Perth Voice Interactive

MT LAWLEY Labor MP Simon Millman says he got a bit of pro bono legal advice before this week’s announcement that he’d be stepping down from his seat at the next election.

Mr Millman recently caught up with some old mates who’d risen to become judges and senior barristers while he was on his political “hiatus” and floated the idea that a return to the bar was on the cards.

“Politics and law are very similar, they’re both in the same direction, and so they were relatively sanguine about my prospects of returning to practice successfully in the short term,” Mr Millman told the Voice.

“Their counsel was; it’s better to go back to the bar after eight years rather than 12 years.”

Of course that wouldn’t necessarily hold true if he were offered the plum role of WA’s attorney general, which was widely tipped following John Quigley’s announcement of his retirement, but he says a couple of factors pointing him in the other direction.

“I thought it would be a great honour to be the attorney general, but when you run for Mt Lawley you don’t run expecting to be a cabinet minister, because it’s a marginal seat.

“All other things being equal, you want to be focusing diligently on serving your local community.

“And then I thought I didn’t really come with a big legislative agenda the way John Quigley has as attorney general.

“And so when the question becomes ‘am I aspiring to be attorney general so that I can ease the transition back into practice’, maybe it would just be better to go straight back into practice.”

Mr Millman said he also looked into the background of his seat and noticed a trend.

“When I looked at the history of the seat, but also similar seats in the inner north, like Yokine, like Dianella, no previous member for the last 40 years has held that seat for more than two terms.

“You have to all the way back to Ray O’Connor, who was a Liberal premier in the early 1980s, and a member for Mt Lawley, to find somebody who’d held the seat for longer than that.

“So I generally thought that two terms would be the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be in Parliament.”

He said it was important to announce his retirement from politics early to give a new candidate a chance to get momentum, but notes the Liberal party had to extend its preselection after it couldn’t find a candidate.

“I would be lying if I didn’t say that the absence of a strong Liberal presence in Mt Lawley didn’t factor into my thinking as well, because I think that my successor will be hitting the ground running.

“I was thinking the margin by which the Labor Party holds Mt Lawley is terrific right now; that’s a function in part of the Covid environment of the 2021 election.

“So some political commentators will say that there’s the potential for a swing back, but there’s about 25 seats between Mt Lawley and the first Liberal seat that they need to win, so in order to reach Mt Lawley, they’ve got to get through those other 34.”

Mr Millman wouldn’t speculate on who that successor might be, but says he’s hoping for: “Someone under 50, somebody who’s got a bit of youthful energy and enthusiasm, definitely somebody who’s local, and preferably somebody who’s had time in the real world.”

He says election night in 2017 was a highlight of his political career.

“Making Mt Lawley a marginal seat – though I’d like to say that it’s not too marginal now, making your seat where there’s a contest, making your seat where Antony Green’s looking at you on election night, that was a great result.”

From a legislative perspective, he’s proudest of his work during the Covid period when he was parliamentary secretary for then-health minister Roger Cook and says the current premier did a brilliant job under difficult circumstances.

Fixing the debt and deficit left by the previous Barnett government was also a highlight, as he sat on the Public Accounts Committee scrutinising how the Perth Children’s Hospital had descended into a debacle.

“Thirdly, just investing in health, education and infrastructure, looking at game-changing projects like Metronet.

Work health and safety reforms under industrial relations minister Bill Johnston, lifting the statute of limitations for victims of historical child sex abuse with Mr Quigley and sitting on the joint select committee chaired by health minister Amber Jade Sanderson which reformed the state’s euthanasia laws were also career highlights.

He’d been co-opted onto the committee because of his law background to balance the Opposition’s only member Nick Goiran, who also has a legal background.

“It’s no secret that I got married in a church, and so I was raised in a Catholic tradition, but I hadn’t ever really turned my mind to voluntary assisted dying.

“So I was an open slate when I went into this.

“If you look at the speech that I made when the legislation was introduced, I said ‘this is hard, but ultimately it was the right thing to do’.”

Mr Millman says thinking back to his doorknocking before the 2017 election, there was a lot of backlash against the Liberal party for its opaque deal with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, with many saying the party had abandoned many of its principles – particularly supporting a diverse cohesive community.

He says his other proudest achievement has been getting to know that diverse community “in a way that a middle class, white Anglo Saxon Protestant bloke probably wasn’t exposed to”.

“Supporting our local sports and community clubs, the volunteers, those ordinary bread-and-butter people who are that at Bunnings at a sausage sizzle, day-in, day-out just doing the right thing.

“And so to see the smiles on their faces when you deliver them a $3000 grant – in a budget of billions of dollars – they’re just ecstatic.”

Mr Millman says one of his focuses during his last 12 months will be the relocation of ECU into the CBD, saying he’d like to see the Mt Lawley campus’ artistic heritage retained when it’s redeveloped, and has hopes it can become a creative hub.

He acknowledges there’ll be backlash against the inevitable housing that will come with the redevelopment of the campus, but says the Cook government has to take action to address the state’s housing crisis.

by STEVE GRANT