Wills, Goldstein, Kooyong and Bruce at centre of 2025 federal election

Hi, over the next five weeks, I’ll be blogging about the seat of Wills as the 2025 federal election unfolds.

I’m normally an investigative reporter for The Age – investigative reporters never miss an opportunity to push their stories, so please read my most recent reporting on Australia’s $4 billion cosmetic injectables industry here. But during the federal election, I’ll follow full-time Labor MP Peter Khalil, the Greens’ Samantha Ratnam, Liberal Jeff Kidney, Socialist Sue Bolton, and all of the other candidates in this northern suburbs seat.

Wills covers progressive northern suburbs like Brunswick and Coburg and Labor-leaning areas like Pascoe Vale, Fawkner, Oak Park and Glenroy. But a redistribution has added some of Australia’s most green booths – in Fitzroy North and Carlton North – to Wills for the first time.

This is likely to hand Ratnam and the Greens an advantage. However, as I moved around the seat in the last week, preparing for the launch of this blog today, I noticed plenty of Peter Khalil signs on house fences in both Carlton North and Fitzroy North. Maybe that advantage, like so many Greens predictions of victory here, will be an illusion again: it’s been a phenomenon in this seat for more than a decade that the Greens talk up their chance of snatching Wills from Labor and then ultimately a win fails to materialise.

At the 2022 election, I spent six fascinating weeks in the seat of Chisholm, roaming its suburbs, which include Box Hill, Burwood, Glen Waverley and Mount Waverley. There, it was clear a few weeks out that Liberal MP Gladys Liu would struggle to hold the seat from Labor’s Carina Garland. Ultimately, Garland won easily with a 7 per cent swing to her and Labor. So far in Wills, it’s hard to tell whether the Greens’ talk of this being a potential win is just that – talk – or if the voters of this economically and ethnically diverse seat will finally turn out for them. Or will voters back Khalil and the status quo? Ratnam has stood in Wills against Khalil before, in 2016. Then, she came close to ending the party’s near-continuous hold on the seat since its creation in 1949. Ratnam secured 45 per cent of the vote that year. Khalil ultimately won but had to rely on preferences from other parties. Since then, no Greens candidate has come near Khalil, who has expanded his majority in the seat on a two-party preferred basis to 9 per cent.

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Khalil, 52, was born in Melbourne to Egyptian parents and grew up in public housing. Ratnam, 47 and born to Sri Lankan parents who left that country because of civil war, is a strong candidate in her own right. In the nine years since she last ran, her profile has grown and grown – first as the mayor of Moreland (now Merri-bek) Council, and then as the state leader of the Greens in Victoria. Wills, famously represented by former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke from 1980 until his retirement in 1992, is named after William John Wills who, alongside Robert O’Hara Burke, perished on their ill-fated expedition from Victoria to the Gulf of Carpentaria.

At the centre of Wills is Bell Street, the major arterial road which once acted as the so-called hipster-proof fence in previous elections, with Labor voters to the north and Greens voters to the south. But rising house prices punched a hole in that fence, and younger, Greens-voting progressives increasingly settling in suburbs such as Pascoe Vale and Coburg North. The big issues here, as with everywhere in Australia right now, are housing, the cost of living, and health policy (particularly the cost of care).

But the vicious politics over Israel and Palestine is the really significant factor in this suburb – just as it is in many of Sydney’s most ethnically diverse seats. Ten per cent of Wills was Muslim at the 2021 census, so Palestine is sure to be a big focus. The first time I chatted to the campaign teams for either side, they talked up what I can only assume is their hoped-for outcome on this issue. Labor argues Israel-Palestine is of vastly less importance to most voters in this seat than the more mainstream issues like health and the cost of living. The Greens say Israel-Palestine is the first thing many residents talk about when Ratnam and her team doorknock homes here. So we will see.

It’s going to be an exciting five weeks. Please send any tips you’ve got relating to this seat, to any of the candidates, or really anything a voter in Wills might be interested in, to my email, clucas@theage.com.au, my Proton mail, claylucas@protonmail.com, or via Signal on +61439828128. This really will be one of the most fascinating battles in Australian politics in 2025 – I hope you will follow it with me.