Environmental consultant Ellie Smith knows she has a tough job ahead of her to unseat the federal opposition leader, but she’s up for the challengeFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastEllie Smith says the reason she decided to try to unseat Peter Dutton in his Brisbane electorate is simple.“For me it was just about having a local MP who reflects our community,” she said. “It just kind of didn’t make sense to me that we had an MP that was so divisive.”Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading…Environmental consultant Ellie Smith knows she has a tough job ahead of her to unseat the federal opposition leader, but she’s up for the challengeFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastEllie Smith says the reason she decided to try to unseat Peter Dutton in his Brisbane electorate is simple.“For me it was just about having a local MP who reflects our community,” she said. “It just kind of didn’t make sense to me that we had an MP that was so divisive.”Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading…
Ellie Smith says the reason she decided to try to unseat Peter Dutton in his Brisbane electorate is simple.
“For me it was just about having a local MP who reflects our community,” she said. “It just kind of didn’t make sense to me that we had an MP that was so divisive.”
If she does it, it will be a first. Just seven Australian opposition leaders have lost their seat at an election – all of them at state and territory level.
But then again, nobody thought it was possible to defeat the Coalition in the federal electorates of Kooyong, Warringah, Goldstein, Curtin or Wentworth before the so-called teal wave emerged as a political force in Australia.
But Smith, an environmental consultant, says she is in the fight for the Brisbane seat of Dickson to win it.
But please, don’t call her a teal; she’s a community independent, Queensland-style.
“I don’t see myself as a teal. Maroon is our colour,” she said.
“I know that any independent who is elected in Queensland, that we’re going to be representing our communities, and Queensland is different.”
Smith launches her campaign on Monday, one of several Queensland campaigns backed by the Climate 200 movement, which it says is bent on halting the growth of far-right politics in Australia.
Who is Ellie Smith?
Smith never thought she would see her name in a headline. Like many Climate 200-backed candidates she was effectively drafted into the role. There was a months-long process which she said was led by the community, which wanted a different way.
“I spent a lot of last year trying to find somebody else,” she said.
“I would absolutely not be standing as an independent if it wasn’t for this community of people who have asked me to run. Begged me to run.”
Guardian Australia spoke with her at her home at Camp Mountain, a rural area north of Brisbane. Her home is surrounded by trees, on a ridge line, on a multiple-acre lot. She built most of it after moving there in 2017 from Brisbane’s south. Ironically her now opponent used to live just a few doors down.
It’s a classic Brisbane suburb – but not a typical teal one.
Dickson is a classic mortgage belt, outer suburban seat – and the party’s most marginal in Queensland. It has returned Dutton every election for the past 24 years – though only just – after tossing out Cheryl Kernot at the 2001 Tampa election.
That’s likely why the first words on Smith’s lips aren’t climate change.
“Cost of living is the biggest thing everybody’s concerned about,” she said.
“But also integrity and a fair go.”
That’s a little surprising, given her professional background. She spent two stints at Lock the Gate, a body opposed primarily to the expansion of coalmining, the most recent one ending just last year as she resigned to run.
But she says there’s no contradiction. The climate hasn’t been the centre of her professional career either; her job was “trying to get a fair go” for farmers, she says.
“The organisation is focused on communities and getting the best outcome, and protecting water and protecting farmland,” she said.
“That’s been my focus for the last for those 10 years of working there. If people go and talk to the farming communities that I’ve worked with, they’ll say ‘she’s just a good advocate’.”
‘Why does he talk about that stuff?’
Like campaigns of the past – and future, for Labor’s Ali France and the Greens’ Vinnie Batten – the battle for Dickson attracts a specific kind of ground soldier: the anti-Dutton warrior. People who sign up not to win for a cause but to defeat a candidate.
Smith swears that’s not true of most, but admits it is for a “good chunk of people”. But it’s not personal.
“That’s the reason they come in, but the reason that they stay is because there’s a vision that’s not anti, not just anti. In fact, we’re not anti at all,” she said. “We’re for something different.”
She says the hundreds of volunteers expected to turn up at her launch today are her secret weapon.
Though the Climate 200 website promises an end to “Trump-style Australian politics”, Smith isn’t sure that’s something she can achieve alone, even in victory.
But she is sure Dutton is out of touch with the electorate.
His causes, such as nuclear power, “a distraction” from the household savings that could be won from rooftop solar, she says – and his socially conservative attitudes on issues such as immigration and Australia Day simply aren’t the things people care about.
“They want somebody who works hard for the community. That stuff kind of boggles my mind, like, why does he do it? And why does he talk about that stuff?
“I’ve spent a bit of time talking to people locally; they just wouldn’t rate it as an issue.”
“It doesn’t make sense to try to be an independent from a movement that’s happened down in inner city, Sydney and Melbourne.”
Smith says her how-to-vote card won’t direct her supporters how to preference, and would not say which party she would back in case of a minority government or on what basis.
Just one teal ran in Queensland in 2022, in the Toowoomba electorate of Groom. But this time she won’t be alone. Independents are also running hard in McPherson, Moncrieff, Fisher and Fairfax, among others.
“Overwhelmingly, the people who are coming to us are doing so because they don’t think that the person is the person who represents their views and values.
“And then, when they sit down and think about it, they go, ‘look at all of these other independents that have run and what they’ve achieved in their community in terms of that cohesion and actually bringing people together, rather than dividing the community’.”
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