Victorian Liberals tasked with winning back African voters after 2018 'gang violence' election campaign
ABCState elections are normally fought over hospitals and schools. "We just need to call it for what it is — of course it's African gang violence," now-federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said in the lead-up to the 2018 poll. Ian Smith says the Liberal Party was "wrong" to use the language around African communities it did. "So criticisms of me in any multicultural communities is really quite hard to take, given the amount of work I've done with so many communities, including the African communities, from politicians who probably never ever set foot inside one of their community centres," he says. "It's hard, once you've lost trust, to bring it back," says Berhan Ahmed, enjoying a cup of tea and greeting passing friends on the main street in Footscray.
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