news, federal-politics

The union movement is gearing up for its biggest ever federal election campaign in the ACT, with Unions ACT set to spend $100,000 on a campaign to unseat Liberal Senator Zed Seselja. Unions ACT secretary Alex White said the local unions had never before spent "a cent" on a federal election campaign aimed at ACT seats, but would be spending on television advertisements and other campaign techniques in the lead up to the expected May poll. Not all the union money to be spent is from members' dues, with almost $10,000 raised through a crowd-funding campaign. According to polling commissioned by Unions ACT as part of the campaign, many in the capital disapprove of Senator Seselja. Some 58 per cent of those polled said they disapproved of the job Senator Seselja was doing as senator for the ACT, and of those 40.3 per said they strongly disapproved. According to the ReachTEL poll conducted on January 22, where 1105 Canberrans were robo-polled, 22.5 per cent of Canberrans plan on voting Liberal in the Senate, well below the 33.2 per cent that voted Liberal in the Senate at the last election. Unions ACT has only released three questions of the poll, with other questions and results kept under wraps, making it unclear what questions were asked before those released. The unions are only the latest group to target Senator Seselja, with the Greens and independent candidate Anthony Pesec also declaring taking down the conservative Liberal as their number one Senate goal. Canberra's two Senate spots have been represented by one Liberal and one Labor member for almost the entirety of the time the ACT has been represented in the Senate, but these groups seek to change that. The polling doesn't necessarily signal victory for the union-aligned Labor party, with those reporting they intend to vote Labor in the Senate at 33.1 per cent, below the 37.9 per cent that went to Labor last election. The Greens may take heart from the results, where 19.9 per cent said they intended to vote for the minor party, more than the 16.1 per cent that voted Green in the Senate in 2016. Mr White said he was prepared for the possibility that if his campaign was successful, it was likely to benefit a party other than Labor. "Zed is so bad and so anti-union and so conservative that we believe anyone would be better than Zed," he said, with the caveat that ultra-conservative parties were unlikely to run in the ACT. Senator Seselja played down the results of the poll on Monday. "I’m not surprised a poll commissioned by militant unions has told them what they want to hear, but I have not and never will take the ACT for granted and I know it's always a fight to retain this seat from the Greens," he said.

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