Victorian election hot seats: Having visited a fortune-teller with Matthew Guy, Nick McGowan thinks he can win Ringwood

详细摘要

After years of being labelled a “perennial candidate”, Nick McGowan thinks his luck could change on November 28 – not least because some locals believe he’s already their MP.

“I’ve just missed the premier at the station! I have a toilet to give him.”

It’s an unconventional way to start a conversation, but I actually know what he’s talking about because like it or lump it, McGowan has become a fixture of my social media feed since I started covering the seat of Ringwood.

That morning, McGowan was decrying the lack of a public toilet at Ringwood East train station and had hoped to give Ben Carroll – who was there minutes earlier for a press conference on capping public transport fares – a gift, but narrowly missed him.

From mowing nature strips to posing with Instagram-famous potholes, locally, McGowan is notorious for such stunts.

Videos of him scrubbing graffiti have been met with good humour by the offenders, who’ve subsequently tagged his name throughout the area, and somewhat less good humour by fellow North-Eastern Metro representative and Labor MP Sonja Terpstra, who said his clean-up efforts had actually done further damage to one bridge in the order of $150,000 – a claim McGowan refutes.

The Liberal candidate for Ringwood, who recently resigned from the upper house to make a play at the Legislative Assembly, clearly enjoys a laugh. But when I join him door-knocking on a Thursday for a couple of hours, I quickly realise there is a distinction between what McGowan considers tactically humorous and absurd.

As I pull up at the meeting point, he’s changing into a pair of blue shorts by the boot of his car, sporting a pink T-shirt with his name on it and some sneakers. He holds up a stack of fridge magnets as I approach.

“I hate having things in my pocket, so I have to carry as many as I can in one hand,” he explains. “Your hand gets quite sore by the end of it.”

It’s a fine line politicians must walk between being seen as approachable and professional, something McGowan’s had time to perfect. Having been called a “perennial candidate”, struggling for preselection and unsuccessfully running in state and federal elections before finally…

文章开头，摘自Brisbane Times。如需阅读全文，请前往媒体网站。