The Victorian opposition will face voters for the first time since John Pesutto took on the leadership, with a byelection to be held following the resignation of the long-serving Liberal MP Ryan Smith.
Several potential candidates have been floated since Smith announced on Wednesday he would step down from parliament on 7 July, triggering the byelection in his electorate of Warrandyte in Melbourne’s north-east.
They include the Liberal party’s federal vice-president, Caroline Inge, Manningham councillor Michelle Kleinert, KPMG director Sarah Overton and former Box Hill candidate Nicole Werner.
Inge, who previously worked as an electorate officer for the former Liberal MP Tim Smith, confirmed she was “weighing up” a tilt for the seat which the party currently holds with a 4.2% margin.
“We need strong, experienced people – preferably women – in the Liberal party to hold the Andrews Labor government to account,” she told Guardian Australia.
Her former boss, who resigned as the member for Kew after a drunken car crash in 2021 and has been living in London since last year, told the Age he was also considering running for preselection. He could not be reached for comment.
The upper house MP Matt Bach has also been linked to the seat, which overlaps with the north-eastern metropolitan region he represents. However, he denied a possible switch to the lower house on Wednesday.
“I’m very happy to do what I’m doing,” he told reporters.
A senior Liberal source said Ranjana Srivastava, an oncologist, who is also a columnist for Guardian Australia, had “strong internal support”.
“She ticks all the boxes: she’s from the area, she’s a professional woman, she knows what she’s talking about when it comes to one of the biggest state issues – health,” they said.
Srivastava most recently ran for preselection for the party in the federal seat of Aston with the endorsement of the former health minister, Greg Hunt, and the former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett, but lost to Roshena Campbell.
Campbell then went on to lose the Aston byelection. It was the first win by a government from an opposition at a byelection in more than 100 years.
Kos Samaras, a former Victorian Labor assistant state secretary who is now a pollster with RedBridge Group, said Warrandyte was a “safe seat on paper” but had a similar demographic profile to Aston.
“There is a large Chinese population in the Doncaster part of the electorate in the west, where Labor did really well at the last election and in the north, the combined Labor and Greens vote has been steadily increasing over several elections,” Samaras said.
“The Liberals hope is to hold down their vote in the southern part of the electorate and make some inroads in those other two sections.
“The problem in Aston is they made no inroads – they actually lost support in the months between the May federal election and this year’s byelection.”
A Liberal MP, however, maintained the party had “learnt its lesson since Aston” and would be sure to preselect a local candidate who reflects the community. They said due to the size of the local branch, members from the wider party would be called in to take part in the preselection.
Smith, a former government minister and critic of Pesutto, suggested party negativity had played a part in his decision to resign. He did not inform Pesutto prior to releasing a statement.
Following the November election loss, Smith put his hand up to run for the Liberal leadership but pulled out of the race to support the Berwick MP Brad Battin, who lost to Pesutto by one vote.
Smith was then dumped from the Coalition’s frontbench and was one of the 11 Liberal MPs who voted against the motion to expel the upper house MP Moira Deeming from the party room.
It remains unclear whether Labor will contest the byelection, given the party has generally not run in byelections for Liberal seats. While there are hopes among members there could be another Aston-style upset, Labor MPs said the political climate was different at a state level.
“We’ve been in government for nine years, we have a commanding majority in the lower house so we don’t really need the seat,” one said.
“All it would do if we won is cause further humiliation for John Pesutto. If we didn’t win, and we had any sort of swing away from us, that would cost us more politically.”
Premier Daniel Andrews on Wednesday said it was a matter for the ALP to decide if it would contest the byelection.
The speaker will decide when the byelection will occur, though it is expected to be held between 5 August and 30 September.
