FOCUS – Election 2006: A TALE OF TWO SEATS
In the final part of a series profiling the safest conservative and Labor seats, Karen Kissane visits the blue-collar heartland of Melbourne’s north – the ALP stronghold of Thomastown.
TONY FIERA is a working man, with a working-man’s derision for politicians with soft hands. They do not understand the realities of a life for men like him and his father-in-law, who spent his working life pouring concrete.
“John Howard has been telling people, ‘You should work longer years, after 65.’ Do you see any people working concrete after 65? They can’t. Mostly their knees and back go; after 55, they’re gone. If you are a person like John Howard, you don’t have to retire. But ask him how many times he’s put petrol in his own car in the last few years.”
Says Tony’s wife, Carmel, equally scornful: “Or dug holes!”
They look at each other and laugh, remembering. Tony says, “We saw him on TV the other day, trying to plant something with a shovel. He could not even scratch the surface. He had no idea.”
The Fieras are an Italian-Australian family who live in a yellow brick-veneer house in Fawkner. Tony, who has a reserved manner and an analytical mind, was born in Sicily and came here in 1984; the exuberant, hospitable Carmel was born in Melbourne of Italian migrants. They have three teenage children, Matthew, Maree and Laura, with whom there is a lot of boisterous banter. They also have a loyalty to Labor that is based more on their world view than on their satisfaction with the party’s performance at either state or federal level.
It is not a loyalty that has been entirely inherited by their children. Their son Matthew, 18, likes to throw mischievous grenades into the conversation at regular intervals but he is not joking when he says that at the next federal election, “I’m going to vote for good old Johnny. Howard’s doing all right at maintaining the country. We’re not living in a country that’s falling apart.”
Matthew’s parents take this news with equanimity. They believe the kids should be allowed to form their own views. Laura, 13, says she has no interest in politics yet but Maree, 16, shares a bit of her mother’s cynicism, at least about the federal leaders: “John Howard is not doing good, like in the Iraq war, and Beazley – it seems like he’s just really desperate to be prime minister. So they both don’t seem good; I really wouldn’t vote for either of them.”
The Fiera family’s mix of political attitudes illustrates many of the phenomena political scientists describe in research about why Australians vote the way they do: the loosening of ties to parties, the passive benefit to an incumbent leader, cynicism about the role of government and politicians, and the primacy of self-interest over altruism.
The Fieras are a typical family in the state seat of Thomastown, the most strongly pro-Labor electorate in Victoria. It contains the northern suburbs of Fawkner and Reservoir and parts of Epping, Lalor and Thomastown. It is Victoria’s safest seat, needing a swing of 31.75 per cent to fall to the Liberals.
Thomastown is the home of the migrant success story, despite its higher-than-average unemployment and lower-than-average income levels. According to Batchelor, 49 per cent of his constituents were born overseas, with Italians, Macedonians and Greeks making up the biggest ethnic groups. They are mostly working people – “they are production workers or transport workers, typically”, says Batchelor. But the seat has one of the highest rates of home ownership in the state, with more than 80 per cent of adults either owning their own home or paying it off.
“They have worked very hard, often in low-paid jobs – labouring jobs, not high-tech jobs – but nevertheless they have placed very great importance on personal security and having a home,” Batchelor says.
Tony Fiera, 52, has certainly worked hard, at first in factory jobs and now in the warehouse and at the front counter of a company that imports Italian machinery for making wine and traditional food such as salami. In his free time, he brews his own beer and grows his own tomatoes in his backyard. Tony came from a soft-left family in Italy and has always voted Labor in Australia but has no idea whether most of his friends and colleagues share his views.
“You cannot tell, here,” he shrugs. “It’s not like in Europe. In Europe, politics is a topic in everyday life. Everybody every day is talking about it. Here, you only hear about politicians and politics when it’s time to vote, the time when you see them shaking hands and kissing babies.”
Carmel’s parents were Labor voters but she takes little interest in politics because she is cynical about it: “It doesn’t matter who you vote for. It’s still the same. Nothing much is going to change.” When she has to pay attention, when she is heading for a voting booth, “I ask Tony, ‘Who are we voting for today, love?’ … Tony’s got more patience for it. I haven’t. It’s all confusing.”
Tony disagrees: “It’s not confusing. If you know what’s happening then it’s easy.”
Carmel protests: “I still don’t know who to believe – ‘Is it true, or is it not?’ ” This does strike a chord with her husband. “The first thing you learn as a politician is to lie. (Both sides) don’t tell you the truth. They cover up for each other and they give jobs to their friends and they try to make it easier for themselves … (Look at) the wheat scandal.”
