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Details emerged yesterday of the key role played by Asian voters in ousting former Prime Minister John Howard from the seat he had held for 33 years, delivering one of the biggest political upsets in Australian history.
A new book has revealed the Labor Party went to extraordinary
lengths to woo Chinese and Korean constituents, giving their star candidate a telephone number ending in the numerals 888 - considered lucky in Chinese culture - and enlisting young Asian activists to talk to voters.
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, former TV journalist and magazine columnist Maxine McKew, 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 her to carry off the biggest coup of the election.
Journalist Margot Saville has documented the extraordinary victory in a book due to be published on Monday, The Battle for Bennelong.
She says Labor planners sent a "crack team" of Chinese- and Korean- speaking "twentysomethings" to canvass Asian immigrants, who make up 20 per cent of Bennelong's population.
Volunteers distributed thousands of how-to-vote cards in Chinese and Korean and the family of Mandarin-speaking Labor leader Kevin Rudd were enlisted in the fight for Howard's seat.
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 made it on to the front page of the Chinese-language newspaper Sing Tao.
While the exact number of Asian-Australians who voted Labor is not known, there were sizeable swings away from the Government in all of Bennelong's voting booths, including those in areas dominated by Chinese and Koreans.
While the Labor team oozed cosmopolitanism, 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," said Li. "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." Howard was also hurt by comments he made in the late 1980s calling for the pace of Asian immigration to Australia 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 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 Howard's undoing after four terms of office and 11 years in power.
"In past elections Asians were apathetic about voting because they didn't think they could change things. But when the seat became marginal, they thought 'where was Howard when we needed him?'," said Li.
Howard was also indirectly damaged when it emerged on the eve of the election that party activists had distributed bogus leaflets 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 Howard a humiliating defeat. He lost not only his government, but the seat he had held since 1974.
