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Politics
Explainer
Battle for Batman: Can Greens social worker topple Labor heavyweight in by-election?
The Liberals are not running a candidate in the inner-city Melbourne seat, stepping aside to give the Greens a greater chance of ending Labor’s decades-long dominance.
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Updated
By James Elton-Pym
Image: Labor candidate Ged Kearney, left, and Greens candidate Alex Bhathal. (AAP)
The seat of Batman in the north of Melbourne was once the definition of Labor heartland, held by the ALP since the early 1900s in an almost uninterrupted run.
Now it could be under serious threat from the Greens.
Labor is hoping heavyweight union candidate Ged Kearney will be enough to shore up its traditional working-class base, while the Greens believe a groundswell of opposition to the proposed Adani coal mine will swing the result in favour of their six-time candidate, social worker Alex Bhathal.
Voting opens at 8am on Saturday 17 March.
Why is there a mini election in Batman?
The sitting member for Batman is Labor’s David Feeney, who is among the politicians caught up in the dual-citizenship crisis.
In February, Mr Feeney admitted he could not prove he had renounced his British citizenship a decade ago and resigned from the House of Representatives.
The resignation triggered a by-election in the electorate, similar to the local contests fought by the Coalition’s Barnaby Joyce and John Alexander last year.
Labor vs Greens
The Liberals are not running a candidate in Batman, so the main contest will be between Labor and the Greens. There’s a strategic reason for that decision.
In the 2016 federal election, the margin was already tight – 49 per cent to the Greens, 51 per cent to Labor. But that was after the distribution of preferences from the Liberal candidate George Souris, who attracted nearly 20 per cent of the primary vote in his own right.
Liberal preferences helped Mr Feeney get over the line. This time, Labor will need to fend off the Greens without the help.
Swinburne University researcher and elections analyst Peter Brent told SBS News the Liberals’ manoeuvre would make it “hard for Labor to win”.
But he said the by-election could “go either way” and was very difficult to predict.
The Batman contest fits within a broader trend of the Greens challenging Labor’s hold on inner city seats. A Greens victory would be a huge coup for the party, which still only has one elected MP in the Lower House – Adam Bandt in the seat of Melbourne.
Map of the Batman electorate. Source: AEC
There was a concerted campaign to unseat Anthony Albanese from the inner Sydney seat of Grayndler at the last election, but the popular Labor figurehead eventually prevailed.
In a recent Victorian state by-election, the Greens won the inner-city seat of Northcote, ending decades of ALP dominance. Lidia Thorpe became the first Indigenous woman to be elected to the state parliament.
While there will be no Coalition candidate in Batman, there will be conservative options from Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives and minor parties like the Australian Liberty Alliance.
Mr Brent said preferences from conservative parties could help Labor, depending on how they structure their how-to-vote cards.
The canary in the coal mine
The Greens are focusing their campaign on the controversial Queensland coal mine planned by the Indian resources giant Adani.
The government accuses Labor of spruiking the mine and its job-creating potential when campaigning in Queensland, then backflipping and opposing the mine to appeal to Green voters in Melbourne.
Labor leader Bill Shorten has maintained he would not support the mine if it “didn’t stack up economically or environmentally”.
But two weeks out from the election, Mr Shorten toughened his language. “I don’t support the Adani project,” he told reporters in Perth.
The Greens says voters with a strong objection to Adani should vote for them instead. Greens leader Richard di Natale appeared on the ABC’s Q&A program earlier this month and promised his party would do whatever they could to stop the mine going ahead.
Mr Brent said voters in Batman could interpret Mr Shorten’s messaging on the mine as “cynical”, given the timing.
The Greens are also focusing their attacks on Australia’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. Greens candidate Ms Bhathal has experience working with refugees and has criticised Labor for supporting offshore detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru.
A changing electorate
Labor has seen its vote decline in a number of key Melbourne seats, as the inner city becomes increasingly gentrified. The current knife-edge in Batman bears little resemblance to Labor’s strong numbers in the 1980s and 90s, when its vote hovered around the 60-70 percent range.
The seat is home to more than 160,000 people - with some working-class European migrant communities remaining. Around 10 per cent of the electorate identified as having Italian ancestry in the most recent census. A further eight per cent were Irish and six per cent were Greeks.
But the Batman electorate also contains the campus of La Trobe University, which pulls in highly educated young people who often vote Green.
Greens candidate dogged by bullying allegations
Greens candidate Ms Bhathal, found herself at the centre of an internal party dispute just weeks before the election. A letter of complaint written by a group of Victorian Greens was partially leaked to the media recently.
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In the memo, fellow Greens members accuse Ms Bhathal of bullying and intimidating her factional opponents.
“Her tactics have become more aggressive and ruthless, her breaches of the code more flagrant and brazen, her behaviour many magnitudes more destructive," the complaint reads, according to Fairfax Media.
Richard di Natale has rubbished the reports, saying the claims against Ms Bhathal had been investigated but were not substantiated. He said the complaints came from a “very small” group who were unhappy with the Greens’ choice of candidate.
In 2016, Ms Bhathal spoke out after she was targeted over her Sikh faith in an anonymous flyer campaign.
Labor pick forced to apologise
Labor, meanwhile, is backing union heavyweight Ged Kearney.
Ms Kearney, a former nurse, is the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. Her campaign hit a speed-bump last month, when the candidate admitted she did not actually live in the electorate. Her house in Brunswick sits over the boundary in the neighbouring division of Wills.
Then only two days before the election, Ms Kearney and Mr Shorten were forced to issue an apology over a "production error" on a campaign flyer that used Greek text under the subheading 'Macedonian' - angering some members of the community.
Mr Brent said it remained to be seen how much the former Labor member Mr Feeney, had already damaged the party’s reputation. Mr Feeney was an “unpopular” member who was caught out for not declaring an investment property in the lead-up to the last election, he claimed.
Ms Kearney, as a unionist and true “leftie”, has a better chance with Batman voters, Mr Brent said.
SBS News will bring you the results of the by-election on Saturday, across TV, Radio and Online. Download the SBS News app here.
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