Such perceptions could be one reason for the widespread lack of interest in politics reported by many researchers. “An awful lot of people have tuned out of politics,” says John Armitage of Auspoll.
Social researcher Hugh Mackay agrees. “This is the era of political disengagement. I have noticed over the last five years an incredible reluctance to talk about politics. I think it’s because people are preoccupied with too much change, too much uncertainty, so we insulate ourselves and focus on renovations and the kids’ schooling.”
Along with this disengagement has come a softening of Australians’ party loyalties. Workers such as the Fieras used to be “rusted-on” Labor voters; now, particularly in growth-corridor electorates, it is not uncommon for people to vote Labor at the state level and Liberal at the federal level. “There is a 15 per cent gap in the support for Bracks compared to Howard in some Victorian seats,” Armitage says.
Matthew Fiera fits this category. He is growing into an “aspirational” voter; he has just bought his first car for $12,000, half of which he paid for out of his own earnings from a part-time job (his parents matched his savings dollar for dollar because they wanted him to learn that he has to work for his goals).
Matthew is doing his year 12 exams. He aims to be a civil engineer and jokes that by 30, he wants to have made his first million and to own a high-rise apartment at Docklands and a car for every day of the week. “Everything comes with hard work,” is his mantra.
Despite his support for Prime Minister John Howard, when he votes for the first time in the state election on November 25, Matthew says he will probably vote for Bracks. “He is doing a sufficient job at the moment and I see no need for a replacement. Besides, there’s nothing in particular that attracts me into voting for Baillieu.”
Matthew’s preference for political stability is also part of a more widespread phenomenon, according to Hugh Mackay, one that benefits an incumbent political leader. “Australian electorates, both federal and state, are notoriously inert,” he says. “They are very reluctant to make changes. Going back 50 years or more, it’s extremely unusual to see a one-term or even a two-term government.”
At the same time, though, in another way Australian voting patterns have become more fluid over the years. Brian Costar, professor of Victorian parliamentary democracy at Swinburne University, says we now have more swinging voters. This is assessed by research in which voters are asked whether their identification with a particular party is not very strong, strong, or very strong.
“The big fall is among people who used to say ‘very strongly’. They’ve fallen from 33 per cent in 1967 to 18 per cent in 1990, which is the latest figures I’ve got,” Costar says. “Whereas people who say that they are ‘not very strongly’ identified has risen from 23 per cent in 1967 to 35 per cent.
“So party identification has weakened over the past 30 years but not as much as in other countries such as the US and Britain and parts of Europe.”
Even Tony Fiera, who has always voted Labor, is feeling jaded about his party. “I think that here in Victoria Labor has become a little bit slack. It just blows with the wind. It does nothing so that it cannot make mistakes … They charge us tax like everybody else, but in return I would like to see social things like roads or schools.”
The Fiera children go to a Catholic secondary school, Penola College, not for religious reasons but because Carmel and Tony did not have faith in the academic standards of the local state high schools. “We should not send our kids to private school,” says Tony irritably. “What’s the reason? The public schools were not good enough.” Agrees Carmel: “They’ve slacked off. And there’s more rules at a private school, and they give them goals and values.”
BUT Tony’s disaffection does not extend to contemplating voting Liberal in the state election. “Baillieu, what has he done? He’s worse than Jeff Kennett. Jeff Kennett had good ideas; if he kept his mouth shut, he would still be premier, but the problem with him was he did not appreciate what he had.”
Tony Fiera did not like many of Kennett’s reforms, though: “He didn’t do any good for us. He took away two days of public holidays, sold the schools, and holiday loading was struck off, and so was civil court claims if you had an accident.”
Carmel is worried about the effect industrial relations changes are having on family life. She and Matthew and Maree all work at Kmart part-time (jokes Tony, “We’re taking over Kmart, starting at the bottom!”). Carmel, 43, likes her job and is chuffed that she has been chosen to run the store’s Christmas gift program for poor children. But she says that when she was young there was much more time for family life: “Now, with this seven-day trade, there’s nothing. I’m working on weekends and so are the kids, so you can’t say, ‘Right, let’s have a family Sunday together’, like the old family lunch or picnic. We have to write it on the fridge, ‘What time are you working?’ ”
They may not put it quite this way, but the Fieras have a strong sense of social justice. It’s as if their traditional Italian attitudes about the importance of family and community are projected onto the broader canvas. Matthew, asked about what worries him most, says without hesitation: “Probably the lack of understanding in the world, the inability to see eye to eye. There’s so much war, so much hatred. If the world keeps deteriorating the way it is now, I can’t even imagine bringing up my kids and trying to explain why (terrorists) take so many lives.”
