Smith & Kell’s “Goliath” is, at its heart, a song about the little battler squaring up to something much bigger than themselves and refusing to blink. It’s been on high rotation in my head this week, because it’s exactly the energy I got sitting down with Leanne Foresti, who ran as an independent for Ginninderra in the 2024 ACT election.
Leanne isn’t your typical candidate. She and her husband run a concrete remediation business, and it was watching the skills and labour crisis chew through small operators like hers that got her writing letters to federal and local ministers in the first place. A meeting with Andrew Leigh, a conversation with the Master Builders Association and later she found herself talking to Thomas Emerson, who was then working for Senator David Pocock. “It was the first time I ever really felt that I had been heard,” she told me. That feeling was enough to tip her from letter-writer to volunteer, and then, at Emerson’s suggestion, into the race itself as a lead candidate with Independents for Canberra.
Ginninderra in 2024 was no soft landing. Sitting government ministers, sitting members, and around 32 other hopefuls on the ballot. Leanne jokes about coming out the other side with a bit of PTSD, and about the particular indignity of your own face staring back at you from a corflute on every second corner. But she’s also clear-eyed about what the experience gave her: resilience, and confirmation she was chasing the right issues.
Those issues keep coming back to training. Leanne pointed out that not one of CIT’s top six fee-free enrolments is construction-related, in the middle of a housing and infrastructure crisis where the ACT is already competing with New South Wales and Victoria for tradies. CIT’s completion rate sits around 50 per cent, against roughly 80 per cent for carpentry apprentices through RTOs like MBA ACT. Add in the highest workers’ compensation rates and payroll tax in the country, and it’s little wonder so many subbies have quietly relocated across the border into Yass Valley, Queanbeyan-Palerang and Goulburn Mulwaree, taking their revenue with them.
So will she run again in 2028? Leanne’s answer was a careful yes-but. She’d like to put her hand up under the banner of Voices of Belconnen and Gungahlin, part of that “voices of” community-independent tradition we’ve already seen with Voices of Bean and Voices of Canberra – groups that select and endorse their own candidates through an open, transparent community process, rather than running as a party. But she’s genuinely respectful of that process: it will be the community, not Leanne, who decides whether she’s the one to carry the banner.
Which brings me back to Goliath. Politics loves to frame these contests as David versus a giant, but talking to Leanne, it felt less like she was trying to slay anything, and more like she just wants a seat at the table where the decisions about small business, training and construction actually get made. Sometimes the underdog doesn’t need to win the whole fight – just get heard.
