The Liberal Party ran a disastrous campaign in electorates with large Chinese-Australian populations, with swings against the Liberals far greater than the national average. Marcus Reubenstein reports.
The Perth seat of Tangney, Sydney metropolitan seats of Reid and Bennelong, as well as Chisholm in Melbourne, were all comfortably retained by Labor with swings well above the national average of 2.2%. In Tangney, the swing was 4.9%; in Chisolm, 4.6%; in Reid, 7.5%; with a swing of 13.5% in the once rock-solid Liberal seat of Bennelong.
In the Melbourne seat of Menzies, with one of the highest proportions of Chinese-Australian voters, rising Liberal Party light, Keith Wolahan tipped to lose his seat to Labor rival Gabriel Ng, picking up a 3.3% swing. Deakin, another Melbourne seat with a high Chinese-Australian vote was lost by, former LNP Housing Minister, Michael Sukkar, with a swing of 2.1% to Labor’s Matt Gregg.
In the Liberal seats of Bradfield and Berowra on Sydney’s north shore, with significant proportions of Chinese-Australian voters, there were swings of around 5% against the LNP.
From Howard country to Labor heartland
The Liberals have regarded Chinese-Australians in Sydney’s north as natural conservatives who flocked towards a party they saw as pro-small business, better economic managers, and having the right policies to protect investments and retirement savings.
When Prime Minister John Howard lost the 2007 federal election, he lost his seat of Bennelong to high-profile Labor candidate Maxine McKew. When Howard was swept into office, defeating Paul Keating in 1996, he had more than 60% of the two-party preferred vote. This year, sitting Labor MP Jerome Laxale, who scraped home on Greens Party preferences in 2022, captured over 59% of the two-party vote.
The Liberals’ candidate for Bennelong was 32-year-old Scott Yung, a likeable candidate with a high profile in the local Chinese community; his parents are from Hong Kong and mainland China.
So where, and how, did it go wrong?
Says Kingsley Liu, a former Greens candidate for the House of Representatives and founder of the Asian Australian Lawyers Association, “You can’t lay all the blame at the feet of Scott Yung. The Liberal Party machine demanded blind loyalty from its candidate without loyalty to the issues of concern to his community, such as racism and constant allegations of foreign interference.”
Two days before the election, Yung posted a paid video on the Chinese social media platform WeChat in which he said he does not “blindly follow” instructions from above.
Another question is whether non-Chinese voters viewed the choice of Yung as a cynical attempt to win over voters lost by Morrison in 2022. According to Liu, “Even though he’s now a local, Yung has (previously) run for the Liberal Party in the state seat of Kogarah. One must ask,
to what extent did non-Chinese voters in Bennelong feel that he was parachuted in because of his ethnicity?”
A number of Chinese-Australians in the electorate asked similar questions about Yung’s preselection and his ability to distance himself from Dutton.
Privately, Yung was telling supporters throughout the election campaign that he was being mentored by John Howard, and Howard showed up at Chinese community events for Yung, as did Dutton and Tony Abbott. However, all of the party backing of Yung translated into the Liberals’ lowest ever primary vote in Bennelong, ten percent lower than Howard’s when he lost the seat in 2007.
Reid voters unimpressed
The Liberals’ choice of Chinese-Australian Grange Chung as its candidate for the inner western Sydney seat of Reid had the whiff of the LNP head office hanging over it from day one. Says Liu, “Chung was the wrong candidate, in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Chung ticked all of the boxes for the party’s leadership but few, if any, for the local community. He’s ex-military, having also worked for military contractor Jacobs, so he’s cleared all the LNP national security hurdles.
He had no campaign website; instead, his only messaging was through social media. Rather than community engagement his feed was littered with support from China-sceptics from the party leadership. Chung posted photos of himself with Abbott; images with Dutton at Sydney’s Easter Show; and videos with endorsements from NSW senator Dave Sharma, who has little recognition among the Chinese-Australian voters in Reid.
In perhaps the most ill-conceived stunt of any LNP candidate in this election, Chung invited Victorian Liberal Senator James Paterson – the vehemently anti-China “wolverine” – to campaign on his behalf. Paterson handed out how-to-votes at pre-polling booths; most voters would not have known who Paterson was, and those who did know would almost certainly have been put off by his presence.
Says Liu, “Rather than seeking endorsement from his community,
he brought in senior Liberal figures with questionable, or no, records of supporting the Chinese community.
When Chung addressed the Chinese community directly, it was through a fear campaign with a video on WeChat claiming that Labor was the sole party responsible for the White Australia policy. “It’s a deliberately blurred line”, says Liu, “between citing a deeply racist historical policy and suggesting it belongs to a party that didn’t exist when the Immigration Restriction Act – the White Australia Policy – was enacted in 1901.”
Following Saturday’s poll, sitting Labor member, Sally Sitou, was returned with 62% of the two-party preferred vote.
The long march back
When it comes to Chinese-Australian voters, the LNP is in tatters and appears to have implemented nothing from the party review following the 2022 election loss, which stated, “Rebuilding the Party’s relationship with the Chinese community must be a priority during this term of Parliament.”
Victorian senator Jane Hume, the co-author of that review, has done a stellar job alienating the Chinese Australian community. In the final week of the election campaign, she accused Labor of employing “Chinese spies” to work on its polling booths.
The LNP remains enthusiastically supportive of AUKUS, a deal which many Chinese-Australians strongly oppose; in the final leaders’ debate of the election campaign, Dutton unambiguously identified China as our biggest security threat; on top of that, LNP politicians are quick to question the loyalties of Chinese-Australians. These are issues that do not resonate across the broader electorate anywhere near the extent to which they alienate Chinese-Australians.
Writing in Crikey, UTS professor Wanning Sun succinctly summed up the failings of the LNP, saying, “Dutton wanted the Chinese-Australian vote… and the anti-China vote. It screwed his candidates.” Dutton is certain to never return to the parliament, how many Chinese-Australians will never return to the LNP?
Scott Yung and Grange Chung did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article.
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Marcus Reubenstein is an independent journalist with more than twenty-five years of media experience. He spent five years at Seven News in Sydney and seven years at SBS World News where he was a senior correspondent. As a print journalist he has contributed business stories to most of Australia’s major news outlets. Internationally he has worked on assignments for CNN, Eurosport and the Olympic Games Broadcasting Service. He is the founder and editor of Asian business new website, APAC Business Review..