Amelia Hamer’s task of winning back Kooyong for the Liberals

The Liberal Party’s candidate for Kooyong believes listening to the electorate and providing solutions for the housing crisis are key to the next election.

Amelia Hamer, the Liberal candidate for the seat of Kooyong, with ‘secret weapon’ Juno at Central Gardens, Hawthorn. Picture: Alex Coppel

Oxford-educated Amelia Hamer is a combat sport competitor and former soprano charged with winning back the heartland Liberal seat of Kooyong where, she says, the party needs to listen more closely to voters, offer clear alternatives on the vexed issue of housing affordability, and find ways to appeal to younger voters.

At 31, Ms Hamer is a daughter of the Victorian Liberal establishment, the grand niece of former premier Dick Hamer, and is using her job as a finance lecturer at Swinburne University to further embed herself in a seat she has been tied to for pretty much her entire life.

Speculation that former Liberal member Josh Frydenberg may attempt to run again in the seat was formally cremated this week, and Ms Hamer now has a clear run to try to defeat teal Monique Ryan.

The Liberal Party will highlight Ms Hamer’s relative youth in the inner southeastern Melbourne seat, which has witnessed a sharp rise in young voters and which is about to swallow large parts of the nearby electorate of Higgins, once held by crash-through former treasurer Peter Costello.

Ms Hamer, like the previous Liberal candidate, is an over-achiever. She studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University, made the podium at the 2023 Pan Pacific Jiu Jitsu Championship, sang with the City of London Choir and is using her black cocker spaniel, Juno, as a secret campaigning weapon.

For the majority of her life, Ms Hamer has lived in the seat, which will include some of the richest real estate in Australia if the suburbs of Toorak, Armadale and Malvern are included, as is likely.

As a renter, she wants people to be given a greater opportunity to buy into the housing they want.

She also has detected the need for the Liberal Party to listen more intently to what voters are telling it. That means, she says, the need to change to embrace the future.

“So we’re in a position where we need to make sure that our approach is not just business as usual,” Ms Hamer said.

“It’s offering something different, it’s offering something that addresses the challenge of the time and that we’re listening. They (voters) didn’t feel like the Liberals were listening. Whether that’s fair or not, that’s a different story.’’

Among Ms Hamer’s backers are former deputy federal leader Julie Bishop, former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett and Liberal frontbencher Jane Hume.

Kooyong MP Monique Ryan. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The internal consensus is that Ms Hamer is leadership material, always the criteria for preselection in the best of the Liberal seats.

The problem is that now the teals hold the seat, Kooyong is just another number Peter Dutton must win back to have any chance of beating Labor. One key issue is housing because of the surging lack of affordability in Kooyong, like just about every other seat.

Around the suburb of Hawthorn, which is at the heart of the old Kooyong, there is a high percentage of renters, particularly in the medium-density housing along the railway line to Belgrave.

Ms Hamer’s view is that families often should have the opportunity of getting more access to larger housing stock.

“By and large, Australians don’t want to raise families in apartments,’’ she says, citing the Great Australian Dream.

She says the inner city works for young professionals and downsizers but a strategy needs to be in place that deals with issues such as planning and proper fast rail to the regional centres such as Geelong.

“So we can’t say, ‘well, you’re going to gave to raise a family in an apartment’ because that’s not the quality of life that people expect, right?’’

Ms Hamer is backing greater use of suburban infill housing, where better use is made of available space and more dwellings can be built, and also a more sophisticated approach to planning that creates opportunities for renters.

“Long term, (we need to) get people to own their own house,’’ she argues.

Whether that is in well-heeled Kooyong is another question.