‘It’s been safe Liberal for so long. I’m the daughter of a footballer. I’m competitive’

ASHLEY BROWNE: Zoe Daniel, independent candidate for Goldstein, says the Libs have lost touch with the electorate - and clears the air on the ‘Palestine’ petition

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN journalists and politicians by nature, is supposed to be adversarial. And yes, it can sometimes spill over into something more combative and downright dirty.

But while there are plenty of ex-politicians who end up in the media, usually as pundits but occasionally as journalists, there hasn’t been that much traffic going the other way.

Which is why Zoe Daniel’s bid to win the bayside Melbourne seat of Goldstein at the forthcoming federal election is notable. She is the latest in a growing line of high-profile independent candidates standing for federal parliament and in her instance, seeking to win a seat that for generations has been held by the same party, the Liberals.

Daniel hopes to follow in the footsteps of the likes of Cathy McGowan, who won the rural Victorian seat of Indi in 2013 and was the flag-bearer for many independents, and former Olympian Zali Steggall, who knocked over former Prime Minister Tony Abbott to win Warringah in 2019, to become the rock star of the independent MP movement.

Given Daniel’s long background as a former ABC journalist in Australia and then on postings as a foreign correspondent in Africa, southeast Asia and the United States, where she covered Donald Trump’s election as President, she was not deterred, although she did think hard about it when the grassroots Voices of Goldstein advocacy group asked her to consider standing.

“I was quite cautious because politics is quite toxic,” she told Plus 61J over a recent coffee. “I thought about it for a couple of months because I’d dealt with politics around the world. I know what it is.”

But Daniel also understood that she has many of the necessary tools to make the great leap. Journalists need to listen in order to their job properly. As do politicians. “My real love was interviewing people face-to-face in their own comfort zone and environment.”

As a regional radio journalist, and former presenter of The Country Hour, her job entailed “hanging with farmers and walking around in gumboots. That authenticity, meeting people in their own environment, sitting around a kitchen table, having a conversation and understanding something you know nothing about, that really grabbed me.

“That translated into my foreign correspondent life and what I really liked was landing in a new environment, developing contacts, understanding what was going on. The essence of my reporting was talking to real people,” she said.

It has helped Daniel on the hustings as she has gotten to know the intricacies of Goldstein, the electorate that has become her home, after growing up in Launceston, the daughter of well-known Australian Rules football identity Peter Daniel (who played 100 games for Essendon), who also dabbled in politics.

For a long time, Goldstein was as blue-rinse Liberal as it gets. Its demographic heart is wealthy Brighton with its leafy streets, beautiful homes, flashy cars and expensive private schools. There’s the old Melbourne joke that the Brighton woman at a funeral is easy to spot because she’s the one wearing the black tennis dress.

The suburbs of Hampton (where Daniels lives), Sandringham, Beaumaris and Black Rock, which sit further south, are almost as affluent and boast large, beachfront properties that are among the most highly sought and valuable in Melbourne.

But the eastern fringe of the electorate includes more middle-class Ormond, McKinnon and Bentleigh, which have sizable Jewish populations while the northern boundary takes in Elsternwick and Caulfield South, both heavily Jewish and in which are located several Jewish schools, synagogues and other community institutions.

The census estimates that about six per cent of the electorate is Jewish, but community leaders say that that figure is closer to 10 per cent. If Macnamara and Wentworth are the heavyweight Australian Jewish electorates, Goldstein (named for the decidedly non-Jewish suffragist and social reformer Vida Goldstein), is comfortably a middleweight. (Its Jewish constituency is also reflected in the fact that there are two Jewish candidates running for seat, the ALP’s Martyn Abbott, and David Segal, from the Liberal Democrats).

Goldstein is in play, says Daniel, because the sitting member, Tim Wilson, who has held the seat since 2016, is not the “moderate Liberal” he claims to be. “At the end of the day the Liberal Party member for Goldstein votes the same way as [Deputy Prime Minister] Barnaby Joyce, and the National Party’s positions generally don’t represent the views of the people of Goldstein, especially on climate, but also on equality and a range of other issues.

