Hostile and deeply divided: In south-west Sydney, it’s an election campaign like never before

Jihad Dib is worried. “There is a change,” he says. “You can feel the change.”

The state Labor minister, transformative education leader and the first NSW MP to take his oath on a Quran has never seen an election campaign like this.

It is personal, deeply divided and increasingly hostile. And it is being driven by sophisticated social media campaigns that have splintered communities, forced Labor ministers out of mosques and littered streets with corflutes stained blood-red.

“In the last 14 years of participating in elections, I’ve never seen a campaign as dirty as this one,” says Dr Jamal Rifi, a Muslim community leader in south-western Sydney.

The allegations are flying from both sides: claims of censorship and bullying, candidates being pushed out of events, and the defacing of campaign materials.

Three cabinet ministers and potential future prime ministers have held this ground since before the global financial crisis: Tony Burke, Jason Clare, and Chris Bowen. Their electorates and neighbouring Werriwa and Fowler cut like a pizza slice through south-west Sydney.

The stakes are high, and the swing is on. Nationally, Labor is polling ahead of the Coalition. Still, Labor operatives here believe the heartland seats of Blaxland and Watson could be hit with swings against Labor of more than 6 per cent, as independents Ahmed Ouf and Ziad Basyouny mount teal-like challenges to incumbents. Clare holds Blaxland on a margin of 13 per cent. Next door, Burke holds Watson on a margin of 15 per cent.

“It is not panic stations,” says one senior Labor figure who asked not to be identified to speak freely. “But I think there will be a lot of protest votes.”

Bowen, the Energy Minister and MP for McMahon, is circumspect. “I would expect all the western Sydney cabinet members to be returned, but no one’s taking anything for granted.”

Instead of pulling away in the polls as it has elsewhere, the government is increasingly relying on preferences flowing from voters who could never countenance putting the Liberals second. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s history of targeting migrants from the Middle East in areas where the most common language spoken at home is Arabic, not English, is deeply resented in the community.

But Labor has not faced a threat like this in seats like these before – sophisticated, independent campaigns run by former Labor members and volunteers using the momentum of a singular emotive issue: Palestine, to mount an assault on its handling of the cost of living, housing, education and health.

“I think it’s too late in some respects for the major parties to reverse that trend,” says the executive director for the Centre for Western Sydney, Andy Marks.

“The drop-off in support [for the major parties] has been going on for decades. It’s more accelerated in western Sydney, and I think that will continue.”

In Blaxland, 300 volunteers are transforming the electorate into the “Orange City” for Ouf’s campaign. He spends each day handing out hundreds of orange balloons at school pick-ups. Two hundred more are doing the same in turquoise for Basyouny in Watson next door.

From 6am to 9pm they hit the shops along the arteries that carve through these diverse electorates, where weekly incomes are $200 below the state median, housing and rental stress is 10 per cent higher than the rest of NSW, and the parents of two-thirds of residents were born overseas.

For the first time in her life, Peri Kiratli will not be voting Labor. “That’s all we knew, that’s all we’ve been doing,” she said.

“I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but if you put a Labor photo on a donkey in Auburn, they’ll still vote for the donkey because they’re so used to Labor.”

The 49-year-old says it’s time to give someone else a go. “The independents, let’s see if it makes a difference. Let’s see if they keep their promises.”

Gamel Kheir, the secretary of the Lebanese Muslim Association, says there has been “a seismic shift in the way we talk and relate to politicians”.

“We’re dealing with people like me, third-generation Australians, who have learnt that their vote is not taken as a fait accompli any more,” he says.

Basyouny and Ouf’s WhatsApp groups are filled with the children of migrants who once delivered election after election for Paul Keating, Gough Whitlam, Bowen, Burke and Clare – all proud sons of western Sydney. They have shed their parents’ war-born reluctance to challenge authority. Now they are outraged by Labor’s moderate position on Gaza, and the housing, education and infrastructure outcomes that have seen them lag their peers in the east for all the 70 years that the party has held power in these areas.

“The best migrant is the infant Australian,” a 25-year-old Keating said in his maiden speech as the member for Blaxland in 1970. He urged parliament to consider “the enormous cost of bringing migrants to this country”.

By the time he left office as prime minister in 1996, the demographics of his electorate were unrecognisable: 40 per cent of residents were born overseas, most of them from Lebanon and Vietnam. The economics were not. Keating railed against the cost of living, inflation and infrastructure, topics that still confound his successors to this day.

“I would like to be able to describe my electorate as a scenic district, as something of beauty, but, unfortunately, I cannot,” Keating said. “The suburbs within the Blaxland electorate would serve as some of the best examples of chaotic development that can be seen.”

In 2008, Clare despaired that Blaxland was “the mortgage stress capital of Australia”. Two decades later, nearly 30 per cent of the electorate is still in mortgage stress, almost double the state average. Across Blaxland, Watson, McMahon, Werriwa and Fowler, financial fatigue has been driven by lower median weekly incomes and higher unemployment.

