Dancing To A Different Tune At A Party Of Her Own

18 November 2007

TONI McLENNAN used to be a member of the ALP. She was in the running for pre-selection for the bellwether seat of Eden-Monaro, in south-eastern NSW, until Labor's notorious NSW office dumped democracy overboard and imposed army officer Mike Kelly as its candidate.

To this day, neither she nor any of the others in the running have been told by the Labor boys why the party's rank-and-file in the seat couldn't choose the candidate. And yet McLennan is just the sort of candidate whom Labor - the old-fashioned Labor, anyway - would have been proud to have as a candidate.

Now a high-flying public servant, her background is one of serious hardship. At 15 she was in reform school in NSW. At 16 she was living by herself, and by 19 was a survivor of an abusive domestic relationship with a child to nurture. She was patterning her mother, another survivor of domestic abuse who fled Queensland with four children to set up home in Sydney.

McLennan's political instincts flared when her mother, with cancer but no medical insurance, was forced to sell off her meagre furniture to pay her bills.

McLennan became her carer, from her mid-20s to her mother's death when she was in her early 30s. Not only did the daughter then become politically active, she was determined to change her own circumstances so she wouldn't live and die in poverty.

Off she went as a mature age student and completed year 12. Next was a professional writing degree with a sociology major, then a graduate diploma in law and a masters in marketing and communications.

Labor, she determined, was the party where she could use her background and skills to help people, to fight for the rights of battlers, the strugglers, those without a voice. Wrong. After the NSW branch parachuted Kelly in, she wrote a stinging letter of resignation to NSW secretary and now senator-elect Mark Arbib pointing out a few niceties about the democratic process and women in politics. Even though she'd resigned, they promptly expelled her for such anarchy.

Undaunted, McLennan started her own party. It seeks to represent those who used to be Labor's natural constituency - the battlers, the strugglers, those without a voice.

When she launched Hear Our Voice, she got the 500 signatures required to register the party in a weekend. The Australian Electoral Office told her she'd set a record.

McLennan's given up her senior job in the Health Department and, with the help of around-the-clock voluntary workers, has set her sights on a seat in the NSW Senate - in the company, if she won, of the bloke who expelled her from the ALP for insolence, Mark Arbib. What a delicious image.

McLennan isn't the only one angered by ruthless party heavyweights and exclusive party politics. People who feel neglected and rejected by major party politics are uniting and rising up, offering a cornucopia of alliances and candidates.

Here are two: the Alliance for Forgotten Australians, representing the ignored interests of the tens of thousands of children suffering in institutionalised care; and the National Aged Care Alliance, agitating for better aged care.

There's a warning here to the major parties. The voiceless want a voice, and they don't think the two-party system gives it to them. The political times are shifting.

kwalsh@sunherald.com.au


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