Political reporter BELINDA STRAHORN files from the ACT election trail…

“THAT’s not something I give a rat’s arse about, frankly.” Could this be the campaign’s best one liner? 

Ask me a few days ago and I would have said this election campaign has been far from scintillating, then Chief Minister Andrew Barr pulls out that pearler.

His comments were made in a press conference on Wednesday (September 2) after a reporter asked if former Labor chief minister Jon Stanhope‘s commitment to chair a Canberra Liberals government-run poverty task force would jeopardise his life membership with the Labor party.

Barr says the move is just a political stunt, but Liberal leader Alistair Coe says it will bring a huge amount of integrity to a potential task force. Does Barr have a short memory? Has his forgotten Brendan Smyth, the Liberal he hurdled into an ACT government role a few months out for the last election? It may have been a sleepy start, but this election campaign is heating up.

THE man who sought to have the 2016 ACT election declared invalid is having another tilt at ACT politics. Mohammad Munir Hussain was announced as the Federation Party’s candidate for Yerrabi this week. Hussain was barred by the ACT electoral commission from running as an independent in 2016 because he did not have the required number of signatures on his nomination form. 

Hussain, a businessman said he was shut out of the race and applied to the Supreme Court to have his candidacy declared valid and the 2016 ACT election declared invalid. It was the first time in the ACT’s history that an election has been challenged in the courts. But the challenge fizzled, with a judge allowing Hussain to abandon the case citing “severe medical conditions”. Federation Party chairman Jason Potter said he was delighted to welcome Hussain as candidate because of his “long history of community work and his commitment to helping others”. The party has also announced Potter and Scott Sandford as candidates in Brindabella. 

LABOR’S latest election commitment has some scratching their heads over their decision to commit to a project that doesn’t appear to tick any major boxes. Member for Kurrajong Rachel Stephen-Smith and member for Murrumbidgee Chris Steel announced a $5 million package for major road, parking and pedestrian upgrades at Pialligo on Monday. While the announcement may go down well with voters there, it’s unlikely to capture the imagination of voters elsewhere.

IN a rare show of bipartisanship, both sides voted in favour of new laws to stamp out misleading political advertising, but they won’t be in place in the lead up to October’s ballot. The laws, which make it harder for politicians to lie in political advertising, passed last week in the ACT Assembly. Cracking down on false election material has been a big issue in the territory. As of July 2021, individuals in the ACT could be fined $8000 and a corporation $40,500 for misleading advertisements, the laws will only apply to authorised political material.

THE first election stouch between candidates has broken out in Ginninderra. Belco Party candidate Bill Stefaniak gave Greens candidate Jo Clay a spray over the party’s ambiguous position on the handling of Canberra’s rubbish. Clay was quoted on the Greens website saying that the ACT government had no intention of sending most of Canberra’s waste to a new facility – to be built by private firm CRS – at Fyshwick, another statement on the Greens website said it was not CRS’s plan to handle that much of our rubbish, yet the waste proponents website stated that it will. Stefaniak called the Greens bluff demanding they come clean on their “confused” position on waste disposal. Meantime Belco Party candidate Vijay Dubey has pledged, if elected, at least $50 million of extra funding, annually, to clean up deteriorating suburbs across Canberra.

A MINOR party running as a “protest vote” against overdevelopment and planning corruption across the ACT, has fielded candidates in all five electorates for the upcoming election. The Sustainable Australia party will announce its candidates soon and is still on the lookout for a candidate “active in campaigning against overdevelopment” to run in Kurrajong.

THE Australian Climate Change Justice Party has launched its ACT election manifesto with a long line of policies including a $2 billion, community led covid recovery package, a renewable energy plan, affordable housing for Canberrans, establishing a food bowl for the ACT through agricultural enterprise and community base funding for town centre councils. The party’s leader Petar Johnson says the policies offer an “alternative” to building infrastructure that the city “doesn’t need” and will invest in projects the “community wants”.

THE ACT Greens have jumped on the back of a local charity’s call for major investment in the social and affordable housing in Canberra. The latest figures from Anglicare’s rental affordability snapshot show just how difficult – and in most cases impossible – it is for people on low and moderate incomes to find affordable rental housing. “Everyone should be able to afford a decent home” Greens candidate for Kurrajong Rebecca Vassarotti chimed in, promoting the party’s $450 million housing policy, which includes new public and affordable rental houses, more support for the homeless, and an indigenous controlled Aboriginal community housing provider.

FINALLY, Belco Party candidate Alan Tutt is breathing a little easier this election knowing that his opponents aren’t also his neighbours. Last election Tutt, who stood for the Canberra Community Voters Party in Ginninderra, lived a few doors down from retired Labor MLA Mary Porter and across the road lived Chic Henry, who stood for the Australian Motorist Party in 2012 and is now running alongside Tutt as candidates for the Belco Party. The little corner in Hawker may have been known as a “political hotspot” but this time around, Tutt has the street to himself.