Gladys Liu could clinch Chisholm for Liberals, Julia Banks fails to unseat Greg Hunt
Liberals are cautiously optimistic they can hold turncoat Julia Banks’s old seat as her poll bid fails.
The Liberal Party is becoming cautiously optimistic it can hold the marginal seat of Chisholm, which would put a stake through the heart of its former member Julia Banks.
MORE : Federal Election 2019 Results
Ms Banks failed to oust Health Minister Greg Hunt in the Victorian seaside seat of Flinders and now, against the odds, the party has edged about 500 seats ahead of Labor in Chisholm.
Ms Banks vacated Chisholm after turning independent in the wake of Malcolm Turnbull’s dumping, leaving the Liberal Party with a last minute bid to retain the seat with a new candidate.
The current Liberal candidate in Chisholm, Gladys Liu, is a veteran party activist who will now face an anxious wait to determine whether pre-poll votes break sufficiently her way.
Chisholm is held by the Liberal Party with a margin of just 2.9 per cent. Labor’s candidate is Jennifer Yang. Both she and Ms Liu are Chinese-Australian.
Chisholm was one of three seats Labor had effectively locked in as gains in Victoria before the election.
Labor, despite perceptions of working towards a landslide in Victoria, consistently said it expected to win between two and four seats in the southern state.
It is on track to win Corangamite, held by Liberal Sarah Henderson, and believes it has won Dunkley. Both of these seats were rendered notionally Labor after the redistribution.
The Liberal Party trails in Corangamite by about 2000 votes, senior Liberals said.
There were big anti-Liberal swings in the inner seats of Kooyong and Higgins but the party has managed to keep both of those seats, despite the increasingly Left-leaning nature of inner Melbourne.
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