Perth Voice Interactive

TIM HAMMOND is looking odds-on to win Labor preselection for the federal seat of Perth, one of only three seats the ALP holds in WA.

The Mount Lawley lawyer’s entry into the race follows Alannah MacTiernan’s announcement this week she’s calling it quits.

A member of the ALP for “about eight years” the 40-year-old has been busy.

He ran as Labor’s candidate in Swan in 2010 and, along with Matt Keogh, initially put his hand up for pre-selection in Perth for 2013 following Stephen Smith’s retirement.

Both stood aside to give Ms MacTiernan an unfettered run, recognising she had the best chance of winning the seat: Mr Keogh has since run for Labor in the Canning by-election and has been preselected to run in the new seat of Burt, which has a nominal Liberal margin of 5.2 per cent.

Last year Mr Hammond stood for the party’s national presidency. He didn’t win but scored enough votes to be elected federal senior vice-president. He’s also president of his own North Perth branch and president of the Mount Lawley Society.

His political interest was sparked by his law work on behalf of asbestos victims.

“What I wanted to do with my legal career is make sure I was spending my energy making a difference for people who needed help accessing justice,” he says.

“Those are cases where the exposure to asbestos has occurred 20 to 40 years earlier and all of a sudden these people are given a diagnosis for terminal cancer and they’re given six to nine months to live, and it’s incredibly motivating to run these cases through the court against [James] Hardie and CSR, and that’s really where I got a strong sense of the importance of justice and compassion.”

When James Hardie moved its HQ to the Netherlands, Mr Hammond was impressed with the campaign by Labor and the trade unions to ensure the company left enough money behind for restitution.

“I came to the ALP in the course of that process, so I’ve been a member now for about eight years,” he says.

These days his law work focuses on travelling to remote regions to help Aboriginal victims of road trauma.

“I act on behalf of men and women, often in the Kimberley, who’ve been injured in road accidents but don’t have access to the courts the same way you or I would.”

There have been whispers of Labor’s afffirmative action rules impeding Mr Hammond’s nomination: 40 per cent of nominees for held and winnable seats are to be women, yet for Perth, Fremantle, Brand and Burt, all front-running pre-selection candidates are men.

Mr Hammond says he doesn’t comment on internal party processes: “I simply focus on the things that I can control, and what I can control is demonstrating to the members the credentials that I have to be a candidate.”

The quota issue can apparently be solved by reshuffling Senate candidates to put women in the top two winnable spots, or pre-selecting a woman in Rockingham-based Brand or in Fremantle. Labor holds just three of 12 Senate seats in WA, with Sue Lines the only woman.

by DAVID BELL