Ex-Labor MP targets Greens in Prahran, boosting Liberal hopeful’s bid

The former Labor MP for the seat of Prahran is urging voters to “evict the Greens”, boosting the chances of a Liberal victory and frustrating his old party – which doesn’t want to gift new Opposition Leader Brad Battin a crucial win.

Some ALP members are also campaigning for independent Tony Lupton against the wishes of party headquarters, after the former Prahran MP (from 2002 to 2010) cut up his party membership and stood as an independent to protest Labor’s decision to sit out the race.

Former Labor member for Prahran Tony Lupton, running as an independent in the February 8 byelection.Credit: Justin McManus

Lupton’s how-to-vote card for this coming Saturday’s Prahran byelection also includes a personal endorsement from former premier Steve Bracks, who led the state with Lupton in his party room.

“He has experience as the member for Prahran, the ability to work with the government to get results for Prahran and the independence to always put Prahran first,” Bracks wrote of Lupton.

Bracks told The Age he supported Lupton as the former local Labor MP. He said he was not aware of Lupton’s preferences but would not be recommending voters put the Liberals high on their ballots.

Lupton hopes to win the seat for himself but said his secondary aim was a Greens loss, arguing the minor party had become an extremist group that fostered social division and antisemitism.

Rachel Westaway, the Liberal candidate for Prahran.Credit: Penny Stephens

“It’s a referendum on the Greens,” Lupton said. He has also accused Labor of lacking leadership and moral clarity on antisemitism.

He’s gone as far as attending a campaign meeting with volunteers backed by right-wing lobby group Advance, which has narrowed its target on the Greens but has previously campaigned against federal Labor in the Dunkley byelection and helped defeat the Voice referendum.

“The Greens lit the political fuse on division and antisemitism in this country. Maybe The Age should go report on that,” a spokesman for Advance said. The spokesman said it did not organise the meeting but confirmed volunteers met with Lupton as part of the campaign to put the Greens last.

Lupton said he was only worried about Prahran, not Advance’s other work, and that anyone trying to defeat the Greens was in his view doing a community service.

Environmental engineer Angelica Di Camillo, 26, is running for the Greens.Credit: Penny Stephens

He has swapped preferences with Liberal candidate Rachel Westaway, giving her a genuine chance of flipping the Greens seat that has fallen to preferences at every poll since the turn of the century.

Elements of his campaign, and the involvement of Labor members, have frustrated some within the party.

The byelection was triggered after the sitting Greens MP for the seat, Sam Hibbins, quit parliament following an affair with a staffer.

Labor hard heads would prefer to see the Greens hold the seat than a Liberal victory, said two sources not authorised to speak publicly, to avoid putting momentum behind Battin as statewide polls turn against Premier Jacinta Allan.

Labor members of the Caulfield branch also received a request for support from independent Tony Lupton’s campaign.

The sources said headquarters had asked the Prahran branch to respect the party’s decision to sit the byelection out and that the party told members not to co-ordinate or promote another campaign.

Others in the party were already incensed at Labor’s decision not to contest the byelection, leaving local supporters disenfranchised.

Lupton’s campaign manager, Madeleine Sanders, is from Labor’s Prahran branch and last month emailed members seeking volunteers and donations to “evict the Greens”. She attached a letter from Lupton to party members.

“While I’m now an independent, you will all know that I’m true to those traditional Labor values that are so important,” Lupton wrote in the letter, obtained by The Age. “I’m asking you to put your hand up too by assisting this campaign to take Prahran off the Greens.”

The email was also sent to Caulfield branch members with the party logo.

Sanders disputed that members had been told not to get involved in Lupton’s campaign, and said she’d been advised it was all right, but otherwise declined to comment.

It’s not clear any party rules have been broken in any case, given there is no Labor candidate to be disloyal to.

A Labor member from another branch that received information from Lupton’s campaign said it was a betrayal and disloyal given he had left the party, and particularly since he had given his preferences to the Liberal Party.

“Why would we be interested in hearing about his campaign?” they said. “He’s left the party and got nothing to do with Labor any more.”

Another Labor figure said Lupton’s campaign could bring the Liberals one seat closer to state government and that it beggared belief that people within the party would try to mobilise members to back him.

As the frontrunner in Saturday’s by-election, Greens candidate Angelica Di Camillo is the main target of negative campaigning.

The Liberal Party leafleted homes in Prahran — which also includes St Kilda, St Kilda East, Windsor and parts of Southbank and South Melbourne — to claim she just wants any seat in parliament.

“4 elections, 4 different seats, in 2 years,” the leaflet says. “Focused on herself. Not focused on you.”

Di Camillo in 2022 contested the state seat of Rowville, where she grew up, and then the byelection in the overlapping federal seat of Aston in 2023. She was preselected for Higgins at this year’s federal election before the Australian Electoral Commission abolished the seat and is now contesting the overlapping state seat of Prahran, where she lives in St Kilda East.

Di Camillo, a 26-year-old environmental engineer, said the leaflet was disappointing but that “negative politics” turned voters off.

The Liberal Party has leafleted Prahran accusing Angelica Di Camillo from the Greens of being a serial candidate elsewhere.

Westaway has herself contested two elections for the Liberal Party, for the NSW upper house and Sydney City Council, though this goes back to the early 2000s.

The 55-year-old, who was until recently a senior member of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and is widely regarded as a strong candidate, has since lived locally for two decades and is embedded in the community.

Westaway, describing herself as economically conservative but socially progressive, said she joined the Liberal Party 25 years ago when she felt politicians were stoking racism in Australia.

She said crime in Prahran and the cost of living would determine the result in the byelection, as well as vacancy rates along the Chapel Street shopping strip.

Di Camillo, Westaway and Lupton have all called on the state government to save the Windsor Community Children’s Centre.

Eleven candidates are contesting the February 8 byelection, including independents Janine Hendry, Buzz Billman, Nathan Chisholm and Alan Menadue; Family First’s Geneviève Gilbert; Libertarian Mark Dessau; Sustainable Australia’s Dennis Bilic; and Faith Fuhrer from the Animal Justice Party.

Prahran is always an outlier as a genuine three-cornered race. And it’s a transient community; about 57 per cent of residents rented at the 2021 census, double the state average, meaning many voters may have moved on since the 2022 state election.

Without Labor, the byelection is even more difficult to read.

Di Camillo is defending a Greens primary vote of 36.4 per cent. She will need disenfranchised Labor voters to ignore Lupton’s recommended preferences if the minor party is to hold on.

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