Victorian election hot seats: Having visited a fortune-teller with Matthew Guy, Nick McGowan thinks he can win Ringwood

The first time I call Nick McGowan, he sounds out of breath.

“I’ve just missed the premier at the station! I have a toilet to give him.”

It’s an unconventional way to start a conversation, but I actually know what he’s talking about because like it or lump it, McGowan has become a fixture of my social media feed since I started covering the seat of Ringwood.

That morning, McGowan was decrying the lack of a public toilet at Ringwood East train station and had hoped to give Ben Carroll – who was there minutes earlier for a press conference on capping public transport fares – a gift, but narrowly missed him.

From mowing nature strips to posing with Instagram-famous potholes, locally, McGowan is notorious for such stunts.

Videos of him scrubbing graffiti have been met with good humour by the offenders, who’ve subsequently tagged his name throughout the area, and somewhat less good humour by fellow North-Eastern Metro representative and Labor MP Sonja Terpstra, who said his clean-up efforts had actually done further damage to one bridge in the order of $150,000 – a claim McGowan refutes.

The Liberal candidate for Ringwood, who recently resigned from the upper house to make a play at the Legislative Assembly, clearly enjoys a laugh. But when I join him door-knocking on a Thursday for a couple of hours, I quickly realise there is a distinction between what McGowan considers tactically humorous and absurd.

As I pull up at the meeting point, he’s changing into a pair of blue shorts by the boot of his car, sporting a pink T-shirt with his name on it and some sneakers. He holds up a stack of fridge magnets as I approach.

“I hate having things in my pocket, so I have to carry as many as I can in one hand,” he explains. “Your hand gets quite sore by the end of it.”

“Why don’t you wear a bum bag?” I ask.

He looks at me aghast. “A bum bag? I’d look ridiculous!”

It’s a fine line politicians must walk between being seen as approachable and professional, something McGowan’s had time to perfect. Having been called a “perennial candidate”, struggling for preselection and unsuccessfully running in state and federal elections before finally securing a spot in the upper house in 2022.

Then the following year, while Ringwood’s incumbent MP Will Fowles was keeping a low profile in the aftermath of assault allegations that saw him ousted from the Labor Party and investigated by police (no charges were laid and Fowles has always denied any wrongdoing), McGowan began not-so-subtly making an early play for the lower house seat.

With his office at Eastland Shopping Centre (aka Ringwood heartland), McGowan has spent the last few years building his profile as the member in Ringwood. Cheeky? He admits it is. Effective? Highly.

Door-knocking on the streets of Mitcham, it seems many locals think he already is the member for Ringwood, not someone hoping to win the seat back for the Liberals on November 28, after it was lost in the so-called ‘Danslide’ of 2018.

At one house, someone asks McGowan: “Are you the state member?”

“I’m a state member,” he responds coyly.

Adding to the blurred lines is McGowan’s choice of campaign colours. Refusing to be pinned down to Liberal blue alone, his wardrobe is full of T-shirts in a range of colours.

It would be fair to say McGowan isn’t leaping out of his skin to tell people he’s a Liberal. In the few dozen interactions I observe between him and residents, he mentions the name of his party just three times.

“I got talking to a lovely old couple earlier today who were hardcore Labor,” he tells me as we walk. “I didn’t have the heart to break it to them.”

Political commentator Dr Zareh Ghazarian says McGowan’s not alone in distancing himself from the Liberal brand at this election. He says the party’s Victorian branch has made a conscious effort in 2026 to separate itself from its flailing federal colleagues, as well as its own recent messy past.

McGowan insists there’s no real method to his madness, but that it’s intentional in the sense that it removes the barrier of partisanship from conversation.

“I don’t love shoving my politics down anyone’s throat,” he says. “I don’t think the public love it either.”

The 51-year-old father-of-three seems generally uncomfortable sitting within partisan boundaries. Some of the issues he’s particularly zealous about most people wouldn’t typically associate with the Liberals.

In a rapid-fire round of word association, he greets “working from home” with an enthusiastic “love it!” and “immigration” with “yes please”. It’s a “no, thank you” to One Nation, while he says he gets on “really well” with the Greens.

McGowan says that to him, being a Liberal is about striving for a tolerant, multicultural society, where individual and collective rights are balanced. That was the vision presented to him when, as a 16-year-old, he contacted Labor, the Liberals and the Democrats, trying to decide which to join.

Nonetheless, he’s about as far to the left as a technically right-wing politician can be, and prides himself on doing what he can to bridge the partisan divide.

Having grown up moving from place to place with his mum after she separated from his dad – who McGowan describes as loving, but a “functioning alcoholic”- McGowan learned to be something of a chameleon.

As an adult, he moved between countries working for various agencies under the umbrella of the UN (where he first got a foothold by giving an “optimistic” account of his French language skills). It was during this time, he says, that he learned the value of “shitty peace”.

“It’s been a great lesson for me in life with any group of people … [to ask] where’s the common ground? What’s palatable, and what moves us forward?” he says. “Because if you’ve been or lived in a war zone, you know that’s the one thing you want to avoid above all else … And every peace I’ve ever seen is pretty shitty, but it’s better than the alternative.”

At one point in our conversation, McGowan casually recalls being held up at knife point not once, but twice – first in Burundi, then in the Netherlands.

Bizarrely, he says the latter incident – in which he was mugged while walking home at night – had been predicted by a fortune-teller who he visited in Melbourne with his childhood friend and Liberal colleague, Matthew Guy.

I ask if she told him anything about his future as a lower house representative for Ringwood. He can’t remember, he says, but promises to call Guy, who taped the conversation for posterity and may still have a copy.

Though he believes much in life is predetermined, he’s not leaving anything to fate in his political career.

In the past month, he reckons he’s personally door-knocked almost every street in the electorate. He’s also announced tens of millions of dollars in funding commitments for the area and has pledged to build a new facility at Maroondah Hospital, despite the Liberals not having made any formal commitments.

If he is successful on election night, his all-in approach will leave him with a lot to deliver. If he doesn’t, it might be back to the crystal ball.

Welcome back to week three of our hot seats election coverage, where we’re taking a hyperlocal look at the burning issues in the electorates of Ringwood, Hawthorn, Shepparton and Sydenham in the lead-up to polling day on November 28.

In case you missed it, here’s everything we covered in week two.