Gaetano Greco, the independent fighting for Preston, proves Labor’s complacency

“It’s amazing,” Gaetano Greco, the independent candidate and possible future member for the Victorian state seat of Preston, emailed me after I sent him a herogram from London saying: “For the first time since 1945, Preston and Reservoir is a marginal seat!” 

Greco and his team of activists are right to be proud, with a 14% primary vote from a hastily put-together jalopy of a campaign, puttering around the seat, lacking even an electoral office. Greco — a veteran councillor for Darebin (covering Preston, Northcote and other bits and bobs of inner-north-east Melbourne) — decided to take another cruise at the seat (he’d put in a very last-minute campaign in 2018, getting 7%) after Labor’s continued complacency around a supposedly safe seat, and its refusal to respond to community demands on planning and services.

The time’s double-figures result has put Greco’s working-class, inner-city, independent campaign neck and neck with the Greens’ delightfully named Patchouli Paterson for the recipient of the anti-Labor preferences, with votes still being recounted. The Victorian Electoral Commission (VEC) has the Greens second in the two-candidate-preferred vote; the ABC has Greco.

In both cases, it appears challengers may fall just short of what’s required to knock off new Labor candidate Nathan Lambert. Greco requires 70%, and chances may be fading. But the fact this is going to the wire is one of the most significant results of the election.

Preston takes in Preston and Reservoir. It’s all above Bell Street, the famed “hummus curtain” that divided Greens (south) and Labor booths (north) in the Cooper (formerly Batman) election, almost won by the Greens’ Alex Bhathal a couple of times. 

But that curtain is still a reasonably reliable guide to the area. Paterson got 15% of the first preferences for the Greens. That’s one click higher than the usual Greens vote in utterly unfriendly seats — which sits at a predictable 6%, from remote Australia to regional cities to outer ’burbs — but it’s short of the 23% or so of the vote the Greens have been able to get in middle-class inner seats. 

It’s a measure that the first wave of the knowledge class has gone north of Bell Street. It had long since taken over Preston South (now a sort of upper Thornbury), but it has now, with the terraces and tight streets running out and unaffordable, moved into West Preston and Reservoir en masse, funky coffee shops and the like popping up among the postwar houses. But it’s still not enough for a Greens candidate to be viable in this electorate for another couple of elections.

However, Greco, and other candidates like him, are viable. Greco faced the problem bedevilling all independents this election: the sleazy and cynical fundraising “reforms” created by Labor, supported by the Liberals, which cut off political donations at around $1500 for each individual or group. These reforms left the major parties’ backers, the unions and the Cormack Foundation ringfenced out of it, and thus made both parties capable of cruising past their independent opponents. 

That Greco and his team could get 15% from a standing start, with no money and only a few hand-written rosters of volunteers, is a testament to the dissatisfaction among voters who would otherwise have been solidly Labor. Not only has the party taken the area for granted, depriving it of the shiny new facilities that outer-suburban marginals get, but the local member was, for a decade, Robin Scott, the loyal factional lieutenant of Adem Somyurek. Scott was an ex-Shoppie rebadged as a mod, who had been imposed on the area as part of a factional carve-up and had never been a good fit.

After he resigned in the Somyurek branch-stacking scandal, Labor simply imposed another drop-in, Lambert, despite the mass displeasure with Labor’s treatment of the place. There was no love for the Greens from Labor voters either, with Greens councillors perceived as remote and “left neoliberal” in their attitudes.

When Greco put his hand up again, many noted that his most visible campaign over the past few years had been the preservation of the Preston Market, dismissing him as a single-issue candidate. “The mainstream media completely ignored what was happening in our working-class suburbs and instead focused on the middle-class teals,” Greco notes. That’s true enough. The Age’s “community focus” chose a safe Labor seat, a Liberal-teal contested seat, and Richmond, which the Greens were always going to win. Its focus on Melton in this trio was a product of its right-wing view that the only challenge to Labor would be “cooker” independents raving about the lockdowns.

Instead, the challenge came from a working-class community independent, who said nothing about COVID and the lockdowns, and instead focused on holding Labor to task for the things it should be doing but wasn’t, such as protecting from demolition a market anchoring the community as a century-and-a-half-old working-class area, now mixed and diverse. All Labor and others can offer is a boutique pseudo-market as a replacement.

