SCOTT LUDLAM GOES VIRAL

The Greens senator with mass appeal

DJS Ludz would rather you not call him that.

In the stop-start traffic of a Perth Tuesday morning, Senator Scott Ludlam rolls his eyes and smiles when I mention the alias he uses for his oft-cited adventures in turntablism. “A bit of fun, that’s all,” says the federal Greens’ co-deputy leader of his second and most recent set playing “dad stuff” at Disconnect Festival, south of Perth, late last year.

It’s forecast to reach 40 degrees in Perth today, and by 8 am white light is already blasting the backs of schoolboys on the footpath. With their khaki shorts, long socks and giant rucksacks, they look like infantrymen marching to war – the Boer War. My back is plastered to the passenger seat, but behind me, reading on his phone, Ludlam is doing little to dispel his reputation as the country’s coolest legislator: impeccable navy suit with slim-fit white shirt sans tie; black boots with red stitch; just-showered helmet of dark wavy hair, one lock falling over his forehead.

Ludlam’s hair – part Richard Gere in Pretty Woman, part Darrell Lea liquorice strap – gets even more attention than his DJ’ing. The Guardian and the Monthly cartoonist First Dog on the Moon regularly depicts it independently of its owner, and calls the ’do “Gary”. It even has its own fan Twitter account, @scottludlamhair.

The previous day Ludlam revealed he was participating in the Leukaemia Foundation’s annual World’s Greatest Shave fundraiser. But in a novel take on the campaign, he started a competing account for those wishing to stop him shaving his head. Whichever account raises the most money will dictate whether Gary stays or goes.

As we drive to the first of a string of media appearances for the fundraiser, I catch fragments of Ludlam’s phone conversation with a reporter:

“… I figured my hair – which isn’t really anything special – might as well be put to good use. The internet has turned it into this weird cult, and it’s time it stopped … I might have to wear a hat for a while. I might have a weird-shaped head or something …”

Over the coming days, I would come to learn that this is typical Ludlam: bemused by all the fuss over something so trivial, but actively encouraging it.

Ludlam’s commitment to shave his head – update: Gary’s gone – is the latest of many notable engagements with social media: a 2014 YouTube appearance as Gandalf smiting a Gollum-like Tony Abbott; a popular ‘Ask Me Anything’ forum on Reddit; and, the week before we meet, an ‘Address to the Nation’ in which Ludlam, hands clasped at his desk, sarcastically congratulated Environment Minister Greg Hunt upon receiving the inaugural Best Minister in the World award. The Australian flags, the deadpan tone, the carefully placed coat-of-arms mug … Ludlam’s address wouldn’t have looked out of place on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

But there’s one missive to cyberspace that has given Ludlam a profile well beyond the internet. At 10.09 pm on 3 March 2014, Ludlam rose in the Senate to make his adjournment speech. He was contesting Western Australia’s half-Senate election re-run the next month, following the Australian Electoral Commission’s misplacement of 1370 ballot papers at the 2013 election, and figured this might be his valedictory speech. But its brevity (eight minutes), mien (quiet authority) and content (a withering takedown of Tony Abbott’s prime ministership) meant it was well primed to light up social media.

“Tonight I rise to invite Prime Minister Tony Abbott to visit the beautiful state of Western Australia,” he opened. “I do this in good faith, because we are only a matter of weeks away from a historic by-election that will determine not just the final make-up of this chamber after July but will decide much more of consequence to the people of Western Australia, whether they are thinking of voting for the Greens or not.”

From there the content became openly contemptuous: Ludlam advised Abbott to think carefully about what “baggage” he packed for the trip across the Nullarbor, requesting the PM leave his “excruciatingly boring three-word slogans at home”, along with the stereotype of Western Australia being “some caricatured redneck backwater that is enjoying the murderous horror unfolding on Manus Island”.

