Why losing Bradfield would be salt in the wound of the Liberal Party

When the postmortems, recriminations and soul-searching ends, there will be one brutal reality for the Liberals in NSW. If the party fails to hold on to Sydney’s bluest of blue seats, there will not be a single moderate Liberal from NSW in the House of Representatives. The loss of Bradfield would represent one of the Liberals’ worst defeats in a horror election for the conservative side of politics.

Nicolette Boele and Gisele Kapterian are battling for Bradfield.Credit: Michael Howard

The count for Bradfield has been a rollercoaster ride for the Liberal candidate Gisele Kapterian and her opponent, teal hopeful Nicolette Boele. The north shore seat was called for Boele on election night by the ABC and Nine, only for Kapterian to forge ahead on the back of postal votes to be in a winnable position several days later. The Liberals’ federal director Andrew Hirst was comfortable enough with her hold on the count that Kapterian travelled to Canberra to vote for a new leader.

Then, as the final votes trickled in, the Liberals were caught off guard. While postal votes usually favour the Coalition, a batch of international ballots swung heavily in Boele’s favour. There was some conjecture that it was Australia House in London, the largest overseas polling booth, that hurt Kapterian. When provisional counting ended on Monday, Boele was in front by 39 votes. Preferences are being distributed and if fewer than 100 votes still separate them, there will be a recount.

The Liberals range from being despondent to despairing over Bradfield. While some are clinging on to hope, most are expecting the worst. The votes have been through three rounds of counting, a fourth with preferences. The chance of uncovering 40 votes to knock off Boele’s lead is slim at best. Bradfield faces being the final nail in the coffin for a party that turned its back on the city to win suburbia. It walked away with neither.

Kapterian should be the future of the Liberal Party. She is smart, highly educated and a polished performer. Instead, the 43-year-old former international trade lawyer is facing an impossible choice: place her lucrative corporate career on hold and contest Bradfield (or another seat) in three years, or leave her political hopes behind. After a nail-biting two weeks, with another week to go, it would be hard to see why she would do it all again for a party facing years in the political wilderness.

Kapterian was the moderates’ pick for the seat of Bennelong in 2022 when former tennis star John Alexander retired from federal politics. She was beaten in the preselection by the Right’s Simon Kennedy who failed to hold the seat for the Liberals. Kennedy has since replaced Scott Morrison in the far safer seat of Cook, in Sydney’s south. Next, she was chosen for North Sydney. That seat was abolished in the boundary redistribution.

Bradfield is Kapterian’s natural habitat. She was born and bred in the electorate, and still lives there after an impressive overseas career. She had the backing of prominent fellow Armenians Gladys Berejiklian and Joe Hockey, and entered the political fray without any damaging baggage. If Kapterian cannot hold Bradfield for the Liberals, who can?

Boele, a clean-energy finance executive, had a significant campaigning head start on Kapterian. She campaigned for three years after only narrowly missing out on claiming Bradfield from Liberal MP Paul Fletcher in 2022. Her donors helped fund a permanent campaign office in Gordon for three years. Kapterian, meanwhile, became the candidate with only five months to spare. There is a strong view among several senior Liberals in Bradfield that Fletcher’s last-minute retirement left Kapterian with an impossible task.

Despite the closeness of the vote, Liberal strategists working closely on the Bradfield campaign said it really should have been a much more comfortable win for Boele. If it were not for Boele making an inappropriate sexualised joke at her local hair salon, Kapterian would have conceded on election night, a bewildered senior Liberal from Bradfield says. Boele was forced to apologise for telling a 19-year-old employee that her hair washing was “amazing, and I didn’t even have sex with you”. It was not a fatal mistake but it hurt Boele, and the Liberals capitalised.

The party plastered quotes from newspaper stories about the incident on posters as well as trucks that drove around Bradfield, hoping to sway enough voters from Boele. It was effective and the vote has gone down to the wire.

But it is unlikely that a crude joke will be enough to save Bradfield for the Liberals. The voters had a choice and they did not reject Kapterian. Rather, they turned their back on the party they have supported since 1949 and in the process will leave the NSW moderates a threatened species in federal parliament and extinct in the lower house.

Alexandra Smith is the state political editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.

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