Wedged between two of Melbourne’s busiest roads and the Dandenong Ranges sits an outer suburban electorate which has garnered little attention for more than three decades, thanks to its status as a safe Liberal seat.
But on Saturday, the result of Aston’s byelection could determine the future direction of the Liberal party. A loss – or even a narrow win – would not only spell trouble for the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, but the Liberal brand as a whole, which has taken a beating the past year.
At the federal election in May, the Victorian election in November and the New South Wales election last weekend, the party was emphatically rejected, particularly in the city and suburbs. In Melbourne, the Liberals hold just three seats: Aston, Deakin and Menzies. Each one is considered marginal.
When Guardian Australia visited the Rowville Community Centre in Aston last week – a few weeks after a visit from Dutton and his candidate, Roshena Campbell – several voters who had previously backed the Liberal party were unsure who they would vote for.
They include Tony, who once voted Labor but switched to the Liberals after he started working for himself. He does not know what party he will preference first this time but is putting the Liberals last.
“The Coalition [was] the worst government that I’ve seen since I started voting back in the 80s,” says the Lysterfield resident, who asked not to use his full name.
“This sends a message to them that they need to be generationally changing their party because the sort of things that they stand for, [are] things that would’ve been OK back in the 50s.”
The downfall of a once-loved member
On paper, Aston, which takes in suburbs including Bayswater, Boronia, Ferntree Gully, Rowville and Wantirna, should be a safe Liberal seat. Once a key mortgage-belt seat full of young families buying new homes in the 1980s, it has become a more settled area – skewing slightly older, more educated and wealthier than the rest of the country.
But its once-loved member, Alan Tudge, has endured several political scandals including an affair with his former staffer and involvement in the robodebt scheme, currently the subject of a royal commission.
At the May federal election, Labor’s candidate, Mary Doyle, knocked Tudge’s margin down from 10.1% to 2.8%. The single mother of two and former union organiser is running again at the byelection, triggered by Tudge’s resignation in February.
“That swing – of 7.3% towards Labor – I wasn’t expecting that,” Doyle tells Guardian Australia. “That must tell you what Aston thought of the Liberal party and the former member.”
She says the Aston community is “even more angry” after nine weeks of hearings into robodebt, where Tudge gave evidence.
“They’re pretty disgusted with what’s come out,” Doyle says.
Margaret, who also asked not to give her full name, has lived in Ferntree Gully for 20 years and used to be a regular Liberal voter.
She liked Tudge and initially thought he could one day become prime minister. But she became less enamoured the higher he rose up the ranks of cabinet under the Morrison government, especially once news of his affair emerged in 2020.
“I wasn’t at all happy when he had that affair,” she says. “I felt very sorry for [Tudge’s] family back home. My preferences were still Liberal but much lower because of the way he behaved.”
A week out from the byelection, Margaret says she has “absolutely no idea” who she will vote for.
David, a swing voter from Wantirna South, also liked Tudge: “He was a fantastic education minister. Problem was his morals.”
‘Broken promises’ and high stakes
While Tudge may have turned some Aston voters off the Liberals, David thinks there will be something else at the forefront of voters’ minds: the rising cost of living.
“Aston is becoming a very expensive suburb to live in … people are finding it difficult, even though people won’t admit it,” he says.
Forty-one per cent of the seat’s households have a mortgage compared to 35% across Australia, according to the last census, leaving Aston voters exposed to rising interest rates. About one-fifth are renters, who are also feeling the squeeze.
Campbell has largely based her campaign on these concerns. She says Labor has “broken promises” to keep a lid on interest rate rises and power bills. Instead, both have gone up, along with groceries and other day-to-day expenses.
“Plenty of families are struggling to pay expenses like school excursions, or even just to fill the kids’ lunchboxes,” the barrister and City of Melbourne councillor says.
“It’s really changing everyday life here in Aston, and the stakes are very high for a lot of voters.”
Alongside blaming Labor for the rising cost of living, the Liberal party’s other main campaign message relates to the scrapping of three road projects in the electorate. Billboards emblazoned with “Labor cut local round funding” had been erected in the electorate when Guardian Australia returned on Wednesday.
