Kristina Keneally (Image: AAP/Dan Himbrechts)

Since Kristina Keneally blamed lockdown frustration for her Fowler loss, Australia’s political commentariat has been giving her a right Mandy Rice-Davies going over with a “Well, she would, wouldn’t she?”

But let’s hang on a minute, there’s a deeper truth to be taken out of her comments. In our rush to put COVID behind us, we’ve never had the needed reckoning with the actual lived experience of the pandemic on communities hit hardest by the way governments managed outbreaks.

Let’s go back to the beginning, in early-pandemic Wuhan. Just before Australia’s election kicked off, Australian publisher Hardie Grant released Murong Xuecun’s Deadly Quiet City. In all the words written about the pandemic, it’s that rarest of things: a bottom-up telling of eight how-it-happened stories about people in Wuhan at “COVID Ground Zero”.

It offers journalism that’s missing — in Australia, as much as anywhere else — with its promise to “take the reader inside the city during lockdown and introduce you to the people whose voices were drowned out by the blaring official narrative”.

It lets us hear from the sort of people who bore the brunt of pandemic management around the world: gig workers, migrant workers, health workers, social dissidents. True in Wuhan. True in Sydney and Melbourne.

Here in Australia, we think we’ve moved on. We’ve just had a government-changing, post-COVID election where no one — not Labor, not Liberals — wanted to talk about this once-in-a-century moment.

Over those long six weeks of Morrison and Albanese (or his COVID-isolation stand-in) rolling around the country so they could get onto our television screens, these past two years that turned all our lives upside down were strangely absent. It snuck into the official campaign in just a single debate question from Albanese to Morrison over his “not a race” complacency, and Morrison’s opening brag about the 40,000 people alive who would otherwise be not.

Don’t blame the political parties. Their job is winning elections. If they’re not talking about COVID, it’s because their research tells them it’s a no-win topic. Makes sense: remember all those disputes that obsessed politics (and news media and social media) through the pandemic? Lockdown v mockdown? AstraZeneca v Pfizer? Closed playgrounds v open beaches?

The caution of the major parties is natural. These disputes didn’t map readily onto traditional political divides. Rather, they cut across voting blocks, passionately dividing families and friends. Journalism, on the other hand, is supposed to be telling our stories.

Instead, the energy the media expended on crunching all that COVID data and reporting all those press conferences from the premiers all went one way — from experts (or wannabes) out into the ether to descend on locked-in communities.

The work-at-home community (like most journalists) had their takes, of course. But they told us little about the experiences of people who don’t wrangle words for a living.

No surprise then that the communities who bore the brunt of the lockdowns, both in the western suburbs of Melbourne and the so-called local government areas of concern across Sydney’s south and south-west, feel ignored and left out by both the major parties and the media.

Few were telling their stories during the pandemic. Few are telling them now. In last month’s vote, finally, they saw an opportunity to clap back.

The result? An unexpected collapse of the major parties’ vote in Sydney and Melbourne. Labor’s flatlining primary vote clarifies what’s going on: a swing away in safe Labor-voting seats across lockdown-disrupted western Melbourne and south-western Sydney. A swing towards in white-collar communities who could practically work from home (mixed with a swing from the two cities’ increasing number of Chinese Australians).

Lucky for Labor, outside the electorate of Fowler, the swings against it either washed out through preference flows or were blunted by Labor’s solid majorities.

Kristina Keneally’s misfortune was to be parachuted into a seat that was its own ground zero for the 2021 lockdowns. And one where there happened to be a strong pre-existing non-Labor political grouping in local government that was seen to have stood up for their communities through lockdowns.

Give Dai Le the credit of agency: by offering a known local voice, she succeeded in channelling the otherwise inchoate dissatisfaction with the outside political class’s handling of the pandemic and the enduring anger about the lockdowns’ discriminatory impacts.

That’s a lesson the political class needs to learn.