Hearts & Minds - Josh Wilson Up Close - Fremantle Shipping News

While prepping for my interview with Josh Wilson I came across the Federal member for Fremantle’s inaugural speech to parliament in 2016.

I was expecting Wilson to deliver a pro forma account of his personal and political history and a laundry list of policies that fellow members would politely applaud (such was Albo’s parliamentary debut in 1996).

What Wilson served up was something approaching poetry as he informed his colleagues that he was not simply proud to represent “the mighty electorate of Fremantle”. The port city had saturated his soul, he said.

“I have been shaped by Fremantle, by its landscape and its culture; by its function as a place of industry and trade and the arts; a port city; a place of arrival, whose multicultural diversity and cohesion has been hard won and is precious; a place that looks out into the world and welcomes people, whether they come for a short or a long time, with open arms; a place defined by the heat and by the sea,” began Wilson.

Josh Wilson. Credit Mark Naglazas

He then did something surprising for a politician kicking off his career on the national stage. Before running through some of the areas he hoped to act on — climate change and renewable energy, closing the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, improving urban design and planning — Wilson admitted that he was doomed to bring unhappiness because the business of governing is about making difficult decisions.

“They are difficult because the problems they address are often wicked and the remedies they apply are scarce and imperfect,” he said. “They are difficult because very few judgements will be free of impact. Very few decisions in the public and national interest will leave everyone the same or better off. And, if that is the threshold test for reform, or even for budget repair, then we are not going to get much done.”

Such were the elegance of his words and the complexity of his world view that I was not surprised when Wilson revealed to me that, before he made his career-altering decision to work for the then Federal member Carmen Lawrence, he’d written two novels.

“The first novel was inspired by my time living in India with my mother and my younger brother,” Wilson tells me as we sit down on a bench in Cockburn Central after he and his daughter Prya had finished handing out flyers at the station.

Josh Wilson with daughter Priya. Credit Mark Naglazas

“It gave me an insight into how the world works and how some people live in very different circumstances than how we live,” he continues.

“We had a housekeeper who had taken the name Violet. One night we were taken by Violet to her home to have a meal with her family. The house was in a trench with a bit of tin for the roof. They had carpets and movie posters to make it as beautiful as it could be, but it was a ramshackle in a slum.

“When we left my mother gave them the bamboo structure in which we lived. I remember Violet and her husband and his brothers arriving and pulling the bamboo structure apart and taking it away on bicycles,” recalls Wilson, his eyes looking off into the distant past.

Wilson returned to India at the end of his first year at the University of Western Australia when he went backpacking with his then girlfriend and first serious love.

“The relationship was coming to an end so it was an intense three months. It was interesting for me because I was reconnecting with my childhood in India. This became the subject of my first novel, which was a very typical self-indulgent piece of writing that nobody wanted to publish,” laughs Wilson.

But the India novel was no flash in the pan as Wilson started building a career as a writer and academic, winning awards for short stories and combining his love of words with a passion for travelling, including a pilgrimage to Dublin to walk the streets of his literary idol James Joyce.

“I was quite the Joycean,” says Wilson. “I wrote a piece called The Twice-Dreamed Panther that was published in Westerly and won the prize published that year in the magazine.”

But Wilson’s literary career was not happening fast enough. By 2004 he was in his early 30s, he had written two novels nobody wanted to publish, two children and a job as a paralegal for a law firm in the city that wasn’t fully engaging him. So when Wilson saw an ad in the Fremantle Herald looking for someone to work with Carmen Lawrence he took the plunge.

“It was transformative,” he says. “Every single day you answer the phone or the door and there’s a human being from your electorate, from your community that needs help. You couldn’t even predict what the need would be. It could be a housing issue, it could be a medical problem, it could be someone struggling with their pension.

“Then after resolving that issue Carmen would ask me to knock out a thousand words on a bill making a policy change that affects everybody. I would later check Hansard to see if my words were in the speech and underline them. It was a time of tremendous achievement and learning,” recalls Wilson.