Daniel is neither a disaffected former Liberal nor Labor voter. “I really am the person who goes into vote and thinks neither of these parties represent me. You have a Labor Party that’s got a bit of an identity crisis trying to represent both workers and inner-city professionals, and a Liberal Party that has swung so far to the right that it doesn’t represent people who you might think are ‘small l’ liberals.

“Those people have nowhere to go, so from the conversations I’ve been having, there are a lot of people in the electorate who don’t think those parties fit with them. They don’t fit with me,” she said.

She has received what she said was a “substantial amount” of financial support from Climate 200, the organisation founded by businessman Simon Holmes a Court that backs candidates with a strong position on climate change. While she says the bulk of her funding comes from small donors within the electorate, she is unapologetic about the group’s support.

“It provides capacity for someone like me to compete. The major parties spend tens of millions on campaigns and we can’t compete with that,” she said.

The Rothfield Foundation, an arm of the well-known Melbourne Jewish family known for its progressive political leanings, has also provided a significant amount of funding to her campaign.

Climate, integrity and equality are the three key planks of her platform. With climate, her she advocates a 50-60% reduction of carbon emissions by 2030 (based on 2005 levels) and a commitment to 80% renewable energy by 2030; an end to fossil fuel subsidies, and strengthen household solar rebates and subsidies; a national integrity commission; and a raft of measures to support women in their public and domestic lives

When asked what the Jewish voters of Goldstein are telling her, she said their concerns are aligned with the rest of the electorate, before adding, “clearly there are some specific issues for the Jewish community especially around security and school security that have been raised. Protections under free speech legislation and issues about hate speech online have also been raised.”

And then there’s Israel. Daniel was one of many Australian journalists, writers, broadcasters and media professionals who signed the ‘Do Better on Palestine’ petition, which was created and distributed during last year’s Gaza conflict, that urged the Australian media to take a “more balanced view” on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Many of her fellow signatories are outspoken critics of Israel and supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and it didn’t take long for some in the Jewish community, especially in the Zionist movement to tar her with that brush, with a helping hand from the Murdoch media.

Daniel is unequivocal when it comes to BDS. She says she is not a supporter in any shape or form, believes firmly in the two-state solution and rejects any claim that Israel is an apartheid state. She has never been to Israel and is keen to visit.

She claims her support for the petition was based purely on her work as a journalist experienced in war zone reporting, with an understanding and a concern about what a difficult assignment that can be.

“Obviously I wasn’t a political candidate at the time so I wasn’t looking at it through the prism of risk,” she explained. “But I was asked to sign it as a journalist; I think journalists should be able to do their work in conflict zones without fear of being targeted and I would have signed exactly the same document if it was Israeli journalists being targeted.”

There have been suggestions that Jewish community leaders have kept their distance from Daniel because of the petition, which she denies, but having had time to reflect on it – having been asked about it frequently – she says, “I did not write the petition, and if I had, I would have framed it very differently.

“The petition makes several assumptions and did not take into account the complexity of the situation at the time, in which Israel's security was under threat. “Friends of mine were working in Gaza at that time and were facing real risk and I was thinking I could have been there,” she said.

Instead, she could be sitting in Canberra in just a few weeks’ time. The recent flap over her campaign posters being prematurely displayed indicates that he is genuinely concerned about losing the seat, despite the fact that he holds it by a comfortable margin of 7.8%.

“The Liberal Party has changed and no longer represents people in the electorate the way they want to be represented,” Daniel said. “Cathy McGowan said to me, and it really resonated, that it’s a competition and it’s a competition that you’ve got to win.

“The Honourable Member has never had to compete for the seat until now because it’s been safe for so long. I’m the daughter of a footballer. I’m competitive; it’s how I was brought up. Me and my team are in it to win it.”

Photo: Zoe Daniel at her campaign launch at Sandringham Football Club on Sunday (AAP/Diego Fedele)