Achi news desk-
The Liberals expect their Cook candidate Simon Kennedy to have an easy time keeping Scott Morrison’s old blue ribbon seat when voters there go to a by-election on April 13.
Labor declined to run a candidate, meaning Kennedy will face five mostly unknown rivals.
No party has contested Cook from the Liberals since the party first won the seat in 1975.
Morrison, who was prime minister from 2018 until the Coalition’s defeat in 2022, announced his retirement from politics earlier this year. He remains more popular in his local area than he was in the rest of the country, say local Liberals (even if his now-postponed Shire Sutherland farewell dinner had a less-than-ideal number of RSVPs) and he has already been out stumped for Kennedy on at least one occasion.
However, Morrison is understood to have taken a hands-on approach to the by-election, refusing to back any one candidate in the inter-party pre-selection battle. Perhaps it was wise to stay out of it: parachuting Kennedy into the safe seat has caused some controversy in the local branch.
“Kenya will have an easy run this time,” said a local Liberal source Cricket.
As Morrison did when he first stood in the seat in 2007, Kennedy will move to Sutherlandshire as part of his by-election bid. He lives in Maroubra and has previously campaigned for the seat of Bennelong on Sydney’s north shore in a contest won by Labor in 2022.
In the 2022 federal election, Labor candidate for Chef Simon Earle managed a 6.6% swing towards the party, but the Liberal margin was still a comfortable 12.4%.
The local newspaper the Sutherland County Leader he noted that only two of the confirmed candidates were registered as living in Sutherlandshire: Natasha Brown of the Animal Justice Party, who lives in Yarrawarrah; and Greens candidate Martin Moore, who lives in Cronulla.
“I’ve been out every day this week and what I hear is the cost of living,” Kennedy told the newspaper.
“For me, the job now is to show people my work ethic and I’m willing to listen to them and fight for them on the cost of living.”
The other candidates on the ballot will be:
- Vinay Kolhatkar, Liberal (Sans Souci)
- Roger Woodward, independent (Westleigh)
- Simone Francis Gagatam, Sustainable Australia Party (Oatley)
Brown has said she is running to “give animals the political voice they so desperately need”.
Kolhatkar was described by his party as “a passionate advocate of universal human freedom and its profound effect on happiness, [prosperity] and morality”.
Woodward says on a website linked to his campaign that, if elected, he would try to reduce taxes and make sure that annuity does not go through any retroactive changes.
Gatatam’s party said it would aim to “prevent corruption, prevent overdevelopment, and stabilize [the] population … mainly by returning annual permanent immigration to normal”.
