By Ethan Benedicto
As the election looms on Saturday, 3 May, the electorate of Bruce is in the spotlight, with state-wide media outlets bearing down on Liberal candidate Zahid Safi.
Incumbent Labor MP Julian Hill has been more than active against his strongest opponent for the seat, with interviews and social media posts directly targeting Safi’s credibility and reliability as a candidate.
This stemmed from a recent article by The Age, which revealed that, allegedly, Safi and his wife’s independent small businesses were either defunct or littered with fake reviews and stock images.
The Age journalist also managed to have a short encounter with Safi as he was leaving an event, where they asked “why have you been dodging my media requests”, as well as a series of questions that they had sent through.
Safi swerved from answering their questions, instead focusing on responses that highlighted the cost-of-living concerns of residents.
Likewise, Hill posted a Facebook reel with Federal Housing Minister Clare O’Neil, highlighting and featuring the video by the journalist.
Hill spoke on Peter Dutton’s overall approach, not directly touching on the video of Safi.
On the other hand, he also posted a Sky News interview of Safi where he captioned it “this bloke’s dodgier than a servo hotdog”, which, as of 29 April afternoon, garnered 52,000 views, 1300 reactions and over 300 comments.
The interview was a short feature of Sky News’ questioning of Safi as to whether his small businesses gained profit or “operated above board”.
Safi said that “everyone (that) runs a small business struggles, and to the best of their ability, runs a successful business, creates jobs, employment, and I’ve done my best”.
Immediately after, it switches to Hill, who, in the same context, said that “as my mum used to say, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”.
“This bloke’s dodgier than a servo hotdog, but I’ll let you do your reporting – have a look at the front page of The Age, have a look at the stories floating around in the media, people can speak for themselves.”
The short feature touched on Safi’s overall qualifications, where they showed his LinkedIn profile page, touching on his Monash University degree that was allegedly finished in 2016, and his name not showing on the university’s graduate search page.
“I haven’t faked any qualification, what we see on LinkedIn, that’s what I put when I started my qualification with Monash and updated that,” Safi said.
“After that, I lost access to my LinkedIn until today.”
Comments on the video were rife, with one netizen saying that it was an ‘election miracle’ that Safi was able to regain on the same day he was being questioned about it.
Another asked, ‘it took him nine years to regain access to his LinkedIn page?’.
On 25 April, Hill also posted a screenshot of a news article on Safi, which touched on concerns of the candidate’s credentials, considering he allegedly dropped out of the Monash University course.
A day before that, he posted a photo of Safi that was captioned as ‘missing’, followed by Hill saying to “please report him to media, he’s got questions to answer’.
Before The Age broke the news, Safi was previously under fire after an article from The Guardian detailed that he was listed as a co-author on a 2021 Senate submission that suggested the Hazara community in Afghanistan was not persecuted on the basis of their ethnicity.
Neighbouring Liberal LaTrobe MP, Jason Wood, came to his defence then, saying that “his input into the report was on a health aspect”.
“There’s no way that he or anyone at the Liberal Party has the same view (as the report on downplaying Hazara genocide),” he said.
The calculated estimate margin for the Bruce electorate currently stands at 5.3 per cent, and despite Safi’s tumultuous situation, it’s still within reach, and could be a threat to Hill, who’s held the seat since 2016.
