CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
35-year-old Ravi Ray is a high-functioning community figure who can handle whatever hurdle life throws at her.
After spending her twenties studying engineering at Melbourne Uni while working as caregiver in a group home by night, Ravi didn’t expect to fall in love the moment she graduated.
While juggling a demanding professional career and a noisy multigenerational extended family, she also managed to get married and have two kids.
Her husband works as a school teacher, and her immigrant parents still run the family boot repair shop.
After spending her early adulthood working in both emergency housing and government infrastructural projects, Ravi understands waste. She knows for a fact that when it comes to delivering services to Australians – a lot of corners are being cut, and pockets are being lined.
As someone young enough to have gay friends that she’s outside of just weddings and school reunions, Ravi also understands that a great deal of poiticial capital has been wasted by the Liberal Party in their efforts to police what goes on behind closed bedroom doors. Due to her working class upbringing in the multicultural outer suburbs of Melbourne, she is also well versed in the cross-cultural sensitivities that modern political parties now struggle with.
She understands that female voters are sick and tired of the stuffed shirt macho man politics that has defined Australia’s conservative political class for the last two decades. As an engineer, she doesn’t have to spend too long looking at the numbers to conclude that our country is in the midst of both a climate crisis and a housing crisis.
She also realises that even progressive voters are growing frustrated with the overcorrection of political correctness and relentless identity politics. She just wants a government that gets on with the things they have promised to do, as well as the unpopular things that they need to do.
With a charismatic personality and a natural ability to hold a room, she would make for a naturally talented politicians.
By every imaginable metric, Ravi should be a walk-up start for the Liberal Party. She has even explicitly aired her interest in one day running for the lower house.
Unfortunately for Ravi, her humble cobbler father is not a household name within the top brass of the Coalition. Neither is her grandfather – or any of the men in her family for that matter.
This rules her out of lower house pre-selection. Her next best bet is to spend ten years working as a secretary for a backbencher and possibly nabbing a senate ticket. At a state level.
Or she could just answer those phone calls from Simon Holmes à Court.
