Former senior Coalition minister Alan Tudge is reportedly poised to quit politics – less than a year after holding on to his Melbourne seat at the federal election.
A Coalition source has confirmed Mr Tudge’s plans to The New Daily while discussion is well underway among Victorian Liberals about potential candidates to stand in a byelection.
Speculation was running rampant on Thursday about potential candidates for an Aston byelection after the MP and former education minister missed parliament’s first sitting week.
Party sources poured cold water on a suggestion that former federal treasurer Josh Frydenberg could mount a political comeback by standing for the seat, after he was ousted from Kooyong last May.
Aston is one of the last standing Liberal enclaves in broader metropolitan Melbourne after the party’s ranks were severely diminished following a rout across the city at the May election. It hangs on a margin of only 2.8 per cent.
Barrister and Melbourne councillor Roshena Campbell, a columnist for The Age newspaper, was floated as one potential successor with support in a party with only nine women MPs serving in the lower house.
Last week, Mr Tudge appeared at the royal commission into the robodebt scandal, denying responsibility for the disgraced Centrelink scheme.
Mr Tudge, who was human services minister between 2016 and 2017, told the commission that while he was in charge of matters in his department, he wasn’t responsible for the scheme’s “lawful implementation”.
He also said that while he did not consider the legality of the robodebt scheme, questions of the program’s fairness were brought up.
“It is unfathomable for a [department] secretary to be implementing a program which he or she would know to be unlawful, it is unfathomable,” Mr Tudge told the commission.
He was largely absent from the campaign trail ahead of the May 2022 federal election after standing aside from cabinet when his former lover and staffer Rachelle Miller confirmed their affair.
Ms Miller alleged their consensual relationship was “emotionally, and on one occasion, physically, abusive”, claims denied by Mr Tudge.
Late last year, Ms Miller received a $650,000 taxpayer-funded settlement for damages while working the office of Mr Tudge and another senior Coalition minister, Michaelia Cash.