Instead, he advanced an alternative to the mining-state cliché: more than merely “Gina Rinehart’s inheritance to be chopped, benched and blasted”, Western Australia was a community of people who didn’t appreciate the PM waving his “homophobia” in their faces, and who found his obsequiousness to foreign media oligarchs and predator capitalists “awkward, and kind of revolting”. But lest anyone watching get stuck in the moment, Ludlam offered some long-term perspective. “[T]he truth is Prime Minister Tony Abbott and this benighted attempt at a government are a temporary phenomenon.” In years hence, Ludlam suspected, political scientists drilling back in time would consider the Abbott government to be “nothing more than a thin, greasy layer in the core sample” of 21st-century politics.

Ludlam ended the Abbott-directed salvo with the finger: “[T]he reason that I extend this invitation to you, Mr Prime Minister, to spend as much time as you can spare in Western Australia, is that every time you open your mouth the Green vote goes up … Prime Minister, you are welcome to take your heartless, racist exploitation of people’s fears and ram it as far from Western Australia as your ta

Richardson for a walk in Tasmania’s World Heritage wilderness, but you get the picture.

If some divide the Greens into “deep green” (conservationist) and “watermelon” (socialist) factions, Ludlam seems less easily classified. He’s been described as a “hipster with gravitas”, “enigmatic” and “the senator for the internet”. A lover of Japanese whisky, science fiction and the Tokyo public transport system. (“Even Shibuya Station at rush hour?” “Especially Shibuya Station at rush hour!”)

Back at Ludlam’s office, a quiet retreat from central Fremantle’s backpacker tat, his life story unfolds. Ludlam was born in New Zealand in 1970. He and his younger brother spent their early years living like “gypsies”: their artist mother and civil draftsman father are “natural born travellers”, and from 1973 until 1979 the family travelled overland through Asia to Europe, followed by periods living in the UK and South Africa, before eventually settling in Perth.

The Ludlams weren’t party political, but had a strong social conscience. He can remember conversations “about social justice stuff” around the dinner table, a Palm Sunday rally in Perth in the mid ’80s (“still one of the biggest rallies I’ve been to”), and, while living in apartheid South Africa, coming home from school and appalling his parents with the God-given racism his teacher espoused.

Ludlam didn’t care about politics until he was nearly 30. At Curtin University, where he studied design (he also has a degree in policy studies from Murdoch University), student politics seemed like it was “just about beer”. He thinks electoral politics isn’t much better.

Although he was initially attracted by the Greens’ anti-nuclear stance, Ludlam soon discovered that the party also shared his values on forests, biodiversity and social justice. “But from outside the bubble it just looks like a dismal pile of poo, of people shouting at each other, and that their factional allegiances are more important, and more intensely focused on, than what they’re trying to deliver.”

His focus on issues over political point-scoring goes a long way to explaining Ludlam’s appeal. In an era of record-low party membership and for a generation that no longer grows up knowing their party affiliation because of their postcode, Ludlam, unlike tribal warriors in the mould of the Liberals’ Christopher Pyne, Labor’s Sam Dastyari or even the Greens’ Adam Bandt, could hardly be labelled a political animal.

When I ask Liberal Democratic Party senator David Leyonhjelm what Ludlam is like to work with, he emails that Ludlam is “relaxed, civilised [and] a decent person (which is more than I can say for several of his Greens colleagues)”; when I ask for a weakness, Leyonhjelm writes Ludlam has “an absolutely blind objection to anything nuclear”.

Ludlam’s interest in nukes had developed gradually. While laying out physics and chemistry textbooks as a designer (“not graphically brilliant; some of my more mediocre work, to be honest”), he started reading popular science. Through James Lovelock, Roger Penrose, the Gaia hypothesis and chaos theory, he developed an appetite for subjects that had previously had “all the juice squeezed out of them by high school”.

Ludlam’s consultancy landed a job for Canning Resources Australia, who at the time held the lease to the Kintyre uranium deposit in Western Australia’s north. It was his job to design the brochures. He quit on ethical grounds.