Nassim Mohaminade, a Liberal supporter who will vote independent for the first time, says business is down at his barbecue restaurant in Auburn by 50 per cent.

“This is the government’s fault,” he says. “You are the head of your family. If you are not supporting them, how are they going to survive?”

Marks says the teals won support in other parts of Sydney based on national issues such as integrity, women in politics and climate.

“But in western Sydney, it’s very much about your ability to get to your job, child care availability, and access to education. It’s things that are happening in your neighbourhood, rather than a national agenda,” he says. “This is where Labor has become a bit distracted.”

Labor’s success at all three levels of government in this area may also be its Achilles’ heel. The council election results from September are an ominous portent.

In Cumberland, Labor was hit with a swing of 16.9 per cent. In Canterbury-Bankstown and Liverpool it was more than 6 per cent.

“I’ve spoken to so many MPs. I’ve spoken to the council members, nothing’s changing,” says Kiratli, the Condell Park business owner.

The same frustration drove Ouf, the Egyptian son of a Red Crescent surgeon, away from supporting the party and towards his tilt at parliament.

In the summer of 2019, his son Ibrahim, 13, went for a swim at a popular swimming hole in the Royal National Park. When another swimmer jumped on Ibrahim from the cliff above, it permanently severed the nerve between his spine and his shoulder.

“His brain can’t see his arm,” says Ouf.

But Ibrahim was determined to get back in the water. Auburn Swimming Club was his saviour.

“For Ibrahim, swimming is not just a sport. It distracted him from the loss of his arm,” says Ouf.

Ibrahim blossomed. He took up butterfly, a stroke that is hard enough with two arms, let alone one. Then the program faced funding cuts. Its rank plummeted. Families withdrew their kids, and coaches left.

“They say people from overseas, the immigrants, they don’t value sports,” says Ouf. “We couldn’t reach anyone in the council to help us fix the issue and save the club.”

Ouf and his wife were forced to drive an hour each way to Blacktown to keep Ibrahim’s dream of making the Paralympics alive.

The experience lit a fire in Ouf. Through gridlock, he noticed the school playgrounds with holes in them (public schools in Paddington and Vaucluse received more taxpayer funding per student than some schools in Liverpool and Campbelltown last year), the disparity in healthcare services, and home owners struggling to make ends meet.

“The gap between those who are living in Blaxland and those who are living in the city is growing, and nothing has been done to fix it,” he says.

“Believe me, 99 per cent of those who came here from Lebanon, from Egypt, from China, what motivated them to cross the ocean? It’s because they want to contribute. They want to build something for the kids.”

Labor MPs point to the substantial investments in the region under their watch. The fibro shacks that characterised the area have been replaced with new apartment blocks, urgent care clinics are springing up, and the Sydney Metro is expanding to Bankstown. But the major parties’ penchant for mixing the local and the national has meant that council and state-based problems are conflated with the responsibilities of the federal government.

“In the last week, we’ve seen both the prime minister and the opposition leader come out and promise upgrades to local connecting roads,” says Marks.

“I can’t think of another country in the world where the leader of the nation decides to dine out on an upgrade to a road, and the opposition leader decides to pile in as well. It’s just such small and narrow thinking about what is effectively the most dynamic, fastest growing and exciting region in the country.”

Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that despite still lagging the eastern suburbs, south-west Sydney is now wealthier than ever before.

“I think where the frustration might come from is there’s an expectation that so much more could happen,” says Dib.

The very services Labor says it has delivered have also seen residents rightly push for more as they become more educated and politically active.

“We are just reaching our first wave of political activation here in the west,” says Dr Mohamad Assoum, a former Labor member of 17 years who is running Ouf and Basyouny’s campaigns after leaving the party over its position on the war in Gaza.

Assoum’s decision to defect, like others, including former Labor senator Fatima Payman, shows how perilous the conflict in the Middle East has become for Labor, with members unable to reconcile the party’s position with their view on a war that has taken more than 60,000 lives, including close relatives, since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.

“There is a level of tension,” says Dib. “It’s trauma on top of trauma.”

“There’s that feeling among some quarters that Labor could have done more, the government could have done more … The general thing is: ‘Oh, look, we really like what you’re doing. We like you. We know you, but you know we’re just angry.’ ”

Labor supports a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine and voted in favour of enabling more Palestinian participation at the United Nations. Months after coming to office in 2022, it reversed the Coalition’s decision to move the Australian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Burke was criticised by the Coalition last year for “rolling out the red carpet” to Palestinian migrants after he personally met with refugees to give them protection visas.

But for some voters, nothing short of declaring Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide will be enough.

“I just think they find [politicians] hypocritical,” says Kiratli. “You’re supporting one thing, and then coming to a Muslim get-together. How does that work? You’re OK with Muslims being killed in Gaza, but at the same time, you come into a Muslim Ramadan, how does that work?”

Ouf, Basyouny and Kheir all describe Gaza as “the straw that broke the camel’s back”.

