By CAM LUCADOU-WELLS
THERE’S some big brush strokes to La Trobe incumbent Liberal candidate Jason Wood’s big-picture vision for his electorate.
On the one side, there’s arts, tourism, roads, small business and tech parks as part of his local cultural and economic plan.
The former counter-terrorism cop also has natural interests in law-and-order and national security.
In sum, he wants to ensure La Trobe is a fantastic place to live – and a safe place.
Mr Wood can’t afford to sit on his haunches. He won back the seat with a four per cent margin in 2013 after losing it in 2010; it is one of the Liberal Coalition’s most marginal seats in Victoria.
The breakdown of the electorate is complex. It must be some task appealing to residents in the rampant Casey growth corridor as well as in the Green-tinged Dandenong Ranges.
Being a marginal-seat MP is exciting. It gives him licence to “fight like hell to get what I want in the area”.
Feedback “on the ground” is positive for his vision, Mr Wood says.
“When I go out and talk to people, they love the tourism package, they love the plan for Bunjil Place, they love the plan for the Monash.
“They realise it hasn’t been matched by Labor. Labor’s left them high and dry.”
Feedback was a little tougher after the first Abbott-Hockey budget in 2014, Mr Wood concedes. He paints it as a small business trying to pay off a debt over two years instead of 10.
“We tried to hit every possible group and every person we could.
“The people we were hurting were concerned about that.”
This election, Mr Wood is selling innovation under “visionary” Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
Mr Wood talks up the prospect of an innovative IT business park on the O’Shea Road extension, which would create a new feeder road to a widened Monash Freeway.
He wants to fill the breach created by Monash University’s exit plan from Clyde Road. The new provider must be focused on innovation, he says.
“This is the space we want to work in this city,” Mr Wood says.
The Coalition has also announced a $20 million tourism package, including $10 million for the Bunjil Place civic-arts precinct, running a red rattler from the CBD to Puffing Billy and creating a discovery centre at Emerald Park Lake.
Mr Wood hopes to launch a possible trail of walks highlighting the local arts history. Acclaimed creatives such as Arthur Boyd, C.J. Dennis and Arthur Streeton have lived and stayed in his electorate.
He’s working on an upgrade for Wilson Botanic Park, including a cafe and education centre.
After losing the seat to Labor’s Laura Smyth in 2010, Mr Wood went back to policing at the St Kilda Road-based state CIU. It kept him up to speed with modern crime-fighting such as the rising influence of outlaw bikie gangs and the drug ice, he says.
After Numan Haider allegedly stabbed police and was shot outside Endeavour Hills police station, parents with radicalised sons contacted Mr Wood for help.
A former counter-terrorism cop, he made a speech in parliament last year calling for an expansion of the MYHACK program.
The ensuing hack-a-thon staged in La Trobe last year challenged young people to be “agents of change”, to come up with ideas to tackle home-grown radicalisation.
It was led by counter-terrorism expert and now-ALP candidate Anne Aly, but roundly criticised as scaremongering by La Trobe ALP candidate Simon Curtis.
“He was completely wrong. He didn’t understand the issue,” Mr Wood says.
“I don’t normally attack the candidate but I was trying to do the right thing and work along a bi-partisan approach.”
Mr Wood wants community protection intervention orders to halt the reach of “extremist preachers” turning young impressionable minds to terrorism. The orders would include bans from social media, and from associating with “certain people”.
It was something the State Government had “failed to address” – the gap in its incitement laws, Mr Wood said.
“An extremist preacher never tells them to do something but gives them messages like Osama Bin Laden was a great man … infidels are your enemy.
“It’s everything but telling them to do something, so it doesn’t fall under the incitement laws.”
