The marginal electorate of Bennelong in Sydney’s North West has the biggest overseas-born population of any Liberal-held seat.
Bennelong's Chinese and Korean community's support for Labor leader Kevin Rudd is believed to have helped dethrone former Prime Minister John Howard.
For more information on Bennelong, look at our electorate snapshot.
But now that the seat is back in Liberal hands, ALP challenger, Jason Yat-sen Li, is not assuming the Asian community will rally behind him on ethnicity alone.
“I can speak to them in Chinese, that's obviously an advantage because there's that direct communication… but there's another 80 per cent of residents which is the general population and we need to make sure we appeal to everyone,” Mr Li told SBS.
That doesn’t mean that the candidates aren’t taking Bennelong’s multicultural vote into account.
Incumbent Liberal MP John Alexander is door-knocking with a Chinese speaker, and putting forward community initiatives of interest to the Asian community.
“We saw a situation where Chinese and Korean students were left out of sports and therefore not engaging with other students, so the idea came to us that if we were to introduce table tennis into schools, we could get students engaging across those cultural boundaries,” Mr Alexander said.
With a margin of 3.1 per cent between the two major parties, it’s hard to tell who will take out the seat of Bennelong, and even harder to tell what will influence the voters.
SBS Radio's Cantonese and Greek programs will host bi-lingual voter forums in the marginal electorates of Chisholm and Bennelong on Friday August 30. For more information, visit sbs.com.au/radio
Bennelong's Liberal sitting member John Alexander has declined to attend.
Check out comedian, Michael Hing's take on Bennelong in the video below:
