Finding My Place Page 23

  I walked out of the UN building after three long days of panels, presentations and talks. The Vienna sky at dusk was awash with grey and the winter chill was hinting at snow. At the bottom of the steps, Dave was standing with his hands in his pockets, his steamy breath becoming more visible as I approached. He smiled as he saw me and took my hands between his to warm them. ‘All done?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m done. I’m really done.’ Dave tilted his head and shrugged.

  ‘All this talk. All these meetings. All these dialogues and summits and conferences. All this. And I’m gonna go home and nothing’s gonna change. Because there’s no political will.’

  Three days later, as I lay by a pool in Bali letting the sun wash away the lingering chill of the European winter, I got a message on my phone.

  ‘Anne. This is Peter Tinley from WA Labor. Can you give me a call when you get a chance.’

  27

  The Campaign

  A week later I met Peter Tinley at Parliament House in Perth to talk about the upcoming federal election. ‘Why should I do this?’ I asked. ‘I have a good job, an international reputation, a career as a professor and a body of research that will keep me busy for at least another decade.’

  I could tell that Tinley was prepared for my question. ‘This is an extension of your work. It’s a different way for you to make a contribution and keep doing what you’re doing.’ I knew that Tinley couldn’t possibly have known about my frustrations with the work I was doing and the lack of change I was able to effect, but his words spoke directly to that very frustration.

  Not long after, I sat across from Patrick Gorman and Lenda Oshalem – the Secretary and Assistant Secretary of WA Labor in the boardroom of the party’s offices in West Perth. ‘Do you have any questions for us?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘Um yeah.’ I searched for the right words. ‘You know who I am, right?’

  ‘Yes we do.’

  ‘You know what I do, what I’ve said in the media and that some of it has kind of attracted some controversy, right?’

  ‘Yes, we’re well aware of that.’

  ‘And you still want me to run for the federal election!’

  Patrick and Lenda smiled. ‘Yes, yes we do.’

  I wasn’t so sure. I hadn’t planned on becoming a politician. If anything, my experiences with politics and politicians had turned me into a cynic – the kind of cynic who says things like, ‘I thought lying was part of the job description for politicians’ on national television. And yet, here I was, seriously contemplating a future – or at least part of a future – as a politician.

  Accepting the offer to run for the seat of Cowan in Perth’s northern suburbs was easier than I expected it would be. This was not my first foray into politics, although it was more serious. Years earlier, I had been asked by the Greens to run third on their senate ticket for the federal election. There was never really any chance that I would be elected and I accepted the offer as a kind of token gesture but withdrew after just a couple of weeks.

  I didn’t have much to do with the process of my preselection as the Labor candidate for the federal seat of Cowan – that was looked after by the party’s leadership after I gave my final commitment to run less than a week after the meeting with Patrick and Lenda. I was told to keep my candidacy quiet until the official announcement was made. Only my close friends and family knew about it.

  Dave was encouraging. ‘I’ve always said I could see you in politics one day, babe. You should do this. You would be great at it.’

  Adam was equally enthusiastic. ‘Do it, Mum. You’ll be great. It’s a winnable seat and you’ve got a good chance.’

  Karim, who had never been as political as Adam, promised his support no matter what path I chose.

  Others weren’t so encouraging. Most of my friends and work colleagues argued that I would be giving up too much, that I would find politics even more frustrating and that the best way I could make a difference was to keep doing what I was doing. I was a little disappointed with what I saw as the lack of support from those closest to me – especially those I had worked with – but I also understood that I would be leaving them and the research program I had built behind. I couldn’t take them with me on my journey into politics, but I had hoped that they could step up and take over the work I had been building over the years.

  Patrick Gorman called me to tell me that my preselection had been passed by the state executive and we agreed on 28 January to announce my candidacy for the 2016 Federal Election. Just days before the announcement, I was in Sydney and had an interview for a newspaper story about my research and work with PaVE. I did the interview knowing that in just a few days’ time, journalists would no longer be interested in Professor Anne Aly who specialises in counterterrorism and is about to release her fifth book – instead, they would refer to me as the Labor candidate for Cowan and I would, in their eyes at least, now be a politician and that meant fair game.

  January 28 was a warm Perth day, and I chose a white skirt and blue top for the big announcement. Dave, Adam and I made our way to the offices of Mark McGowan, the Leader of the Opposition who was destined to be the Premier of Western Australia. Karim had since moved out of the family home to Melbourne, where he’d found work as a consultant with a global firm. We met Alannah MacTiernan there, who, along with Mark, would say a few words about my candidacy at the press conference on the steps of Parliament House before introducing me. I was briefed about what I was likely to be asked and the kinds of answers I should give, and thirty minutes later I walked through the side entrance of Parliament House with Mark, Alannah, Dave and Adam to greet a handful of journalists and television cameras that had gathered on the steps to hear the announcement.

  I didn’t expect such a big deal to be made of it all. I had thought that the news of my candidacy really wasn’t that big because, like most people, I had never really paid much attention to who was whom in the political zoo. I was surprised that it even made it into the news and I certainly wasn’t prepared for the headlines: ‘Labor recruits Muslim anti-terror expert to challenge Cowan seat’ proclaimed The Australian. Muslim; woman; expert; anti-terror; counterterrorism; radicalisation – journalists and their editors could choose from a rich database of descriptors for my DNA profile.

  Cowan was Western Australia’s most marginal seat held by the Liberals and it was winnable. I had no idea what that meant or what it would take to win an election. I had never been active in party politics the way Adam was, and I found myself turning to him for advice and answers to even the simplest questions. Luke Simpkins had held the seat since 2010 when he won it off Labor. I’d met Simpkins before. Around a year earlier when I was at Curtin University, he had contacted me and asked to meet to discuss some of my views on terrorism and counterterrorism. I agreed to meet him at his office and we spent an hour or so talking about my research. I invited him to attend a PaVE event to see first-hand some of the work we were doing. Initially he seemed enthusiastic, but didn’t show up. I had no idea that he was the same MP who had reportedly started the leadership spill against Tony Abbott, or that he had spoken in parliament about Australians being ‘one step down the path’ towards converting to Islam if they unwittingly eat halal meat, or that he had once mistaken a nightclub logo for an ISIS flag. I’m not sure if any of that factored into the decision to run me against him. Either way, it seemed like my contender and I were like chalk and cheese – the tall conservative former military bloke and the short brown academic chick – it was easy to tell us apart.

  From the moment my candidacy was officially announced, the campaigning started. I had to manage my time so that I could still work on my academic duties full-time while also fundraising for the campaign. Fundraising is the hardest part of a campaign. It is humiliating to call people and ask them for financial support, but it is necessary. I’d always found it easy to ask for favours or money when it came to PaVE. I had none of the nerves calling people I knew to ask them to donate time or money for PaVE eve
nts or activities. But this was different and I soon found that people are a lot less willing to part with their money – even if it’s just a few dollars – to donate to a political campaign, even if they support you and believe in you. There’s a dirty stench about politics that makes people wary of being stained by it – as if by coming close to it they have to scrub themselves clean and burn their clothes.

  A good campaign costs money. Lots of money. Around $150,000 to be exact. Simpkins had the advantage of visibility in the electorate. I didn’t live in Cowan. I didn’t even live in the northern suburbs, but had made a public announcement that I would move my family there if I won the election. Simpkins seized on that and ran his campaign on the fact that he was local to the area. Visibility was important, so from March I started standing on street corners and at train stations with an A-frame photo of myself waving at passing cars.

  As we approached autumn, the morning air was beginning to turn and the occasional early-morning drizzle left a lingering chill in the air waiting to be warmed by the sun. As I stood on the outer border of Whitfords train station one morning waving at passing cars and curious drivers who must have thought I was some kind of crazy (and they wouldn’t have been wrong), I thought about the year that had passed – the White House, the Club de Madrid and the United Nations. ‘Tell me again why I’m doing this?’ I asked my campaign manager. ‘Why am I standing at train stations and street corners waving at strangers like Anne “no friends” Aly?’

  My campaign manager was a 22-year-old named Robbie. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had met Robbie once before. Adam had asked me (begged actually) to address a Young Labor event. ‘How long do I have to speak for?’ I asked.

  ‘Just fifteen minutes, Mum.’

  ‘What about? What can I say in fifteen minutes? Why me? Can’t you find someone important to do it?’

  Although I gave him a hard time, I always enjoyed opportunities to speak to young people and agreed to speak to the gathering of Young Labor members that Adam had organised. Little did I know that one of those young members would then convince the Labor leadership that they should approach me to run for the seat of Cowan and that he would become my campaign manager and later my most trusted adviser.

  The election was officially called in May and though I had been campaigning unofficially for a couple of months before then, the five weeks of the official campaign had only just started. I resigned from my position at the university as is required by the rules and completed the process of renouncing my Egyptian citizenship so that I could be sure that I met all the eligibility criteria for candidacy before the writs were issued. The calling of the election for 2 July meant that everything was now in full swing. My campaign team met on a weekly basis and we ramped up the early-morning honk and waves, train stations, telephone banks and door knocks.

  I loved door knocking. So much so that I took it upon myself early in the campaign to go door knocking by myself one afternoon. I chose a street in Girrawheen – a suburb in the southern part of the electorate – grabbed my clipboard and a pen, a handful of flyers and some sensible shoes.

  I’d knocked on a couple of doors, but nobody was home (or else nobody was prepared to answer the door to Anne ‘no friends’ Aly), when I stopped at an older-style home with an older man drinking a can of beer in the front yard while his granddaughter played.

  I introduced myself and asked him the standard question about the issues that mattered most to him for the upcoming election.

  His face beamed with a broad smile. ‘Get rid of those fucking muzrats,’ he said.

  I nodded politely and tried to redirect the conversation, but he kept going. I kept listening, though I really just wanted to walk away as he continued on about how hard he worked, how much he hated Muslims, how much money he had, how much he wanted Muslims out of Australia, how he owned a boat (not that I could see any signs of any boat), how Muslims were lazy, how useless his wife was, how much his daughter (who I assumed was the mother of the granddaughter) hated Muslims and how proud he was that she swore at and even spat on every Muslim she saw in public. I wondered if his daughter was named Christine.

  The old man at the old house had read the headlines – the ones that called me the Muslim counterterrorism expert who is running for the seat of Cowan. As his wife hobbled out of the house to see to whom he was talking, he introduced me as the ‘fucking muzrat who’s running for the election’ with that same broad smile that was beginning to look a lot like the smile of the psychopathic mass murderer from Wolf Creek. ‘Well, it’s been nice talking to you.’ I waved as I walked away. ‘Yep,’ he beamed and then something inaudible that involved the words ‘fucking’ and ‘muzrat’. I didn’t go door knocking by myself again.

  Every candidate goes through a rigorous selection process that involves delving into your past to see if there is anything, any skeletons in the closet or wayward remarks here or there, that the opposition could use to run against you. I knew that the Liberals would be poring over everything I’d ever written to find something to use against me. Two weeks out from the election it was beginning to look like they hadn’t found anything. But then I got a call from a journalist warning me that they were trying to get something up and that I should be on my guard. The next day Luke Simpkins and Michael Keenan, the member for Stirling and the Minister for Justice, called a press conference in Perth. A journalist for The Australian showed up and ran the story claiming that I had provided a letter of support for Junaid Thorne.

  In 2015, Thorne had been caught along with another one of his followers named Mustafa trying to book a domestic flight under a false name. His lawyer had asked me to help. I made it clear that I wasn’t interested in helping Thorne, but that if there was any chance that I could do something to steer Mustafa away from him that I would be willing to arrange some support for him to return to his family in Perth and start life afresh away from the influence of Thorne.

  The second time I came face to face with Thorne was under very different circumstances from our first meeting. He wasn’t the same confident and brazen young man who had come to protest at my talk a couple of years earlier. In the cramped office of his lawyer in Sydney and facing prison time, he looked just like a young boy who had been sent to the principal’s office for swearing in class.

  When I returned to Perth after the meeting, I proceeded to contact Mustafa’s family and the WA police to see if we could develop a program to help him detach from Thorne. I even spoke to a well-known local sheikh who refused to get involved because he was worried that it would tarnish his reputation. At the end of the day, the truth is that the only person willing or able to make a difference to Mustafa was me. And so I wrote a letter, addressing it to the magistrate, stating that I had met with Thorne and Mustafa and that I would work with Mustafa and his family to ensure that, if he could return to Perth, he would be given the support he needed to become and remain a law-abiding and productive citizen. Keenan had obviously not read that letter. Neither had Simpkins. Or Julie Bishop or Mathias Corman or John Howard, who were all passed the baton and had something to say about the letter and me and the seat of Cowan.

  For much of my life I have believed that there are certain things that need to be done if you want to succeed – certain milestones that must be achieved. I have lived by the rule that if you work hard, tick all the boxes, keep getting those A pluses, you will eventually, inevitably, reach your goals. It’s a method that has served me well. I’ve managed to achieve things in my life by drafting a plan, sticking to it, making sure that my work is impeccable and that I meet all the criteria for whatever it is I’m aiming for. I’ve advised young people, old people and my own children that the path to success is paved with hard work, and that if you work hard then success is inevitable. But campaigns aren’t like that and politics is not a meritocracy. You can work long, hard hours and do everything right, and in the end it’s still not enough to get you over the line. Throughout the months of campaigning leading up to the elect
ion in July, this fact niggled at me like a persistent itch.

  There were many times during the campaign when I struggled to hold on to the optimism that had initially fuelled my decision to run. Times when it seemed like the newspapers and the punters would be right – that Cowan would be a close race, but ultimately it would fall to Luke Simpkins to hold the seat. I had lost friends and I had alienated colleagues. The invitations had stopped coming and people who had once requested appointments to meet me were now requesting that I not appear in any official photographs with them. Over those months I had come to rely on the help and goodwill of strangers – people who didn’t know me, had never met me, but who were prepared to give up their time to help me. They were a group of volunteers who stood beside me in the cold shadows of the early mornings handing out flyers, who knocked on doors and made thousands of telephone calls to electors, and who wore their ‘Anne Aly for Cowan’ t-shirts with pride. I was touched by their generosity of spirit and by their belief in me at times when I struggled to believe in myself.

  Unlike me, these people had never lost hope. And as I said my final goodbyes to them on 1 July, the day before the election, I was overcome with an overwhelming sense of grief. What if I let them down? What if all their hard work and faith in me was for nothing? I spent the rest of the day crying.