From Local Politics to Fiction: How Local Reality Show Came to Life

I never became a politician – though my students and friends might have imagined otherwise.

Back in 2010, I was thrilled to be preselected in the sixth spot on the Senate ticket, supporting lead candidate Richard di Natale.

At the time, I was teaching a group of adult migrants and proudly shared the news with them. Then the election came – and Richard won! It was splashed all over the papers: the Greens finally had their very first Victorian senator.

The following Monday, I walked into my classroom ready to teach… and not a single student turned up. Every chair was empty. They’d all assumed I was already in Canberra, busy being sworn in. For my students, I was the new Greens senator!

And it wasn’t just my students who got carried away. When I later ran for Nillumbik Council, I won the primary vote easily but lost when preferences were distributed. “You were robbed!” wailed my friends – fiercely loyal, but not quite across the intricacies of our preferential voting system.

Over several decades, I threw myself into local community politics, running three times for council – always with the same disappointing outcome. Yet my experiences left me fascinated by the quirks, dramas, and unexpected absurdities of local politics, and by the way it’s treated as spectator sport by ratepayers.

Eventually, I felt compelled to turn what I’d witnessed into fiction. I drew on the absurdities of local politics – and the baffling popularity of murder mysteries and reality TV – to write a humorous short story called Local Reality Show. I transformed my own community into a theatre: politics as prime-time drama, councillors as combatants, and the audience itself as the punchline.

If you enjoy comedy with a twist of mystery and a wink at the ridiculousness of it all, step into my Local Reality Show.