While the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader were speaking at a public forum at Rooty Hill RSL last night, less than two kilometres down the road in Hebersham a different kind of public meeting was going on.
Outside a dismal, liver-coloured block of flats on busy Woodstock Avenue, kind-hearted locals were gathering with their children, as they have done every day just after dusk, to light candles and lay toys at an impromptu shrine for missing six-year-old Kiesha Abrahams.
In the 11 days since her reported disappearance, the shrine has spread the entire length of the fence outside the unit block where she spent her last mystery-shrouded days. By Monday there were more than 500 teddy bears, dinosaurs, dolls and assorted stuffed animals, a hundred candle holders, a set of rosary beads, a cross, and a dozen handwritten notes, many with cut-out newspaper photos of Kiesha with her now familiar clenched smile and brown ringlets.
Such a heartfelt outpouring of concern is the other side of this forgotten area of Sydney, where social problems are epidemic and social services fail at every step.
Hebersham and its neighbouring suburbs Bidwill, Doonside, Mount Druitt, Plumpton, Shalvey, Whalan and Tregear are well known in police blotters, reporters' notebooks and Department of Community Services files. They are the addresses most likely to crop up in news stories about damaged children. These flat, featureless suburbs, with their straight roads and myriad roundabouts on the vast expanse of western Sydney's Cumberland Plain, are a world away from the other, glamorous Sydney by the harbour.
They belong, of course, to one of Labor's safest federal seats, Chifley. Smack bang between the marginal seats of Lindsay and Greenway which have been lavished with attention during this election campaign, Chifley has been ignored, as usual. Held by the retiring Roger Price, longest-serving Labor member in Parliament, it has been gifted to Ed Husic, president of the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union, who will likely achieve as much for his loyal voters as his predecessor. Not that the Liberal Party has treated Chifley with any more respect, selecting a candidate so woeful he had to be dumped last month.
Left to their own devices, the locals have forged a strong sense of community and purpose. Drawn to Woodstock Avenue by pictures of Kiesha in the media, they talk non-stop about a little girl they never knew as police work inside the first-floor unit, carrying carpet and doors out to forensic vans.
"We've got a reputation for being a bad suburb," said 17-year-old Petra Kapusta. "There's a lot of neglected kids around here and [DOCS] doesn't know what to do with them. But this shows how much we all care."
"It just amazes me how much people care," says Rhonda Hines, 47, a mother of six. "I'm so proud I live in Mount Druitt. People run it down but when something like this happens we all pull together."
Her sons, 14 and 16, had come to lay two toy ducks on Kiesha's shrine. "We all wish there was something we could to do to help her.''
"I feel so sad for the little child. It's not right," said Reno Scevola, 43, who has strong theories about what has happened to Kiesha, which are, of course, unprintable.
Almost everyone has solved the case in their minds, and they discuss their theories endlessly, analysing the body language of Kiesha's mother, Kristi Abrahams, and stepfather, Robert Smith, on TV last week.
Since telling police she woke up on August 1 to find Kiesha missing and fronting up to a media conference three days later in dark glasses and barely able to speak, she has scarcely been seen. The young mother and her family, including her six-week-old son, Levi, and three-year-old daughter, Brianna, have been staying in various motels. They returned briefly to pick up some clothes but missed a poignant ceremony in the park next door on Sunday, when about 200 people gathered to release balloons to guide Kiesha home.
After school, mothers with their small children arrive at the shrine to say prayers and pay their respects. ''It's really sad," said Philippine immigrant Moonette.
At dusk whole families arrive. Cathy Stone, 38, brings a box of tea lights and kneels carefully to light them. "When you've got kids you just feel compelled to come here," says Stone, who has brought her partner, Albert Mobbs, 36, her weeping mother, Hilly Stone, 63, her daughter, Chantelle Ismay, 20, and her 16-month-old granddaughter, Lillie Norton.
"Isn't it a wonderful thought that so many people care? There's not a person here that wouldn't have taken that little girl home and looked after her … It's nice to think you are lighting the candles to show her the way home, but I think she's probably not coming back."
The public grief of the people who lived around Kiesha in her six short years may seem curious to outsiders, but it is this community concern which is the most important protection for children in dysfunctional environments. It is rooted in instinctive notions of right and wrong, which are often clearer to those at the bottom of the heap.
They might have jumbled families of their own, but they know where the ice addicts live, and they know in which families children are safe and in which they aren't.
When government bureaucracies and the rest of Sydney let them down, they have each other.
Of course, if police at some stage deem a crime to have been committed in relation to Kiesha, any mention of the little girl will be forbidden in the media. Her name and photo will not be published and any sins against her will be forgotten, because of secretive laws enacted by the NSW government - aided by a negligent opposition - to evade proper scrutiny of its failed policies on child protection, under the guise of protecting privacy.
The laws will effectively extinguish the candles at Kiesha's makeshift shrine on Woodstock Avenue, just as they extinguish any outcry that should come if people hear of another child "known to DOCS" who has met a sad end.
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