Payman’s new party, Australia Votes, is one of myriad new political organisations that have sprung up in response to the conflict, including Muslim Votes, The Muslim Vote and Stand4Palestine.

Stand4Palestine, which has links to Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamic fundamentalist organisation, forced Burke and Clare to abandon plans to visit local mosques at the end of Ramadan after threats to their security. In Victoria, the group celebrated when Liberal MP Jason Wood was booed out of a mosque in Dandenong after promising $6.5 million in funding to upgrade its facilities if the Coalition wins the election, fuelling claims the opposition was attempting to buy votes on one of Islam’s holiest days.

“I don’t think they would ever do that at a church or a synagogue or a temple,” says Assoum.

Kheir, who operates one of the state’s largest mosques in Lakemba, says the decades-old model of political leaders making pitches to Muslim religious gatherings is dead.

“We used to do that because our fathers believed this was the way that you engage politicians,” he says. “I think we’ve realised now that these places should be sacrosanct.

“The greatest thing that’s come out of this is not so much The Muslim Vote because I don’t think it will have a future. But what’s come out of it is that there is a future for involvement and engagement in politics with the community.”

Rifi is less optimistic. Younger leaders view him as a member of the old guard of predominantly Lebanese leaders who have dominated local leadership positions since the Cronulla Riots.

“It’s not about age. It’s about maturity,” Rifi says. “They are the copy and paste generation. We are the heavy builders’ generation, a generation that stands on foundations, not on quicksand.

“They are the generation that is exploiting the suffering of Gaza. We are the generation that has always respected the suffering of Palestinians. They have no idea about the division that they are causing in the community.

“I lived in a sectarian country, I know what the dangers of it are.”

The campaigns have seen community leaders who attended an Iftar dinner with Labor MPs shamed on social media. “It’s bullying,” says one senior Labor figure. “I was shocked.”

Ouf and Basyouny claim they have also been targeted by Labor supporters who have pulled down campaign materials and stopped them from campaigning outside schools and community events. Ouf has funded his campaign by selling his $40,000 Toyota Kluger.

In March, Ouf claims he was stopped by Cumberland Council officials from campaigning at the Nowruz festival in Merrylands. The council allowed Clare, the local MP, to not only campaign but take the stage at the festival, promoting him in a video that was later deleted from the council’s Facebook page.

“It’s unacceptable,” says Ouf.

Cumberland Council said it was “disappointed” public displays had become political, but did not comment on the claims that council officers denied Ouf entry to campaign at the festival.

Clare has been at the forefront of Labor’s national campaign as the party’s spokesman, limiting his presence in the electorate. He and Burke did not respond to requests for comment on the local campaign.

“Welcome to Liverpool, mate, this is my old hood,” Clare told ABC Radio Sydney in Liverpool on Tuesday in a segment dedicated to the issues in south-west Sydney. But he used most of his airtime to spruik Labor’s national education and housing policies. Donald Trump was mentioned more than Blaxland.

Clare’s opponents have taken to calling him “Casper Clare”. “He turns up at an event as a friendly face, then disappears like a ghost,” said one Ouf supporter.

Labor figures believe his street campaigning skills will see him prevail in the final two weeks of the campaign. They are confident of holding McMahon and Werriwa, while going on the offensive in Fowler with local Labor candidate Tu Le. Independent Dai Le won the seat in 2022 in a campaign that Basyouny and Ouf have modelled theirs on.

The strategists are more worried about Burke. Burke has a high profile as home affairs minister and has earned goodwill in the community, but he is facing Basyouny, a candidate who has been running a ground campaign since August.

The physician says the contrast between the political freedoms in Australia and the country he left two decades ago is not lost on him. “If I decided to run against the minister of internal affairs in Egypt, I would be in prison,” Basyouny says.

Ouf and Basyouny face a delicate balance of appealing to Muslim voters and the broader electorate. Muslim Votes does not run either of their campaigns, but it has endorsed both. The two candidates say they are fiercely secular.

“I would say I’m proudly endorsed by them, yes, but there’s a cost,” says Ouf.

“The cost is that lots of parties will not preference me over Labor. So this is an issue that I’m dealing with, but at the end of the day, it’s a game of knowledge and history. It’s about winning.”

Ouf announced on Wednesday he would preference Clare third, behind the Greens, out of six running candidates. At the bottom of the ticket, he placed Courtney Nguyen for the Liberals.

Basyouny put Burke at six and the Liberals at seven from nine candidates, with the Trumpet of Patriots ahead at No.4, and the Greens second.

When voters head to the ballot box on May 3 the calculation will be simple. Will they be better served by cabinet ministers or by independents taking the fight to Labor for the first time?

“The ultimate frustration is to have a look at what everyone else has got. But for that to change, it comes in increments,” says Dib. “The difference being at the cabinet table is that you can see problems, and you can fix it.”

Basyouny says they have already achieved part of their goal. “[We] had the minister who said he would change from the inside,” he says. “What did we get? The wrong end of the stick. Making this a marginal seat means both sides of the political spectrum will give it attention.”

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