Thus Wilson left behind his dreamed-about career in the classroom and the garret as an academic and a writer and entered the world of public service, moving on to become Chief of Staff for Lawrence’s successor Melissa Parke, becoming a City of Fremantle councillor and serving as Brad Pettitt’s deputy mayor.

The change of course hit rough waters when he was badly beaten in Labor’s preselection battle for the Federal seat of Fremantle, but then got a second shot when Maritime Union of Australia-backed Chris Brown was deemed ineligible after failing to declare spent convictions.

Wilson won but the fight for the seat was so draining that by the time he stood up in front of Parliament to deliver his inaugural speech he was a mess, despite the beauty and power of his words.

“I was a bit overwhelmed,” admitted Wilson. “To be honest I was freaking out. I kept wiping my face because I was sweating so much.

“That year had been incredibly tense and tough and heartbreaking. I had been doing work that was meaningful but that didn’t matter. For the last three or four weeks of that pre-selection process I knew I was going to lose. I was running on fumes and it took a toll on me, as you can see in that first speech to Parliament.”

That experience of losing badly and then a last-minute reprieve has clearly left a mark on Wilson, who is still working hard to ensure a fourth term as Fremantle’s federal member despite most pundits believing that far-flung corners of the electorate such as Cockburn will ensure that boom independent Kate Hulett would not repeat the astonishing feat of the State election.

Wilson acknowledges it is great for democracy to have an independent such as Hulett generating so much interest. However, he believes there is little logic in wanting the removal of a candidate simply because they belong to a major party and that they have spent a number of years in office.

“There is this weird idea in politics that if you have been around for a while it is better that you move on, as if being a politician is a bad thing to do. In every other walk of life experience is considered a good and not a bad thing,” he says.

“I am significantly better at the craft of politics than when I started out. I was the Shadow Assistant Minister for the Environment in the last term when we were in opposition and I helped to shape our oceans policy. Last week at a conference at UWA I was able to confirm that the Albanese government will, if elected again, ratify the global high seas protection treaty. That comes from application, persistence and focus.”

Josh Wilson (C) at the Fremantle Candidates Debate, with John Bird (L) and Amy Warne (R)

While Hulett and the other candidates are focusing on what they perceive as Labor’s failure to do anything of substance on housing, on the cost of living, on climate change and so forth Wilson is quick to defend his party’s record, listing one achievement after the other, both at the local level and as Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy.

He is especially proud of Cockburn Central and the high-density housing around the railway and bus station that has provided hundreds of residents with easy access to transport, shopping and other services.

“If you look at a satellite image of this area 20 years ago there was nothing here,” says Wilson, casting his eye around at the apartments built during the Rudd-Gillard reign.

“It started with State Labor who had the vision for the Perth metro rail line, which the Coalition and everybody else said was crazy. Then you get the train station, then you get a recreational facility, then you get Commonwealth support for social housing and suddenly you’ve got this high-density hub with people living in apartments who can walk to a coffee shop and hop on the train to get to Perth. It’s exactly what we need more of.”

Despite his pride in what has been achieved in Cockburn, which pundits expect to be dominated by Labor and ensure the party’s long reign will not be broken by a well-financed Teal-adjacent indie riding the wave of resentment against two party-dominated politics, Wilson’s deepest love is for Freo, where he has lived for nearly half a century, and what has been achieved there in recent years.

“After the America’s Cup until the early 2000s Freo drifted a bit. When Brad [Pettitt] became mayor and you had a group of hard-working councillors who were prepared to make hard decisions and I became the chair of the economic development working group, that’s when things started to take off. When I was a kid you walked out of downtown Freo past the hospital and there was basically nothing. Look at it now,” says Wilson.

“I know some people complain about Fremantle and the mix of characters on the streets. They assume they have mental issues and say we need to fix things. But Fremantle has always embraced diversity. We are a tolerant and caring place. It’s who we are. If people say, ‘I don’t want that. I wish that was somewhere else’ I don’t really see how that is in keeping with the character of Fremantle.”

* By Mark Naglazas