Through the glass of his Watton Street office, John Lister is already in conversation. A woman from the electorate sits across from him, working something through. Nobody hurries. When he eventually waves us in, the ease of it is hard to fake.
The office is compact. On one wall hangs a large poster by Adelaide street artist Peter Drew, a Sikh man in a yellow turban, the word AUSSIE printed below. The man is Bhagwan Singh, photographed in Victoria in 1927 when he was required to apply for an exemption to the White Australia policy. Lister offers a brief account, then suggests moving next door.
Dear Dough, a Korean café a few steps along Watton Street, is quiet mid-morning. Over lattes, the conversation that follows feels less like a formal interview and more like a continuation of what was already happening in the office.
Lister won the Werribee seat at a by-election in February 2025, filling the vacancy left when Tim Pallas, the former state treasurer who had represented the electorate since 2006, resigned from parliament. More than a year on, the margin still gets a mention: 693 votes, 0.82 per cent. Before parliament he was a schoolteacher and a CFA volunteer. He still sounds like both.
“Not a lot has changed,” he says, when asked about the transition. “Being a teacher and being a Member of Parliament are very similar. Just like a teacher has to get to know their students and understand where they come from, I’ve done that as a member of parliament. You have to meet them at their point of need.”
Those conversations, he says, fill in what data misses.
“I could tell you we need more bus services. But what I found was that people didn’t just want a bus to the train station. They wanted a bus to the shops. You’d never see that in data.”
Wyndham is one of Australia’s most diverse municipalities. Indians represent 17.4 per cent of the population, more than three times the Greater Melbourne average. The community has grown rapidly over the past decade, reshaping suburbs like Point Cook, Truganina and Tarneit into something that feels less like outer Melbourne and more like somewhere particular.
Lister has been in these communities often enough to feel their scale. He mentions the Consul General of India almost in passing.
“I was saying to the Consul General last week, honestly, they should open the embassy here. Because it’s such a cool thing that we have this huge, diverse Indian community. It’s not just one part of India. It’s every part of India, all in one place.”
“I was saying to the Consul General last week, honestly, they should open the embassy here. Because it’s such a cool thing that we have this huge, diverse Indian community. It’s not just one part of India. It’s every part of India, all in one place.”
He lists them, Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, as though the names themselves make the point. “There are around 96 different languages spoken in Wyndham,” he says. “There’s diversity within diversity.”
That warmth has been tested. In mid-2025, anti-immigration protests swept several Australian cities, with Indian migrants among those targeted. Comments by Liberal Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price about immigrants of Indian heritage drew widespread anger. Lister wrote to his Indian-Australian constituents at the time, telling them directly: “Multicultural Victoria is not part of the problem. It is part of the solution.”
On the surge of anti-Indian sentiment online, he points to the platforms. The algorithm changes at Facebook, he says, amplified hate content and gave fringe views a reach they would never otherwise have had. What might once have stayed at the margins got shared, boosted and normalised.
He says he understands the frustrations driving One Nation support, cost of living, housing, the sense of being overlooked. Those pressures are real, he says, and the answer is policy that actually meets them, not rhetoric that redirects the anger.
For Lister, the question of who belongs here has a straightforward answer. To be Australian, he says, is to have the desire to commit to the betterment of this country. He says he knows many people of Indian heritage who embody exactly that, committed to building something here, not just living in it.
It is a definition that sits quietly against the Bhagwan Singh poster back in his office. A man who had to formally prove his right to stay in 1927, now hanging on a Labor MP’s wall in an electorate where Indians are the largest ancestry group.
“We don’t want to assume we know what people want,” he says. “We want to listen first hand.”
That instinct runs through how he talks about cost of living. Wyndham tends to absorb economic pressure before the rest of Victoria registers it, and right now that pressure arrives in layers.
“People were saying, yes, they want fuel prices to go down,” he says. “But at the same time, their rego bill has come in, maybe $600, or $250 to $300 if they’re paying quarterly. Then their rates bill arrives as well. These are all things people are dealing with week to week.”
Werribee MP John Lister says while state government cannot control every cost hitting family budgets, he has some pointed words for the supermarket giants. “Woolworths and Coles have something to answer for there,” he says, adding that his focus remains on what the government can directly influence
He is careful about the reach of state government.
“We can’t necessarily control the price of groceries, although Woolworths and Coles have something to answer for there,” he says. “But we can control registration costs. We can influence what happens with local council rates.”
The council rate cap has come down to 2.75 per cent. A rego rebate from June 1 returns 20 per cent of what people have already paid this year. Smaller still, logos are being removed from the bottom half of school uniforms.
“You don’t need logos on pants or socks. That’s an unnecessary cost for families.”
Transport is where the longer-standing gaps sit. Wyndham Vale, Mambourin, the estates north of Manor Lakes, the plans drawn up under the previous Liberal government never resolved how infrastructure would follow the housing.
“They opened them up to developers, but there was never a clear plan for delivery,” he says. “Ever since then we’ve been working out how to build back into those plans and fill the gaps.”
Federal funding, absent for roughly nine years under the previous coalition government, has since helped move projects forward. Ison Road now has traffic signals where there was once a roundabout. Ballan Road has bus lanes.
“It’s not just cars getting delayed, it’s buses too,” he says. “And I want people to be taking public transport.”
No new precincts will open until 2029 or 2030, a deliberate pause while existing infrastructure is brought up to speed before more land is released to developers.
On children’s surgery, this year’s budget has directed funding specifically at category two and three cases that banked up through and after COVID.
“They’re growing, their bodies are changing,” Lister says. “They’re active, always running around. That delay matters.”
His father was a Liberal party member. Lister remembers the lounge room debates. He joined the Labor party at 17, not because politics was unfamiliar, but because he had thought it through and chosen.
Watton Street carries on outside. Lister wraps up his coffee and the conversation in the same easy manner he started it.
“You just need to get out there and talk to people,” he says.
The son of a Liberal, now the Labor member for one of Australia’s most diverse electorates, having won it by fewer than 700 votes. It turns out the lounge room debates were just the beginning.
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