Ludlam sold his car (he hasn’t owned one since) and started a graphic design company with some friends. In time he grew restless. “I ended up off the back of a marriage that didn’t work and I just thought, poo, I’m not very happy being a commercial artist, but I dunno what I want to do.”

He heard about a Perth rally against a proposal to mine the Jabiluka uranium deposit, which is surrounded by Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory. He wondered if the protesters needed a graphic designer.

Jo Vallentine, who was elected to the Senate in 1984 for the Nuclear Disarmament Party and later became the first federal Greens senator, can remember the day she met the man who fondly calls her his mentor.

“It was December 16, 1997. A rally against the Jabiluka uranium mine. This young man was just sort of hanging about. I said to him, ‘Would you like to join us for a cup of tea? We’re going to assess how the rally went.’ He was very shy.”

As it happened, the campaign did need a graphic designer. (Ludlam still does a lot of design work for the Greens.) He spent the next few years working with Vallentine on various anti-nuclear and anti-logging campaigns. “I said, ‘Scott, you simply must get arrested!’ I was always encouraging him to go to jail.”

He did get arrested, both at Jabiluka and at Wattle Forest in the south-west of Western Australia. Ludlam then served his political apprenticeship in the field with Vallentine (“she kind of wrote the book on the idea of an activist-legislator”) and, later, in the office of WA Greens state upper house member Robin Chapple, observing how he would “use parliamentary tools of accountability to find stuff out that we were using in our campaigns the same day”. He unsuccessfully contested the state lower house seat of Murchison-Eyre in 2005, before working for Greens senator Rachel Siewert.

Ludlam was elected to the Senate in 2007. When he told Vallentine he was thinking of running for federal parliament, she was encouraging but said, “It will cost you heaps, emotionally.”

got pretty close to endorsing Scott during the WA Senate by-election.”

“I think one of Scott’s strengths is that some of his passions do away with traditional left–right boxes,” writes Ben Oquist in an email. “Privacy, freedom – these issues are historically meant to be the hallmark of the right. But Ludlam is a champion of them in parliament.”

If the Muckaty victory was a highlight, Ludlam considers the passing of the data retention laws last year to be his greatest disappointment. You can hear the regret in his voice; it happened on his watch, he says, so he takes responsibility. Given Labor’s fear of being wedged on matters of national security, isn’t he being hard on himself?

“With the ASIO bill [National Security Legislation Amendment Bill] I think we were stuffed: there was no way Labor was ever going to not support that.” But metadata, he says, was winnable because it was “cloaked” differently. “The bill was introduced by the communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull. And he talked more about traditional law-enforcement roles when he was introducing the bill than he did about national security.”

In retrospect Ludlam says he wouldn’t have spent so much time debating what did or did not constitute metadata. Instead, it would have been better to engage the blue-collar unions. They are currently fighting against the re-establishment of the Australian Building and Construction Commission, which, Ludlam says, was using warrantless metadata access to spy on trade union organisers.

Both Ludlam and Lawrence tell me they believe the ALP was internally divided on the bill; Sam Dastyari tells me Labor “always saw it as a national security issue”.

Unsurprisingly, Ludlam has been an unfailing supporter of Julian Assange. The pair met in 2011 during Assange’s period of house arrest in the English countryside. Ludlam has since visited Assange twice, and spent Christmas 2012 with him at the Embassy of Ecuador in London. Ludlam says Australia’s decision to “selectively disregard” the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which criticised Assange’s treatment, “dramatically lowers the barrier of respect for these institutions”.

On a shelf in Ludlam’s office, near a photo of the Dalai Lama wearing a Fremantle Dockers scarf, sits a signed shot of the WikiLeaks founder:

Scott – thank you for your courage, perseverance and generosity in my long struggle for justice, big and small. As an Australian I am proud of you! Much love, Julian A. 19 Aug 2012

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https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2016/april/1459429200/sam-vincent/scott-ludl...