For Carmel, the most troubling thing she sees on television is Third World poverty. “All those poor countries, these poor kids with flies eating them and no food and no housing and no clothing. Nobody should be in that situation.”
Closer to home, Carmel worries about society’s failure to care for its seniors: “They should have more nursing homes for the elderlies, look after them. They have done so much, sacrificing their lives, working in Australia.”
Tony agrees: “Respect for the oldies comes first of all, but governments don’t take care about you after you finish paying tax. They use you and then throw you away. If you don’t have super or savings, they make you live on about $15,000 a year – if you can. There are all these dirty hospitals where you have to wait six months for an operation. Older people, they need more care.”
So, here’s the big question: given all these concerns, do the Fieras vote for what is good for themselves and their loved ones, or do they vote for the greater good? Is there a place for altruism?
Carmel says with determination, “Family first. It would depend on how it would affect us and our children.”
Young Matthew, like so many teenagers, would like to have his cake and eat it too. “I would be altruistic,” he grins wickedly, “as long as me and my family are part of that group (that would benefit). I would vote for the common good, provided we’re in it.”
THOMASTOWN
SITTING MEMBER Peter Batchelor, (ALP), Transport Minister
SWING REQUIRED 31.75 per cent
KEY FACTS
– $700-$799 median weekly family income (state median $800-$899).
– Highest proportion of people speaking a language other than English at home (65.6 per cent, state average of 20 per cent).
– The seat with the highest proportion of people with no qualifications (68.4 per cent, average 53.7 per cent).
– 10 per cent unemployment (state average 6.8 per cent).
SOURCE: THE VICTORIAN ELECTORAL COMMISSION and 2001 CENSUS DATA.

First published in The Age.

Focus
As the major parties scramble over marginal seats and woo undecided voters, most Victorians’ political views are set – they are conservative or Labor. In the first of a twopart series, Karen Kissane profiles the safest conservative seat in the state, Lowan.
THEY were childhood sweethearts, the Easticks.
Christine and Robert went to school together in the little Wimmera town of Nhill. They started dating when they were in year 8 and year 9 respectively. They went their own way for a bit but ended up back together and married when she was 19 and he was 21. It wasn’t unusual back then, not in the country anyway. “A lot of people in this area were the same,” says Chris.
That was 28 years ago, a time when young people did not have to leave town to find a job, or to find a life partner; a time when it was possible to thrive by living pretty much as your parents had done. Until this year that approach has worked well for the Easticks, both from local farming families, who now have four daughters and work 4500 acres (1820 hectares). Farmers talk about distances in kilometres and fuel in litres but they size up their precious land in acres, the way their fathers did.
Some things are best done the traditional way.
Like voting, for instance. Rob Eastick votes National Party and always has.
He sees voting conservatively as part of the natural order for country people. “I don’t know a farmer who votes Labor,” he says. “Here, you’re born with it in your blood.”
Christine says she knows little about politics so she simply votes the way her husband and her father do. “We’ve just always been National Party. I don’t go looking at Labor’s ideas because I probably wouldn’t understand it very well, and I’m happy to vote how farmers like to vote. That’s really all I go by.”
Times are changing. Forty years ago, 23 per cent of Australians said they had no strong identification with any political party. Now, it is looser, with about 35 per cent saying they have no party loyalty. But the vast majority still vote steadily in one direction. Their politics is part of their identity and their way of seeing the world, whether they think of themselves as “political” or not.
In Victoria, there are 26 seats outside the Melbourne area but probably only 13 could truly be called “rural”.
Generally, farmers vote conservatively, although a couple of rural seats – Narracan and Ripon – swung to Labor in the rural backlash election that ousted Jeff Kennett.
The Easticks are, politically speaking, typical of the seat in which they live. Nhill is in Lowan, the largest and the most conservative electoral district in the state. It stretches from the Big Desert to within 10 kilometres of the coast and includes the wheat-growing area of the Wimmera, the wool-growing western district, and the towns of Horsham and Hamilton. Its population is one of the oldest and most Anglo in Victoria; Lowan has almost no residents from non-English-speaking backgrounds.
Nhill has 2000 residents and sits on the Adelaide-Melbourne highway.
Its shire, Hindmarsh, produces 90 per cent of Victoria’s ducks and 10 per cent of the state’s grain and oilseeds.
Labor would need a swing of 17.09 per cent to win Lowan, which has always been staunchly right wing, moving only from Liberal to National in their various incarnations.”
