It's high noon in Coogee two days before the state election and Bruce Notley-Smith, the local Liberal MP, is expounding about democracy in action to a group of people whose vote will never come his way. They are party-political officials from Papua New Guinea, Timor Leste and Fiji, here as guests of the Australian government.
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A woman called Maureen, whose vote Notley-Smith is about to lose, loiters nearby and considers gate-crashing this gathering to demand to know what he is going to do about the threatened cancellation of local buses when the eastern suburbs light rail – which he championed – starts rolling in 2019.
"I changed my vote for him last time," she whispers to the Herald, "and it will be a vote-changer this time."
But Maureen is polite. She shuffles away without interrupting. They can be like that, eastern suburbs voters. Civil.
So are Notley-Smith and his rival, Labor's Paul Pearce, civil to one another, as we have discovered an hour earlier at the pre-polling station in the mall at Bondi Junction. Sure, Smith complains about the Labor candidate's "sneaky and deceptive" poster that says "Re-elect Paul Pearce", as if to claim incumbency.
"Well, it's colourful," concedes Pearce, but he was the Coogee MP for eight years until Notley-Smith trounced him in the Liberal rout of 2011.
As they press how-to-vote brochures into the paws of the same early-bird voters, the candidates have a congenial discussion about their respective chances according to Sportsbet. Notley-Smith, a former Randwick mayor, is favourite, at $1.50. Pearce, a former Waverley mayor, would pay $2.50 for the win.
"When I got to $2 at one point, that's when my partner started flicking though the 'positions vacant' for me," says Notley-Smith.
But he has an 8.3 per cent margin. Make that 8.6 with the latest redistribution, says Pearce. "And if there hasn't been another half a per cent swing in the demographics in the past four years, given the rise in house prices around here, I'd be extremely surprised. So we're working on me needing 9 per cent."
Possible? "Um, look," says Pearce, "I believe it's … possible."
He is encouraged by local voter response to the Liberals' sell-off of the polls and wires, cuts to TAFE, the move to council amalgamations, the threat to buses and 8000 trees with the light rail, and Liberal-dominated Waverley Council's development push. "Frankly, the mayor's about as popular as a fart in a lift."
And there's the Tony Abbott factor, says local Labor campaign manager Paul Tracey. They've knocked on 12,000 doors and made 23,000 calls. Unsolicited, Tracey says, many voters raise Abbott – and say they will not vote Liberal, even at state level, while he is prime minister.
Notley-Smith began in local politics as a conservation campaigner and as in independent in 1995. He was a reluctant starter with the Liberal Party. "I thought the Liberals were too homophobic and too far to the right. But then I joined the party and I met more gay people than I'd ever met in my life." The perceptions were wrong, he found.
He has been with his afore-mentioned partner, Paul McCormack, for 25 years. His being gay has never been a problem for voters, he says. "Oh, you know, a couple of nasty letters. 'You fat poofter.' That was outrageous. I mean, I'm not fat."
Notley-Smith remains a green Liberal. He defeated a high-rise redevelopment at the Coogee Bay Hotel. He has just seen off another high-rise at the old Bronte RSL site. He pestered ministers for 245 extra trains on the Bondi Junction line and campaigned for a container deposit scheme until it became government policy.
He finds it "treacherous" that the Greens – who became his allies to break Labor's strangle-hold on Randwick Council – are preferencing against him now.
"I'm proud to be able to say that every promise I made in 2011, I have delivered on. The biggest project was the light rail … And we've started work on that."
But what about voters like Maureen? She walks 10 minutes to her bus, which takes her all the way to the city. If it goes, she will need to walk 20 minutes to the light rail in Randwick.
She should have interrupted, Notley-Smith tells the Herald. "A good tarring and feathering is part of the job." But he says a transport consultancy report is not due until June 2016 and only then will we know which bus routes a marked for closure – and which ones he may need to fight for as local member.
If he is the local MP. If there are not too many Maureens.
As Notley-Smith told Australia's overseas guests studying democracy in action on the Coogee beach-front: "I've always said you're never really elected until you've been re-elected."
