Comment

Monique Ryan
Inside the battle for Kooyong

It’s a truism that independents, once re-elected, are hard to shift. Parliamentary stalwarts such as Bob Katter and Andrew Wilkie are testament to the fact that once entrenched, independents tend to stay in office.

That being the case, political parties are wont to throw everything at first-termers, knowing this might be their only opportunity to win back the seat, other than at the independent’s retirement. It certainly felt as if the Liberal Party – and their associates – threw everything possible at the Victorian federal seat of Kooyong in the 2025 election campaign.

Kooyong was, between 1901 and 2022, held by seven men from conservative parties. Similarly, the neighbouring seat of Higgins was held by conservatives from its inception in 1949 until 2022. A large swathe of the (now abolished) Higgins electorate was added to Kooyong in the Australian Electoral Commission’s October 2024 redistribution. Many older voters in the leafy suburbs of Canterbury, Toorak and Armadale felt a sense of real shock at the loss of Liberal heartland at the last election – the loss of seats described by Simon Birmingham as having “defined the Liberal Party for generations”.

I’m told that half the Victorian Liberal Party’s membership lives in Kooyong. So, they were always going to go all-out to try to win it back. Their unsuccessful fight for that seat reflected many of the existential issues they face as a political party.

They preselected early. Several strong candidates put up their hand, including Rochelle Pattison, a long-term Liberal Party member who has held multiple leadership positions within the party and who has deep roots in the community. Pattison is trans – a former chair of Transgender Victoria. Instead, the party opted for Amelia Hamer.

Hamer was in some ways an ideal Liberal candidate: the great-niece of a well-respected long-term Victorian premier, young, Oxford-educated, and a protégé of Senator Jane Hume. She’d lived for some years in the United Kingdom and the United States, however, and possibly lacked established roots in the community other than through her family connections. She made the error of misrepresenting herself to the electorate as a Millennial renter sharing the struggles of aspirational home ownership and paying the bills, when she was in fact the owner of two properties and beneficiary of a large family trust. Given the subsequent closeness of this contest, this misstep may have cost her dearly.

The Liberals undertook massive fundraising. We’ll never know how much they spent, because parties aren’t required to release detailed electorate-specific data – but a conservative estimate would be at least $2 million. That’s to cover two offices, including the rent of a former Country Road premises in Camberwell (at more than $35,000 a month), overhead signage on prominent intersections, hundreds of oversized real-estate-like signs, mobile trucks and a torrent of attack ads and flyers.

The Liberals’ negative ad campaign, “Teals Revealed”, was rolled out in electorates held by the community independents. In Kooyong, the six Teals Revealed pamphlets and flyers distributed to all households over a six-month period contained inaccurate and deliberately misleading claims about my policies and actions as the member for Kooyong.

The Liberals also brought in their friends. Australians for Prosperity – a coal-lobby funded group fronted by former Liberal MP Jason Falinski – was advertising on massive billboards in the electorate by late 2024, claiming I would raise taxes and the cost of family bills.

In the weeks after the election was called, the Liberal presence in the electorate increased markedly. Rather than occasional small groups of four or five supporters accompanying Amelia Hamer at shopping centres or train stations, there were suddenly many apparently new volunteers – mostly young adults.

My group of more than 2000 volunteers has strong community roots. Everyone knows everyone in Kooyong. It became clear to us that some of these new Liberal representatives were drawn from the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, a religious group that discourages its members from voting. The female Brethren wore black tennis skirts and black leggings, while the men tended to chinos and R. M. Williams boots. They worked hard, with long shifts on pre-poll and at polling booths, and the somewhat unsettling encouragement to voters to “Make Australia Happy Again”. They appeared to know little about policy, or the electorate, but they were plentiful and enthusiastic, certainly in comparison with the older Liberal Party members.

Nine newspapers reported this week that the federal Liberal Party now faces criticism for providing the Plymouth Brethren with confidential voter information.

Kooyong had two pre-poll sites this year. The Kew site was a former post office, on a main road with little parking and limited disabled access. The area was flooded with signage – including my own – in the first few days. Voters described feeling claustrophobic as they queued on a narrow strip of pavement lined by A-frames, large Teals Revealed signs on stakes and volunteers brandishing flyers. Ultimately, the local council requested that all candidates decrease their signage to a single A-frame each. We complied – except the Liberals, who opted to take the Boroondara Council to court. Their legal victory on the penultimate day of pre-poll won them the right to unlimited signs on the final day – a Pyrrhic victory given the community was by then expressing frustration both at the petty ridiculousness of the case and at its cost to ratepayers.

In Malvern, access to parking for people with disabilities and for older, less mobile voters was difficult. The AEC was understaffed and struggled to manage the site safely. Voters tended to aggression at times, such that at least one reduced an AEC official to tears and another senior official quit after a couple of days.

Third-party groups made things at pre-poll, and at some booths on election day, much more tense. J-United, a community activist group partnered with Advance, mounted the occasionally belligerent “Repeal the Teal” campaign. According to its organisers, more than 100 volunteers were mobilised to “contaminate the Teal brand” in Kooyong and Goldstein. Among the misinformation disseminated by this group to voters were claims that I was a Manchurian candidate, funded to the tune of $1.8 million by the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman Xi Jinping.

Meanwhile, representatives for right-wing lobby group Advance – many of whom were paid international students – handed out anti-Greens attack flyers while wearing vests closely resembling those worn by AEC staff but labelled “Community Adviser”. Advertising trucks funded by the Liberals and right-wing blogger Morgan Jonas circled past pre-poll repeatedly over the course of each day, while alt-right commentators such as Avi Yemini badgered volunteers for hours at a time.

The AEC has limited powers at polling sites. If voters or representatives of candidates behave badly outside the AEC’s regulated six-metre perimeter, those issues must be referred to the police. Several of my volunteers reported menacing and aggressive behaviour by right-wing groups at pre-poll and polling booths to Victoria Police during the campaign’s last weeks. During the fortnight before the election, a Kooyong community asylum-seeker forum was disrupted by a far-right anti-lockdown activist; a Friends of the ABC forum was interrupted by neo-Nazis; and a senior neurosurgeon was filmed destroying one of my campaign signs and instructing watchers, “Remember to bury the body, boys.” After those incidents, I occasionally had Australian Federal Police support too.

Politics shouldn’t be like this in Australia. We have a vision of the democratic process being joyful – of blokes in budgie smugglers voting at Tamarama, of democracy sausages and primary school bake sales – but we’re on the edge, in some respects. We must do better to protect the process, to protect candidates and to protect voters – from disinformation, lies and negative campaigns that flood the zone in a desperate attempt to hold back the tide of change.

The first and most important change required to our electoral process is legislation to ensure truth in political advertising. It’s urgent and it’s necessary. We also have to look at how we run elections. How they’re funded. How candidates, their supporters and third parties are expected to behave. How can we keep voters safe? How can we ensure their faith in the process, and their belief in our systems?

Our democracy matters; it’s fragile and our communities care about it. The Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters reviews every federal election. It’ll have a job on its hands this time round.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 17, 2025 as "View from the Liberal Party’s sights".

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