Conservative son of a ‘leftist firebrand’ takes on a former dolphin trainer in Labor’s most marginal WA seat
The previously safe Liberal electorate of Tangney fell to Labor’s Sam Lim – a former dolphin trainer – in the red wave of 2022. Now Howard Ong is fighting to win it back
The Liberal candidate Howard Ong will challenge a former dolphin trainer, Sam Lim, in Saturday’s election for the knife-edge Western Australian seat of Tangney, on the same day his little brother – Singapore’s health minister – goes to the polls.
Ong, an IT consultant born in Singapore, will face off against the Labor incumbent, Malaysian-born Lim, while his brother, Ong Ye Kung, stands for the governing conservative party, the People’s Action party.
Their father, Ong Lian Teng, was a member of Singapore’s parliament in the 1960s. He has been described as a “leftist firebrand” who was once arrested for his opposition to the party his son may one day lead.
Labor is battening down the hatches in Western Australia after its convincing sweep there in 2022, when it picked up four Liberal seats, and a surprisingly emphatic win at last month’s state election.
Lim, who is also a former police officer and monk, holds Tangney with a post-redistribution margin of 2.8%.
The relatively wealthy riverside electorate enjoys higher than average incomes, education levels and home ownership.
Just over 16% of those living there claim Chinese ancestry, which is more than three times the national average.
The Liberal party initially preselected a former Australian Survivor contestant and SAS soldier Mark Wales, despite concerns about a novel he has written depicting a civil war in Australia after a Chinese invasion.
Wales stepped down after a family member suffered a serious medical episode.
John Phillimore, the executive director of Curtin University’s John Curtin Institute of Public Policy, says before 2022 Tangney was a “classic, obvious Liberal seat”, without the shifts that favoured teal independents.
“It was the real out-of-the-box result last time,” he says. “You’d imagine the Liberals would have it high on its list of seats to win back.”
As in the rest of the nation, the cost of living is a big issue in WA. But the state is reaping the benefits of another mining boom, with low unemployment and high wages. The fight over ending live exports is a mainly rural issue, although farmers are trying to make it a statewide one.
In the lead-up to Saturday’s election, Lim tells Guardian Australia he had “goose bumps” when he was elected, and Parliament House was an “alien world”.
“It was a humbling moment,” he says. “I also can feel on my shoulders a big responsibility because I represent the people of Tangney … so every time I walk in there I remember that.”
Lim sounds wide-eyed and enthusiastic but he doesn’t forget his political lines.
“I’m very proud that we’ve helped them in many ways … cheaper medicines, cheaper childcare, tax cuts for everyone … people talk to me about cost of living and as a result I ask them to vote for me,” he says.
Ong declined to speak to Guardian Australia. According to his official bio, he was “raised by hardworking parents” in Singapore, where he did his national service before moving to WA to study at Curtin.
He glosses over his father’s history, saying merely that he was “a politician for a number of years”.
Phillimore says big names from both sides had been regularly visiting Labor’s most marginal WA seat, “doing their bit to get their guys across the line”.
The foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, has described Lim as “one of the hardest-working MPs” she has ever met, while the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has praised Ong’s “wonderful work”.
But as Labor continues its creep forward in the national polls, YouGov has switched its projections for Tangney from a Liberal to a Labor win.
“At the beginning of the year if you asked most people they’d say Tangney and Bullwinkel would go to the Liberals,” Phillimore says.
“The results of the state election make that less the case … Labor won pretty comfortably in all the seats along the river there.”
He refers to the “sophomore effect”, under which someone in their second term can expect a swing towards them.
“I think they’d be feeling confident,” he says.
Tangney was named for Labor’s first female senator, Dorothy Tangney, whose maiden, wartime speech in 1944 paid tribute to working women, the importance of freedom and democracy, and the need for social security, education, adequate pensions, a national health system, decent housing and care for veterans.
The Labor stalwart John Dawkins won the newly created seat in 1974 but swiftly lost it after Gough Whitlam’s dismissal and the 1975 election. He returned to parliament in the seat of Fremantle.
Wales is not the only Tangney Liberal to pen a novel.
Dennis Jensen, who held Tangney until 2016, famously wrote a racy novel that served up graphic sex and a fictional war between Australia and an Indonesia-China coalition.
He lost a preselection vote to Ben Morton, a close ally of the former prime minister Scott Morrison. Morton in turn lost the seat to Lim.
The other Tangney contenders are Eric Hayward for the Greens, the chilli enthusiast Phillip Leslie from the Legalise Cannabis party, Steve Kefalinos for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and James Rai for the Australian Christians.
• This article was amended on 30 April 2025 to correct a misspelling of Ong Ye Kung, owing to a production error.