlett as an “amazingly stable, patient, and listening politician”. She said most politicians only want to talk at you but Bartlett was a great listener and he has the gift of finding a way of precisely expressing what he has heard. If Cluse had one minor criticism of him, it was that his voice modulation tends to be even and there were “no oratory flourishes”. Cluse said he was “an honourable politician”.

I then asked what she was hearing from the electorate out on the hustings. She said there was “universal agreement we’ve got to get control of the Senate back”. She hoped that people would vote Democrat, or else the Greens. She said she was not happy with the way Labor was going. “I’m starting to worry that Garrett WAS joking,” she said. She said John Howard had done “admirable things” in the past such as changing the gun laws in the wake of Port Arthur and restructuring the superannuation scheme. But against that, she said he had caused anguish for refugees, denied the problems of global warming and promoted selfishness in Australia.

She said that while the Greens were on the right path, they were not yet ‘good enough’. Cluse heard Larissa Waters speak recently where she (Waters) said they ‘had 40 policies’ now. “That was the problem", said Cluse. “They have too narrow a focus.” She said that Family First were a sinister party associated with a Church that practiced manipulation on the young people that joined it. “They are too extreme,” she said. “Balance is what we need.”

Cluse said that the environment was the single most important issue of the election. She said that she knows from her radio technician days how a runaway positive feedback situation can have dire consequences. "This is happening with CO2 emissions NOW," she said. "Electronics can control runaway positive feedback with a fuse which blows. The earth has NO fuse.". She believes we have a maximum until 2018 to stabilise our emissions though she notes that CSIRO are now saying we only have until 2015. She believed the message about this “desperate situation” was not getting through to people because of selfishness. She heard it best put in the phrase that goes “the economy is me, the environment is us”.

Cluse was depressed by the role of the local media in the election. She said she had stopped buying all local newspapers and subscribed only to The Economist. She said it was the only publication not to give the name of its reporters. The local media was all about opinion pieces, grabs, sound bytes, and was lacking in in-depth reporting. She blamed the journalism schools at universities who were commercially driven to produce what employers want. She concluded by saying that Howard had slashed education budgets and deliberately created a “dumbed down society”.

Swan floats in the Lilley poll

Of all the seats in Queensland to poll, why in God’s name would you pick Lilley? This was the question asked by William Bowe last week in his blog The Poll Bludger. Bowe is one of Australia’s growing band of influential on-line psephologists. He was perplexed by the decision of a Brisbane newspaper to poll Wayne Swan’s Labor-held seat of Lilley rather than one of Queensland’s volatile seats more likely to change hands in the 24 November election.

The poll was taken by Galaxy for Brisbane’s Sunday Mail on 28 October. It showed Swan’s primary support has risen 10 per cent since the last election - no great surprise, given the Labor swings elsewhere. So why “in God’s name” poll there? A clue to the answer is that the Mail, a News Ltd publication, is more likely to publish a poll in Mammon’s name rather than God’s.

While the electoral focus of William Bowe and the other psephologists is firmly on the key marginal and “bellwether” seats, they sometimes forget the rest of the country is also going to the polls. Bowe acknowledges that a Brisbane monopoly newspaper such as the Mail has to consider every area equally. And Lilley does have a star attraction, If the polls are right, and Labor does win the election, then this seat will be held by the man Kevin Rudd said would be the next Federal Treasurer.

Wayne Swan won the seat by a margin of 5.4 per cent in the 2004 election. Lilley remains, notionally at least, a Labor marginal seat. And it is not an entirely fanciful notion. Named for the 19th century premier of Queensland, Sir Charles Lilley, the seat takes in about 140 square kilometres (pdf) of inner north-eastern bayside suburbs. It is bounded clockwise by the Brisbane River, Breakfast Creek, Webster Road, Cabbage Tree Creek, North Pine River and Moreton Bay. Lilley is mostly residential but also includes industrial areas as well as Brisbane Airport, the Boondall Wetlands and Brisbane’s two racecourses. The seat is roughly analogous to the Brisbane council wards of Hamilton, Northgate and Deagon.

Prior to European settlement, the area was home to the Oondunbi people. They used the lands for food gathering, camping, meetings, conflicts and burials. The first Europeans to arrive were Moravian missionaries who established the German station in Nundah in 1838. They were followed four years later by lay settlers who lusted for the Oondunbi lands and forced them off.

Slowly Brisbane spread its tentacles. Mass settlement took off thanks to public transport. The railway to Sandgate opened in 1882 and it was followed by trams to Ascot in 1899. Today, Lilley has an ageing and mostly Anglo-Irish population. While annual family incomes in the leafier suburbs of Ascot and Clayfield are above the Brisbane average, the industrial belt suburbs of the electorate are below the city’s average.

This demographic mix has seen the seat held by all major parties over the years. Wayne Swan first won in 1993 but was unseated in the Howard landslide election win in 1996. He won the seat back from the Liberals two years later and has increased his margin in every election since. He puts his success down to good local knowledge and hard work. “I think I understand the area well, I’ve spent a lot of time working here and getting extensive knowledge of the community,” he said. “A federal electorate is a large area and it takes time to get to know it.”

Greens’ candidate Simon Kean-Hammerson is also taking the time to get to know his electorate. Born in Kenya, he grew up in Victoria and Sydney and moved to Brisbane in the early 1990s. He has lived in Lilley ever since. Kean-Hammerson was immediately attracted to the friendliness of the area. “Brisbane was a lovely cosmopolitan town with great potential for business” he said. “You walked down a street and someone would smile at you. I didn’t see that down south”. The Galaxy poll puts his support at seven per cent.

The Liberal candidate is 33 year old accountant Scott McConnel. He was the only person to apply for Liberal preselection in Lilley. McConnel told the Sunday Mail in May he faced "an uphill battle" to win the seat. The Galaxy poll bears this out with his support at just 32 per cent. McConnel did not comment on the poll and he also refused to make himself available to interview for this article.

His reluctance to go on the record is matched by several Brisbane-based Liberal candidates. Democrat Senator Andrew Bartlett has noted the consistent non-appearance of Liberal candidates at public pre-election forums. Dr Jason Wilson, convenor of the citizen journalism website Youdecide2007, is also frustrated by the problem. He says the Liberals have repeatedly broken appointments and not returned calls. “We thought it might be us after Herbert MP Peter Lindsay gave us an unguarded interview that was picked up by the Fairfax Press,” he said. “But it looks more like the Liberals don’t trust their members who aren’t A-list performers to deliver”.

Back in Lilley, Wayne Swan is happy to talk. He said the secret of his success was a common-sense approach. “I work hard, am disciplined and I like to get results.” Former Labor leader Mark Latham was no fan of these characteristics and The Latham Diaries described Swan as a “robot”, “careerist” and a “machine man”. Swan sees it differently. “The reason I’m in politics,” he said, “is that I want to make a difference to my local community and my country”.

His confidence is growing and he impressed with a solid performance in his debate on Tuesday with Treasurer Peter Costello. If Galaxy is right, the local community agree more with Swan’s assessment of himself rather than Latham’s. Lilley looks set to reward him with a handsome majority in November. It may not be an obvious seat to poll, but it does say Lilley is ready to back Wayne Swan as their local Treasurer.