Source : the age
When Asian supermarket owner Hugh Do heard reports that a Vietnamese grocer had been fatally bashed in Sunshine, his first thought was: “That could be me.”
Then he realised he knew the victim. Van Viet Truong had arrived in Melbourne around the same time and set up his business around the same time as Do’s dad.
Speaking in his family’s shop in the heart of Ringwood, between serving customers and helping unload deliveries out the back, Do – a second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese Australian – tells me he feels increasingly on edge.
“I’m just worried I’m going to get held up,” he says.
If crime wasn’t already on people’s minds ahead of the November 28 state election, the fatal stabbing of Chinese delivery rider Feng Jianming in the city last Friday night has brought it to the fore, particularly among Chinese-Australians.
In Ringwood, this community is set to have a major influence on which way the pendulum swings on election day. Previously concentrated in Box Hill, the Chinese-Australian community in Melbourne’s east has been expanding further into the outer suburbs.
More than 15 per cent of people living in the seat of Ringwood had Chinese ancestry as of the 2021 census – almost triple the statewide ratio. A further 6.9 per cent of residents were born in China, compared with 2.6 per cent Victoria-wide.
So it’s no surprise that it’s a voter base into which local candidates have been investing significant amounts of time and money. At least two – Liberal candidate Nick McGowan and independent Prue Cutts – have been handing out pamphlets and how-to-vote cards in Mandarin. Notably, these are the only two candidates Do had heard of.
McGowan, who has spent the past term representing the wider region as the upper house member for the North-Eastern Metropolitan Region, has also been embracing platforms like WeChat and RedNote – a Chinese lifestyle and e-commerce platform increasingly used by expats abroad.
The ABC reported last year RedNote alone had more than 700,000 monthly users in Australia. McGowan has more than 2300 followers there, almost double that of Premier Ben Carroll. Even Jacky Sun, the Chinese-born Liberal candidate for Glen Waverley, which borders Ringwood, has only about 550 followers.
RMIT associate professor of Chinese studies, Jing Qi, said platforms such as RedNote could play a key role in this election, explaining that while voter sentiment in the community had swung left in recent years, McGowan’s strong presence on the platform could shift the dial in Ringwood.
“I’m actually a bit surprised I haven’t seen Labor candidate Rachel Halse … [She] has been going into in-person events, but RedNote nowadays has a very, very powerful presence because it’s also AI-driven,” she explains.
“You can search for somebody and ask AI, which is embedded in RedNote, to summarise the content of all the posts about this person … You get a lot of information about, for example, Nick McGowan, and the fact he’s committed $1.5 million for a Chinese early learning centre [in Bayswater] … but you don’t get much about other candidates.”
Qi says it is a missed opportunity for Halse to spruik Labor’s free dental policy, which she felt would be popular with many voters.
“It’s [dental care] much cheaper in China, so I know a lot of people that actually fly back … to take care of their teeth.”
None of the 20 local government areas listed to receive free dental clinics under Labor’s election commitment sits within the Ringwood electorate, though two are promised for neighbouring council areas.
When I spoke with Halse two weeks ago, she hadn’t heard of RedNote, and said she wasn’t planning to translate campaign material into Mandarin because she didn’t want to make assumptions about people’s country of origin or English-language capacity.
Qi says it’s important candidates don’t overdo it, as many Chinese voters were sensitive to politicians being performative – which both Carroll and Opposition Leader Jess Wilson have been accused of on RedNote and WeChat in the aftermath of Feng’s death.
Dr Wilfred Wang, a University of Melbourne researcher who has held focus group discussions with Chinese voters and analysed data from platforms like RedNote, says many Chinese-Australians feel something needs to change, and seem open to shifting their loyalties based on specific local issues.
Wang, who lives in the Ringwood electorate, says hot topics included state infrastructure projects and schools. While crime had been a big discussion point earlier in the year, it had cooled in recent months, but Feng’s death had brought it back into sharp focus.
According to Wang, the success of a political campaign comes down to who is better able to understand what different community groups are talking about and where these discussions are taking place, and use that information to meet them where they’re at.
From a language perspective, Family First candidate Elaine Huang has the upper hand. Having migrated from China almost two decades ago, she is the only challenger for the seat who speaks fluent Mandarin.
But at a candidate’s forum last week, Huang was replaced by her party’s upper house candidate Alex van der End, who said he didn’t want Huang to be made fun of because English was not her first language, according to the event’s MC, Reverend James Douglas.
Huang, who sat in the audience, told me after that she felt frustrated listening to some of the Victorian Socialists candidate’s views, having herself grown up under communism. As a financial planner, she also has strong views on state debt, and ultimately expressed some regret that she had not been up on stage to share her thoughts.
Wang said previous elections show simply being Chinese-born doesn’t necessarily hold much sway with voters. The main problem for Family First, he says, is that most people haven’t heard of them.
One far-right party most Chinese voters are aware of, though, is One Nation – though Wang says increasingly for the wrong reasons.
Though the populist party previously had a sizeable supporter base among Australia’s Asian diaspora, Pauline Hanson’s speech at the National Press Club earlier this year, in which she espoused her desire for the country to be “a monoculture”, had turned many people off.
