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Nick Squires

Ethnic targeting paid off for Labor, book reveals
Details emerged yesterday  of the crucial role ethnic Asians  played in ousting former prime minister John Howard from the seat he  held for 33 years, delivering one of the biggest political upsets in Australian history.
A new book has revealed that the Labor Party went to extraordinary lengths to woo ethnic Chinese and Korean constituents, even giving their star candidate Maxine McKew a telephone number ending in the numerals 888 - considered lucky in Chinese culture - and enlisting young Asian activists to talk to voters in their native tongues.
Mr Howard became only the second sitting prime minister in Australian history to lose his constituency when he was defeated in last month's federal election.
His opponent, a former television journalist and magazine columnist, was initially written off as having no hope of beating the nation's second-longest-serving prime minister.
But months of hard work, her fresh face and the deliberate targeting of Asian-Australian voters eventually enabled  Ms McKew to carry off the biggest coup of the election.
Journalist Margot Saville has documented the victory in her book The Battle for Bennelong,  to be published on Monday.
She says Labor planners sent a 'crack team' of Chinese- and Korean-speaking 'twentysomethings' to canvass Asian immigrants in the Sydney electorate of Bennelong.
The so-called Asian Maxine Support Group - or MSG - distributed thousands of how-to-vote cards in Chinese and Korean, and the family of Mandarin-speaking Labor leader Kevin Rudd  was enlisted in the fight for Mr Howard's seat.
Mr Rudd's daughter Jessica addressed locals at the Eastwood Chinese Senior Citizens Club in Mandarin, while her new husband, Hong Kong-born banker Albert Tse, spoke in Cantonese. Both  hit the front page of the local edition of Sing Tao.
While the exact number of Asian-Australians who voted Labor is not known, there were  large swings away from the government in all of Bennelong's voting booths, including those in areas dominated by ethnic Chinese and Koreans.
While the Labor team oozed cosmopolitanism, Mr Howard appeared out of his depth with his Asian constituents, according to Justin Li, vice-chairman of the Ethnic Communities Council and a resident of Bennelong.
'Cultural sensitivity always helps,' Mr Li said.  'Maxine McKew certainly came across as someone who was interested in the cultural diversity of the area. In contrast, Mr Howard seemed to have only just discovered that there was an Asian population in his electorate. He came across as a less modern sort of leader than Mr Rudd.'
Mr Howard was also hurt by comments he made in the late 1980s calling for the pace of Asian immigration  to be slowed down, and by his failure to condemn the bigotry of Pauline Hanson's far-right One Nation Party in the late 1990s.
'A lot of Asians wanted him to speak out against Hanson, but he refused. We were spat on in the streets and made fun of at school in the late 1990s. There was a lot of racism. One reason was the lack of leadership shown by Mr Howard,' said Mr Li.
For years, Bennelong had been a safe Liberal Party seat, but changes to the electorate's margins shifted it towards more working-class suburbs with large Asian populations. The shift was part of Mr Howard's undoing after four terms of office and 11 years in power.
Mr Howard acknowledged the demographic changes to the area when he formally conceded that he had lost Bennelong at an official event on Wednesday, three weeks after the election.
'The character of the electorate has changed in the last 33 years, but the quality of the people has not changed,' he said, before congratulating Ms McKew.
Mr Howard was indirectly damaged when it emerged on the eve of the poll that activists from his party had distributed bogus leaflets falsely claiming that Labor supported Islamic extremism.
When the election was called the next day, long-simmering resentments among the Asian voters of Bennelong helped deliver him a humiliating defeat. He lost not only his government, but the seat he had held since 1974.
Out of the hot seat
Former prime minister John Howard became only the second sitting prime minister in Australian history to lose his constituency
The percentage of Asian voters in the electorate of Bennelong  20%



The Asian factor in Howard's undoing