Bennelong: kids caught in campaign crossfire as Keneally loses cool

Kristina Keneally was showing the strain of the battle for Bennelong yesterday, saying the PM had ‘nothing to offer’.

Kristina Keneally and Bill Shorten at Ryde Hospital. Picture: AAP

Kristina Keneally was showing the strain of the battle for Bennelong yesterday, labelling Malcolm Turnbull a “fool” who had “nothing to offer” and chiding a former ­media colleague who questioned Labor’s “Mediscare” attack. But as the by-election race entered its final days, it seemed Ms Keneally’s team was generating its own share of anger among the residents of the northwestern Sydney electorate who have endured weeks of saturation political campaigning.

Furious parents at Melrose Park Public School in the electorate this week complained to police and Ryde Council when Keneally campaigners “accosted” children with pamphlets as they walked into school on Tuesday.

Disgruntled parents said the volunteer campaigners, had “gone too far” and shown “a lack of ­integrity and ethics” by parking a billboard criticising the Prime Minister outside the primary school.

Jackie Hadley, who was picking up her granddaughter Laeticia, 11, from the school, said campaigning had been “much more aggressive than usual”.

“I’ve been receiving four calls a day from each party with recorded messages telling me how to vote,” she said. Laeticia said “it was just wrong,” describing the volunteers’ campaigning outside her school as an “invasion of privacy”. Another parent, Deborah Riley, said that in her 40 years living in the area, she had never seen an ­election campaign like this. “It’s been so intense. They’re manipulating children as part of their ­campaign ... it’s really dirty tactics. Anyone who is under 18 and can’t vote should not be approached.”

School principal Clare Kristensen said Ms Keneally’s volunteers had a “legal right to be camped outside the school” and “it was the parents who were ­aggressive”.

Ryde Council confirmed it had received 11 formal complaints about by-election campaigning.

Labor and Liberal acknowledge the importance of winning Bennelong, with the government poised to lose its one-seat majority in the lower house if its candidate, John Alexander, is defeated.

The Liberal Party is spending about $1 million on its Bennelong campaign and has conducted four electorate-wide direct mailouts worth $110,000 each. Labor sources claim they have spent far less than the Liberals but a Liberal source said when the union and Labor spending on the campaign were combined, they were spending “bucketloads more than us”.

Every campaigning tool has been used. John Howard ­robocalled voters on Tuesday night and both sides have bombarded letter boxes with flyers in both ­English and Chinese in an electorate where more than 20 per cent of voters are of Asian heritage.

Mr Turnbull said it was a “very tight contest”, arguing that a loss for Mr Alexander would mean Bill Shorten would be “one step closer to being prime minister” and unleash a “catastrophe for Australia”.

But despite enlisting the help of Mr Turnbull on the hustings, the PM is nowhere to be seen on his party’s how-to-vote cards, which are written in both English and Chinese and have been widely ­distributed.

The ACTU will today launch an online “cost-of-living tool”, which claims to calculate rises in housing, electricity, gas, healthcare, education and childcare costs. The tool asks users: “Can you afford another term of Liberal government … Send Turnbull a message on 16 December. Vote the Liberals out in Bennelong.”

With internal polling suggesting the Liberals are ahead in the race but published polling indicating a dead heat, Ms Keneally and Mr Alexander were both looking for knockout blows yesterday.

Labor yesterday seized on the Liberals’ use of a website, kristinakeneally.com, which attacks the Labor candidate’s record. “Today we see a Prime Minister who is making a fool out of himself,” Ms Keneally said yesterday flanked by Mr Shorten at Ryde Hospital.

“Turnbull has stood up in front of the nation and admitted that he bought a website in my name for the purpose of smearing me, of spreading lies. Malcolm Turnbull’s website is wrong in his facts and he’s just wrong for the country. He’s acting like a fool, he doesn’t have anything to offer the people of Australia.”

She chided her Sky News colleague Caroline Marcus when asked to clarify her much challenged story about being turned away from a Medicare office and later tweeted that Mr Turnbull was “embarrassing himself”.

Mr Shorten echoed these sentiments, accusing Mr Turnbull of being “up himself” and called his Coalition colleagues the most “grumpy group of people”.

Speaking at a defence event in Macquarie Park yesterday, Mr Turnbull admitted his party had purchased a domain name — ­kristinakeneally.com — which contains a series of attacks on her record as premier and ties to disgraced powerbroker Eddie Obeid.

Additional reporting: Andrew Clennell