When you walk down the street of a country town, you realise that regional Victoria doesn’t look all that different to how it looked in the 1950s, in terms of faces on the street,” says Brian Costar, professor of Victorian state parliamentary democracy at Swinburne University. “The immediate thing that hits you is the lack of ethnic diversity.
And, therefore, issues that have moved people in the cities don’t always move people in the bush. There has also been a youth exodus from the country, so it is left with a really skewed older age group, and the aged are more politically conservative than the young.”
And finally, he says, there is the fact that social networks in rural areas, despite the distances involved, are tight: “The effect of what’s called in the jargon ‘voter contagion’ – that is, friends and neighbours – is very powerful.”
Locals call Nhill and surrounds “the bush” but there is little greenery. Trees are sparse, planted like straggling sentinels on roadsides or around the rim of paddocks. The land is flat and brown.
Many country towns are dominated by a big church on a hill; in Nhill, the biggest buildings are the fat silver silos that hold the grain. Across the baking heat of the main street wafts the smell of real baking – the toasted muesli that is a mainstay of one of the big local factories, Lowan Whole Foods, which runs three shifts a day. Nhill is keeping afloat despite almost a decade of drought partly because of jobs at Lowan, Luv-A-Duck and other “valueadding” industries in the area.
The Eastick property, a wide white house sitting in the middle of a stand of box and gum trees, is about 10 kilometres from Nhill. Politics is not much of a topic for discussion in the Eastick home, they all agree; it is a very distant hum in the background of their lives.
Rob, a genial man with a dry sense of humour, keeps up; he listens to John Laws and Richard Stubbs on the radio while he is out on his tractor. Christine, who is quieter but whose questions are sharp, has no interest in politics. She worked at a bank before having children but is now busy running the family and the local junior tennis and is treasurer of the district tennis association.
Danielle, 16, has started watching the nightly news because she recently had a work-experience stint at a Melbourne television station but says the issues just kind of wash over her. Breanna, 14, says of politics, “I don’t get them, and I don’t like them. They’re boring.”
The principal of Nhill College, Neville Trotman, says locals generally don’t talk politics much: “I think for country people it’s work and play. You work hard, and then you try and enjoy yourself.”
Christine Eastick has always worked at home, for the sake of the children, but she thinks she might have to get a job outside the farm if things don’t improve soon. This is a time of year where Rob usually takes pleasure in strolling through his wheat crops and letting his hands brush the heads of the laden stalks; when his canola is so high that he has to walk on tip-toe through the fields to be able to see over it.
Not this year. This year he will take nothing to the silo. What little grain he gets will be kept for seed for next year in the hope rain will come then. He has a barley paddock with no heads on the stalks; an oat field that is a sea of dirt; a wheat crop that should be topping the fence but which sits at a stunted 10 centimetres. The canola that should be head-high is barely off the ground.
It has cost him $450,000 to sow these crops – $100 an acre. “It’s an enormous loss,” he says, shaking his head.”
Enormous. We live for next year now.
This year’s gone. What else can we do?
Go to the casino?” He grins. “No. We’ve already gambled our money.”
It’s a joke, of course. The Easticks are careful people, like most farmers. Their property is big by the standards of the area but their comfortable house is modest when compared with, say, the grandiosity of McMansions in suburban Melbourne. In the good years they have done what farmers have done for millenniums: bought more land.
More recently, sizeable crops in 2001 and 2003 allowed them to stash a bit of money into farm management deposits.
Rob says, “It’s about being lean in the good years so you can be comfortable in the bad years. But we won’t be comfortable. I’ve never had a loss like we will have this year.”
Along with thrift, self-reliance is a key value in the bush. Rob Eastick is captain of the local CFA. When locals rolled a car up the road recently, it was he and his team who turned out to rescue them.
It is these beliefs – being careful with resources, taking responsibility and giving back to the community – that underpin Rob’s political views and, therefore, his family’s.”
Labor always seem to have plenty to spend,” he says critically. “They’re not conservative. Farmers are conservative people. They have to be.”
Look what happened in the Cain-Kirner years. They got the state in all sorts of trouble; debt. Kennett came in, yo, bang, ran a profit, got heaps of money in the kitty. And I think Labor is spending Jeff Kennett’s money still ¿ They’ve just found another $800 million they didn’t know they had.” He smiles.”
I don’t know who their accountant is.”
SO THE fact that Nhill boasts a new 32-bed hospital, and a new fire station and police station, and that his daughters’ state school has been dramatically rebuilt and expanded – well, that cuts no ice with Rob Eastick. He cannot imagine ever voting Labor. He concedes that “the Labor Government’s probably been good for the town”, and he likes Steve Bracks, but he thinks a conservative government could be better relied upon to “put a few dollars away”.