“I had one mum tell me it’s adding 40 minutes a day to her doing the school drop-off in what should be a five-minute drive up the street,” Campbell says, accusing the government of “neglecting the outer east”.
Labor has rejected this, arguing the Coalition had allocated only $210m of the $1.3bn required for the road upgrades.
“The truth of the matter is the former member grossly underfunded those road projects to the tune of millions of dollars and when it was actually looked at, it was going to cost a lot more than what he had projected,” Doyle says.
“They always promised this sort of stuff around election time, and then by the time the next election came round, nothing had been done.”
On cost of living, she says Labor has introduced caps on coal and gas prices, to provide energy price relief, and cheaper medicines, while its childcare changes will see 5,700 families in Aston better off from July.
About 65% of the electorate was born in Australia, though 14% of Aston voters have Chinese ancestry, according to latest census data, which is nearly three times higher than the national figure of 5.5%.
Both major parties have poured thousands of dollars into advertisements on social media platforms such as WeChat. For the Liberals, winning over Chinese-Australia will be crucial, given many abandoned the party in both the state and federal election over its hawkish anti-China rhetoric.
The candidate who ‘grew up in the area’
While the byelection is going to go down to the two major-party candidates, the Greens’ Angelica Di Camillo is putting up a fight, largely for young people in the area who struggle to get around due to the lack of public transport.
“I’m like most other people in the electorate, who as soon as they turn 18 have to rush to get their driver licence because there’s literally no other way to get around unless you want to wait hours for a bus. You have to have a car in this seat,” she says.
“But then that only adds more cars on to the road, adding to the issues such as congestion and the environment.”
Di Camillo made her first foray into politics during last year’s Victorian state election in the seat of Rowville, which covers the southern half of the electorate. She emphasises she is the only candidate who “actually grew up in the area”.
Campbell currently lives in Brunswick, on the other side of Melbourne, which Labor has capitalised on while pitching Doyle as a “putting locals first”. Some voters Guardian Australia met in Aston weren’t impressed with the Liberal candidate for this same reason.
Tony says it appeared they had parachuted in a candidate to represent them.
“I’m not going to vote for someone who lives in Brunswick to represent the people out in the eastern suburbs, because they are dramatically different areas,” he says. “The issues and the values of people in the inner suburbs are different to those who live in the outer suburbs.”
However, David, from Wantirna South, says Campbell’s current address did not bother him.
“To be running an oil company, you really don’t need to know much about oil. You need to be a good manager. So she could be OK,” he says.
Campbell says she is renting a property within Aston’s electoral boundaries for the campaign and has pledged to move to the area permanently with her family – husband, James, who is a political editor for News Corp, and their three children – should she win on Saturday.
She is also quick to point out Doyle also lives outside Aston.
Doyle says she has a mortgage on a home in Mitcham, the adjacent electorate of Deakin, where she has lived for three decades.
“It’s 10 minutes down the road,” she says.
A close contest
While a Labor win remains unlikely – no government has won a seat from an opposition at a federal byelection since 1920 – both parties are describing the contest as “close”.
Dutton on Tuesday said the poll would be “tight” and made a swipe at the Victorian Liberals, whose leader, John Pesutto, staged a failed attempt to expel MP Moira Deeming over her involvement in an anti-transgender rally attended by neo-Nazis.
Several federal Liberals MPs have feared the saga, which dragged over two weeks, has been a distraction for the party and could hurt its chances come Saturday.
Asked whether she backed Pesutto’s motion, or if it had been a distraction for the byelection, Campbell batted away questions.
“It’s a matter for the state Victorian parliamentary party how it runs its processes. My focus is really on what matters here,” she says. “Voters are just not raising that with me.”
There are many locals, however, who are either unaware there is a byelection on or frustrated they are heading back to the polls for the third time in a year. The electoral commission on Tuesday raised concerns about a low turnout at early voting centres.
Yudi, from Knoxfield, voted early but cannot remember which candidate she picked – just that it was the one “on the top” of the ballot paper.
“I suppose they’re pretty much the same anyway.”
