By Michael Newhouse
THE battle for the hearts and votes of Melbourne’s West stepped up a notch last week as voters across Victoria made their first trip to the ballot box when early voting centres opened last Monday, 13 November.
Party candidates and supporters of all political persuasions converged on Deer Park’s early voting centre, at 775 Ballarat Rd, to hand out how-to-vote cards, and chat up the slow stream of voters trickling into lodge their votes prior to the official ballot this Saturday.
For voters enrolled in the Keilor, Kororoit and Derrimut electorates, the Deer Park early voting centre offered a chance to get their ballots in and out of the way if they couldn’t vote on election day.
When Star visited the centre on Thursday, the battle lines had been drawn – Labor leaflets on the left, and the Liberals and Family First posted to the right as voters walked through the door to the ballot box.
On the Labor side, going into bat for Keilor MP George Seitz, Kororoit’s Andre Haermeyer and Derrimut’s Telmo Languiller, was Brimbank councillor Jenny Barboza, Mr Languiller’s mother and various other Labor Party faithful.
Liberal candidate for Derrimut Charles Tran was on hand to distribute his party’s literature, while Family First candidate for the same seat Margaret Forster also added to the paper trail. The Greens were nowhere to be found.
“I voted Liberal because I want it to become a marginal seat,” Albanvale resident David Williams, who voted in the seat of Kororoit, told Star as he left the voting centre.
Mr Williams said he wasn’t a traditional Liberal supporter, but he was fed up with Labor’s dominance out in the West, citing the lack of infrastructure and the St Albans crossings as major Labor let-downs.
“Vote someone else other than Labor just to make it a little more competitive, so that in the next election they’ll start throwing money at us,” he said.
But of the eight people Star asked, Mr Williams was the only one who said he voted Liberal in any of the three safe western Labor seats.
“I always vote for Labor,” said Patricia Maunders, who said she was happy for her vote to go to incumbent Derrimut MP Mr Languiller because Labor’s policies were more family-friendly than the Liberals’.
Others agreed, with most saying they voted for, or would vote for, Labor out of habit.
“I’ve always been a Labor man, that’s the reason (I voted for them),” St Albans resident John – who wouldn’t provide his surname – said after emerging from the polling station.
“The main thing I don’t like about the Liberals is the regulations they’ve brought in with a lot of the workers,” he said.
More than 1200 votes had been lodged at the Deer Park early voting centre by Friday, according to the Victorian Electorial Commission’s Kororoit District manager Heather Oke.
Ms Oke said the polls opened with a flourish on Monday, but stabilised as the week went on with the Deer Park centre taking an average of about 300 ballots per day.