Chinese Australian Network founder Minwen Wu says it’s not people’s words or affiliations that matter so much as what they do.
He says he has seen MPs elevated to power on the strength of the Chinese vote, only to ignore them the minute they enter parliament.
On this front, Wu says Labor – a party he used to be a member of – had let him down.
“They don’t try to encourage a voice from the community, especially Chinese … [They] go to all the photo opportunities, to Chinese New Year, whatever. To dine and wine, taking photos to show off, just like the CCP, like Putin … but I don’t think [they] deserve to be elected,” he says.
Wu, who moved to Melbourne around the turn of the century and runs English-language classes for other migrants in Box Hill, says politicians need to understand two things about Chinese-Australians: they are not a homogenous voter base, and they have long memories.
“[If] you are damaging, undermining, taking advantage of the Chinese community, leveraging this silent group, you are also undermining Victorian democracy … [and] I will try to kick you out.”
Despite running for the seat of Sydenham, in Melbourne’s western suburbs, Liberal candidate Nathalie Moussi can’t call herself a local.
In fact, she owns a house in Torquay just minutes from the beach and says she splits her time between that property and another in Melbourne that’s outside the Sydenham boundary.
If she wins on election night, then she’ll move, she says.
“You sweating?” Cecelia Cooper, the co-moderator of a multicultural candidate forum for Shepparton voters, asks Nationals candidate Shane Sali.
“Go easy on me Cecelia,” Sali says. “Never,” Cooper responds.
They’re both smiling, and some of the voters at the Door Bells – Migrant Women’s Network forum on Tuesday night with them, laugh too.
It’s a prelude to one of the first questions that opens the event, and sets the tone for the night.
If John Pesutto’s relationship with the Liberal Party was a romance, his friends would have staged an intervention years ago.
Over the course of their courtship, which began more than 30 years ago, the former opposition leader has been rejected, dumped and left with a multi-million dollar legal bill.
But the 56-year-old remains devoted to the party, convinced that this time it might be different.
A notorious pothole in Melbourne’s east has been filled overnight after becoming a social media star in the run-up to the state election.
Sitting at the intersection of Mahoneys and Canterbury roads in Forest Hill and straddling the electorates of Glen Waverley and Ringwood, the pothole had been there since at least December, according to Google Street View images. Liberal candidate for Ringwood Nick McGowan says it dated back to at least mid-2025.
One local resident, whose identity The Age has not been able to confirm, created an Instagram page drawing attention to the problem on November 1, with the bio “just a pothole living my best life”. Since then, the account has gathered more than 550 followers and posted daily updates on the gaping hole.
About three-quarters of the way through her campaign stop in Deer Park last Monday, after she had railed against state debt, working from home laws and trans women playing sport, Pauline Hanson took some questions from the floor.
Taking unvetted questions from voters is always a risk, even at an event for One Nation faithful. But for Hanson, authenticity and vulnerability isn’t optional, it’s the entire brand.
Locals asked the One Nation leader about the greatest risk to Australia’s way of life (Islam, socialism, Marxism, “in that order”), crime, and Christian churches being converted to mosques.
Less than three months on from delivering an emotional valedictory speech to the Victorian parliament, following what can only be described as a messy two terms in the lower house, outgoing Ringwood MP Will Fowles is gearing up to have another crack.
The 48-year-old’s name quietly appeared on the Victorian Electoral Commission website on Monday, where he is listed as one of 11 people running in the Melbourne seat of Preston.
When asked about the move to Preston on Monday, Fowles said he saw the November 28 election more as an advocacy opportunity, and felt there was “no greater symbol of government inaction on housing than the decade-long failure to deliver new homes at Preston market”.
It was just six months ago in the regional electorate of Farrer that voters resoundingly chose David Farley to be their next elected official in Canberra and, in the process, delivered One Nation its first lower house federal MP.
Triggered by the resignation of former federal opposition leader Sussan Ley, the byelection result in Farrer not only broke 77 years of Coalition safety in the seat, but also sent an ominous warning to regional electorates across the border preparing for this month’s state election and staring down challengers from the populist minor party.
Taking in Albury, Griffith and Deniliquin, the expansive rural electorate of Farrer covers 126,563 square kilometres in the south-west corner of NSW. At its most southern point is the Murray River, where on the other side of the water sits the state electorate of Shepparton – an area that cuts plenty of similarities with Farrer.
Last week, we heard from voters in Sydenham, a once safe Labor seat that formed part of the “red wall” of outer-suburban Melbourne electorates.
After years leaning left, voters told investigative reporter Liam Mannix that they feel increasingly ignored by the government, with infrastructure, roads and hospital wait times proving to be major issues.
In Ringwood, another seat currently held by Labor, the attack from the Liberals and a number of minor party and independent candidates is well and truly under way.
Reporter Bridget McArthur last week took us inside a lively candidate’s forum where the Family First candidate for the seat was sidelined by a colleague who insisted he speak on her behalf. We also heard from locals that some of the main concerns going into this election are potholes, affordable housing and crime.
Welcome back to week 2 of our hot seats election coverage, where we’re taking a hyperlocal look at the burning issues in the electorates of Shepparton, Ringwood, Sydenham and Hawthorn in the lead-up to polling day on November 28.
In case you missed it, here’s everything we covered in week one.
