The race is on for the Victorian federal seat of Aston, where a Liberal inner-city councillor and a Labor ex-trade union official compete to replace MP Alan Tudge.
The long-time Liberal seat in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs had a 7.3% swing towards Labor at last year’s federal election, leaving the two-party preferred margin at 2.8%.
Labor has the underdog status and would break a 100-year-old pattern of governments losing byelections if it captured the seat, according to election analyst and Crikey contributor William Bowe.
“No opposition has lost a byelection since 1920,” said Bowe, who runs the blog The Poll Bludger. “It would be a big deal if Labor won, but if they don’t, they can shrug it off. It’s a test for [Opposition Leader Peter] Dutton though — if he can’t win, they’ll be asking questions in the Liberal Party.”
Dutton and the Liberal candidate, City of Melbourne councillor Roshena Campbell, have sought to portray the byelection as a chance for the community to “send a message” to Anthony Albanese’s Labor government.
“They need a plan to get on top of the highest inflation in over 30 years and the highest interest rates in a decade … and they should not be able to take the outer east for granted,” Campbell wrote in an article in the Indian diaspora news publication Bharat Times.
Dutton, who has appeared in Aston four times during the campaign, repeated that message standing beside Campbell in mid-March. He brought up Labor’s federal campaign promise to reduce energy bills by $275 — a favourite “broken promise” attack line by the opposition.
“I think in Aston there is a great opportunity for the local community here to send a very strong message to the prime minister that they don’t like broken promises, and particularly when it comes to the cost-of-living pressures that they are having to bear in their own household budgets,” he said.
Albanese has been in Aston four times backing the Labor candidate, Mary Doyle, who also stood for the seat in the federal election.
Doyle has been pitched as a working-class battler who survived breast cancer and grew up in public housing, just like the prime minister.
She’s worked as a “key stakeholder relations specialist” at super fund Hesta since August, and before that spent more than two decades as a union organiser. Her very detailed LinkedIn profile includes part-time jobs going back to 1985, including four months as a “freelance” cleaner and a Coles checkout worker.
She told The Age she believes “we need more ordinary people in Parliament” and pointed to her experience balancing a household budget as a single mother.
Albanese said when launching her campaign: “Mary is a suburban mum who understands cost-of-living pressures, who understands the importance of Medicare as a cancer survivor, is someone who will be a strong advocate for this local community.”
Neither candidate actually lives in the electorate. Doyle has said she lives just 10 minutes away and is “from the outer-eastern suburbs”. Campbell has pledged to move to Aston from Brunswick if she’s elected.
The byelection is on Saturday.
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