But this issue itself anchored others: a lack of green space, the poor maintenance of the existing green space, the social cleansing of public housing tenants, and the lack of facilities such as a new swimming centre that marginal seats get in a flash.

The great advantage of Greco’s candidacy, and the possibility it offers, is that it can gain Liberal preferences without having to modify its policies or be the recipient of a sleazy deal. Inner-city Liberal voters aren’t neoliberal ideologues; they are often simply personally conservative and small-business people whose preferential support for a community-based candidate can be an expression of their desire for a vital community hub to be preserved, or that an area get a better deal from government. 

This then offers the template for Victoria 2026: create two, three, many Prestons, coming at Labor not from the “cooker right” but from the “community left”, with policies that could be said to be objectively left, but which also express centrist community-first ideals. Labor’s neglect of its hitherto safe middle, outer-northern and western suburbs makes it fully deserving of a (magenta? puce? clay?) wave of community independents as challengers. 

Local candidates with a genuine profile and record as community advocates and champions should be able to mount challenges with a real chance of success, as they can honestly claim both Liberal and Green preferences, and also those of the Victorian Socialists, now getting an impressive 7-8% in a whole series of northern and western electorates, and a magnificent 10% for redoubtable Maribyrnong councillor Jorge Jorquera in Footscray. 

It’s far from impossible that the Victorian Socialists will be competitive in a couple of these seats in a couple of election cycles. But absent Liberal preferences for the party — not even Michael Kroger is going to tactically preference them — it is community independents who have the running and, with a full field, can win a seat on a primary of about 15-18%.

What’s important to understand is that these wins are now achievable at any time, not just in a post-pandemic period. Labor’s move to be a party of capital means that a gap of representation must emerge, and the social policies and class base of the Greens limit their possibilities, and the explicit leftism of the Vic Socialists limits theirs.

The first crop of votes for a community independent come from Labor voters in the most traditional mould — economically leftish, community-oriented, mildly social conservative people — who want to dissent from the unfeeling machine Labor has become, without destroying its chances for government. The preferences then come from… everywhere. 

This has taken people by surprise because it represents a potentially historic possibility, in its modest way. The teals succeeded federally by drawing on a knowledge-class and middle-class voter base, and with plenty of money fuelling it. A community campaign that puts the work in, in any one of a dozen northern and western seats, could triumph, in actually representing itself, in a recognisably left but community fashion.

Why has this suddenly happened? Because a century after it was put in place, the single-electorate exhaustive preferential system is now capable of doing what people claimed it would: make it possible for dissenting candidates on one side of politics to run an independent campaign without gifting the seat to the other side.

For decades, the main purpose of the preferential system was to allow the major parties to not have to respond to marginal party demands, and to march people to the polls under compulsory voting requirements — where they would then either spoil their ballot or confirm the enforced legitimacy of the major parties. In that period, the preferential system was a way of dealing with party competition for the bloc vote of relatively monolithic classes and social groups. 

Now these classes are fracturing into a more complex class system, cross-hatched with multiple multicultural communities. There are really a dozen or more distinct “social blocs” across the community, and to be in the running you need to grab only one or two for your first preference vote. This is a huge opportunity to transform the rather undemocratic “actually existing democratic” parliamentary system we live in — and to show the world what’s possible.

Thus people on the left should work for the Greens or the Victorian Socialists, if that’s where their beliefs sit. But if they don’t, then they should start quietly building magenta/clay/terracotta community independent movements. Labor has helped this immensely with its sleazy anti-democratic move of turning multi-member proportionally elected local government wards into nine or so single-member micro-electorates. That’s dozens of small wards for those with a mind to independent candidacy to run for over the next two years, get some practice and to build a team, a local profile and reputation. Thanks, Labor! 

Furthermore, with a long lead-in, Labor’s sleazy donor rules can be used against it. Independent candidates can build their small donor fundraising base, Bernie Sanders-style, and make it part of their network building, and a point of virtue, against Labor’s manifestly dishonest move. Fundraising then does double duty as a group organiser over a long lead-up to the election itself.

Greco and his team didn’t have that this time. They may next time, or it may be someone else. But what they and others have achieved is truly important. “He’s running on empty,” one Labor grandee said of Greco. Wrong. He and his team were running on hope, which, vindicated, is a full tank.

Is Labor sleeping on the power of independents? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.