campaign trail
federal election 2010
Lin ‘gets real’ about taking Senate seat With Greens polling showing the second ACT Senate seat too close to call, Greens candidate Lin Hatfield Dodds is always ready for a cuppa. ELERI HARRIS reports “IF only I had time for a cup of tea with everyone in Canberra, that would be fantastic,” muses ACT Greens candidate Lin Hatfield Dodds, adjusting her stockings in the passenger seat of a car plastered with “Lin for the Senate” stickers. “I genuinely like people,” she says. “People have well-developed crap detectors. Most people can tell when you’re not interested or don’t care. But I do.” As she heads to polling day, Hatfield Dodds is on high-level election mode, gearing up to take the Senate by storm in her Green party machine. “It’s a team process, everyone is involved,” Hatfield Dodds says about her campaign, which is headed up by Greens Leader Bob Brown’s partner Paul Thomas. “It’s just how we do stuff.” The day after the election was announced, Hatfield Dodds stood alongside Brown out the front of Parliament House and has been present at no less than four press conferences with her leader in the capital over the first three weeks of the campaign. In the same time Liberal Senator Gary Humphries and Labor Senator
Lin Hatfield Dodds, takes time for tea, at Parliament House with Greens leader Bob Brown and campaigning… “I genuinely like people”. Kate Lundy have not been seen at any press conferences with their leaders. “It raises the profile of the Greens as a party,” Thomas told the “CityNews”. “We’re serious about this jurisdiction and it says we are a cohesive team.” Hatfield Dodds says: “People want to know, can you deliver what you’ll say you’ll deliver. The Liberal Senator has not a whole lot of influence with his party leadership.” The social justice advocate and former ACT Australian of the Year says she has a solid relationship with her party leadership and will be a strong voice in the Greens if elected.
Hatfield Dodds gave her first press conference at Federal Parliament in 2002 for Uniting Care, titled “Let’s Get Real About Poverty”. “I’ve done reasonably public things in the last decade and my tip for surviving is to take the issues really seriously, but not yourself,” she says. In her campaign, Hatfield Dodds has become famous for sitting down for a cup of tea with constituents, community groups and key players in Canberra’s political scene on top of regular campaign techniques such as door knocking, supermarket bombing and propagating at car park stalls. “It’s about creating informal spaces
to meet people,” Hatfield Dodds says. “We’re trying to create spaces to have conversations because you can’t properly represent people without dialogue. “Leaders and people in positions of power like to think they’re listening, but to develop vision with other people takes building a movement. “Social transformation is not about one person, you lead from the middle. “We’re about building pathways and THAT’s moving forward.” In the freezing winter wind at Hawker shops, Hatfield Dodds stops the daytime traffic of pensioners, tradies and parents, handing out Greens
Photos by Silas
pamphlets and detailing her ideas juxtaposed with citizen concerns. It’s clear the Greens have yet to shake off a certain kind of image. “It’s the looney left,” one man says, while another woman vigorously grabs Hatfield Dodds by the hand. “Got to keep the other guys honest!” she enthuses, borrowing an old phrase from the Democrats, long since voted out into the cold. Despite Liberal confidence at retaining Humphries’ senate seat, Hatfield Dodds is more than optimistic about her chances of election, “It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.”
CityNews August 12-18