BEN HARVEY: Behind the scenes of the secret Labor-teal preference deal, even the candidate was in the dark

Running dead in a seat is a common and very old political tactic.

As you read this column, dozens of candidates in electorates around the country are not breaking a sweat to get your vote.

You won’t see them knocking on doors or shaking hands at local supermarkets. Their faces won’t be grinning at you from corflutes.

On Saturday, you probably won’t see them handing out how-to-vote cards at different polling booths around their electorates.

They aren’t trying to win their seat because they can’t win their seat.

The Greens candidate in a mining town or the One Nation candidate in an electorate filled with migrants is there for two reasons.

First, to get some experience on the campaign trail. Labor has made an art of fielding up-and-coming union officials in unwinnable seats so they can cut their teeth and become useful somewhere else at a later election.

The second, and more important, reason parties run in seats they know they will lose is preferences.

Specifically, the directing of the doomed candidate’s preferences to another party that can win the seat.

That favour will trigger a quid pro quo in another seat that the hapless party has a genuine shot at and voila, you have a mutually beneficial preference deal.

Viktor Ko was meant to play dead.

Labor’s candidate in the blue-blood seat of Curtin in WA doesn’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell of winning.

The electorate hugs Perth’s pristine beaches and takes in the bays of the Swan River. It is home to some of the wealthiest and most conservative people in Australia.

Viktor was installed by Labor so his preferences can be funnelled to incumbent teal Kate Chaney, who is locked in a tight fight with Liberal challenger Tom White.

The Liberals need to win Curtin to have any chance of forming government and Labor is doing everything in its power to stop that from happening.

That is a perfectly legitimate political tactic based on the adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

There was one problem.

Someone forgot to let Viktor know about the plan.

And Viktor is in it to win it.

Perhaps the GP and surgical registrar was inspired by the miracle victories by Labor candidates at the 2021 WA election, when, for the first time in history, Liberal strongholds fell to the red team.

Maybe he was motivated by his family’s unwavering devotion to the ALP. His parents came to Australia as Cantonese migrants and thrived under policies created by Labor.

Or it could have been an old-fashioned sense of civic duty. During COVID, he retrained to specialise in the health of homeless people and serves as a City of Perth councillor.

Whatever the reason, Viktor campaigned hard. He doorknocked until his feet hurt, arguing the virtues of Labor’s policies until he was blue in the face.

He attended community events and put up “Vote 1 Viktor Ko” placards between Tom’s and Kate’s many roadside posters.

He shook the hands of the landed gentry in millionaire suburbs such as Dalkeith and Peppermint Grove, even though he knew it would yield a pretty ordinary return on investment.

Winning was an almost impossible ask but Viktor wasn’t going to die wondering. He had saved for five years to afford this campaign (he has spent close to $100,000 of his own money) and was leaving nothing on the field.

Over the past few days, Viktor felt a change in the vibe of his campaign office. Things were frosty.

He was excluded from meetings and felt he wasn’t being kept in the loop.

It soon became apparent why.

Viktor wasn’t sticking to the script and was refusing to pull his punches when dealing with Chaney. He went after her as hard as he did Tom White and Peter Dutton.

“If you want a Labor government, you can’t risk a vote for anybody else,” he thundered in one political pamphlet which pointed out that Chaney had “backflipped on the live sheep ban” and “backflipped on the North West Shelf gas project”.

“Kate Chaney refuses to tell us who she’ll back in a hung parliament. If you want a Labor Government, this time, you have to vote Labor.”

Here’s where things get politically spicy.

Viktor didn’t tell his campaign team about the pamphlets and only a handful of them were distributed — to Kate’s house and her neighbours.

Despite the limited run, Labor HQ found out about the flyers within minutes of them landing in letterboxes.

The speed with which his political masters found out about the pamphlet made Viktor suspicious.

Did Chaney’s office have a direct line to the ALP, he wondered?

Viktor wasn’t the only person questioning Labor’s relationship with the teal.

For a candidate who was making political hay out of her independence, Kate and her team seemed awfully chummy with the ALP.

Any pretence that Viktor was anything other than a straw man evaporated when the candidate was eviscerated by his own campaign director.

“Yes, well done to the campaign team, who have been working tirelessly behind the scenes — even while dealing with a candidate who ignores instruction, won’t work with the campaign team, has been rude to multiple people, is wasting precious resources from party office, and seems more interested in working against the best interests of the party than supporting the broader WA Labor campaign,” Peter White said in a message to the Nedlands Labor branch WhatsApp group.

Viktor was part of the group. In an excruciating attempt to bleach history, he was kicked out of the chat.

Despite being chewed up and spat out by his own party, Viktor is still a true believer.

“Every seat is important to Labor and it is Anthony Albanese’s intention to return as a majority government,” he said when questioned about his campaign.

For the record, Chaney reckons any suggestion she is in bed with Labor is “manufactured nonsense”.

Kate can’t say look sideways at someone from another party without something being read into it (only last week she was fending off accusations of being too close to the Greens) but that is a problem of her own making.

She has invited paranoid scrutiny by refusing to say whether she will back in Peter Dutton or Anthony Albanese so can’t complain when Michaelia Cash says “a vote for Kate Chaney is a vote for Labor”.

Curiously, the ALP was less enthusiastic in its denial of a relationship with Chaney’s office; no party official was willing to go on the record about the campaign tactics in Curtin when the story broke on Thursday.

When questioned about the controversy the next day, Labor frontbencher Madeleine King said there was no “formal agreement with Kate Chaney”.

You don’t need to have watched all five series of The West Wing to see it’s bloody obvious that there’s an informal one.