Independent senses an ‘appetite for change’ in Vaucluse

KAREN FREYER tells ANNE SUSSKIND she believes her focus on public education, climate, affordable housing and antisemitism is gaining traction with liberal hearts in the safe Liberal seat.

It’s a tough gig standing for election as an independent in a particularly “conservative subset” of Sydney’s east, with priorities such as educational opportunity, overdevelopment and affordable housing. Antisemitism is high on the list too, as is the environment and climate change. 

There’s no escaping the scale of Karen Freyer’s challenge. At the 2019 election, the sitting Liberal member for Vaucluse, Gabrielle Upton, won the seat with 57% of the vote, more than 40% ahead of the next candidate. Vaucluse has been in Liberal hands since World War II and is classified on the ABC website as “Very Safe Liberal”.

But Freyer believes there’s a mood for change in the March 25 election, where she is up against the Liberal Party’s new candidate, former TV news presenter Kellie Sloane, the Labor Party’s Margaret Merton and Dominic Wy Kanak from the Greens.

With climate change and racial intolerance looming large, there’s a new urgency to everything, she argues.

Freyer, whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors – they were hidden under the floorboards of the home of a Polish farming family who took care of their little boy (her father), upstairs - speaks rapidly and passionately about many things. “Everything can be taken away from you in a second,” she says. “Maybe this is a Holocaust thing… I was brought up in a family where I was told ‘Karen, everything can be taken away, but there’s one thing they can’t take away, your education’.”

Her grandfather, a law professor, came to Australia “with nothing”, the family lived in one room in Bondi and he worked in a factory. But he did well because he was well educated, as is his son, Freyer’s father, who became a cardiologist.