Rob Eastick votes for men whom he believes share his experience of life. “(Local Nationals member) Hugh (Delahunty) is an ex-farmer, and Bill McGrath before him was a farmer. Jim McCabe before him was a Liberal politician and a farmer. They understand.”
But he admits that he is not happy with the state Liberal Party. “Ted Baillieu is the new fella on the block, isn’t he? They don’t seem to have ¿” he pauses, searching for the words.
His wife supplies them: “A decent leader.” Rob nods and says, “You need to have a charismatic type. Like Paul Keating. He was just a good bloke on the wrong side. I think for a political party to be very successful they need a great leader, and the opposition here haven’t had one since Jeff Kennett ¿ He could have still been there if he hadn’t been so damn arrogant.”
The Easticks’ two younger daughters listen intently from across the big kitchen table, never interrupting to put their own views or ask a question. Their two older sisters have moved out of home: Lisa, 21, is at university in Warrnambool, and Jenna, 19, has qualified as a personal trainer in Melbourne.
Sixteen-year-old daughter Danielle, asked about her likely preferences, smiles shyly and says she will probably vote the way her parents do. “They know what’s right; you know, what’s best for us.”
The influence of parents’ political views is a stronger factor in how people vote than either income or gender, according to John Armitage of Auspoll.”
US research has shown that in normal times, about two-thirds of people will inherit their political values from their parents,” he says.
This is how it works in families like the Easticks, where both parents share political views. Where parents are divided, it becomes more interesting.”
If the parents are split and they are upfront about it with their kids, the daughter will follow the father and the son will follow the mother,” says Costar.”
No one knows why.”
There is a strong sense of the country- city divide in Nhill. Farmers you chat to almost invariably give you a lecture on how city folk are too extravagant with water. There is also a sense, when talking to the Easticks and other Nhill locals, that country people feel they don’t rate high on government handout lists.
During the week the media are full of new announcements of money for drought relief. Is there a contradiction between the Easticks’ dislike of big-spending governments, and the fact that farmers need buckets of government money to back them up in hard times?
Rob Eastick looks at his wife. “Have you seen any in our bank account?” he asks drily.
Says Christine, “No, but I suppose we haven’t applied for any. There wouldn’t be too many around this area that have had any.”
Rob chuckles. “You have to pass ‘exceptional circumstances’ criteria, although after this drought that will be easier to do. But so far, it’s been hard.
My brother-in-law is up in the Mallee and they’ve had a lot worse ¿ and they couldn’t get it either. It comes down to assets. But you can’t eat assets, you can only borrow against them.”
The biggeset worry on Rob Eastick’s mind is one that he knows no government can help with. He spends a lot of time thinking about succession. His family have worked the area since the 1890s, and now he is the only male Eastick in his generation. He would hate to think his family’s generations of work will end in strangers’ hands.
But local farms are having trouble not just with water but with their young, whom they are losing to the cities.
Rob Eastick has told his daughters that whoever keeps her surname after marriage can have the farm. He has encouraged his youngest, Breanna, to think about whether she would like to take it on. Breanna loves the outdoors and harvested a load of wheat when she was still in primary school. “I like being on the farm,” Breanna agrees.”
But I don’t know yet whether I’ll still like it when I’m older.”
Says Rob, “Nothing would give me more pleasure than for one of these kids to perhaps marry a nice young local fella but even the local boys aren’t stopping.”
Earlier, his wife Chris mentioned that they might sell up completely if all the girls move away. Rob had dived in to say he couldn’t bear that prospect: “I could sell the land I’ve bought, but I don’t think I could sell this piece where we’re sitting now. It’s where I was brought up, where I was born, it’s the original Eastick property.”
Now, it is again Chris who prods him about unwanted change: “If we’re talking a long-term drought, and there’s no money in farming, would you still feel that way then? Would you want your daughter to take it on?” His answer is out almost before she has finished asking: “No.”
LOWAN
SITTING MEMBER Hugh Delanhunty (National Party)
SWING REQUIRED 17.1%
MEDIAN FAMILY INCOME $700-$799
KEY FACTS
– 26.5% employed in agriculture, forestry and fishing (Victorian average is 3.5%).
– Lowest population density in the state, with just 1.5 people per square kilometre.
– 17.2% are aged over 65 (Victorian average is 12.7%).
– Just 2% were born in non-English-speaking countries (Victorian average 16.8%).

First published in The Age.