Teresa Gambaro promises to be comeback queen of the election

TERESA Gambaro has come a long way from being the uni student who waited on tables at the family's signature seafood restaurant in Brisbane

TERESA Gambaro has come a long way from being the uni student who waited on tables at the family's signature seafood restaurant in Brisbane

She promises to be the comeback queen of the election, and if things continue to fall her way in the seat of Brisbane, she might just be the making of Tony Abbott, prime minister. Talk about a reversal of fortune.

Ms Gambaro, 51, was one of the Howard heroes who won seats in federal parliament in 1996, putting John Howard on the road to becoming Australia's second-longest-serving prime minister.

Then along came Kevin07, and out went Ms Gambaro in her seat of Petrie in Brisbane's northeast. The long list of Liberal losers in 2007 was headed by Mr Howard himself, who lost his seat of Bennelong in Sydney to Labor's Maxine McKew, who in turn lost last Saturday in one of those cruel levellers of Australian politics.

Ms Gambaro's seemingly improbable comeback in Brisbane, held by Labor veteran Arch Bevis by a reasonably comfortable 3.8 per cent, is a turnup result in an election that is quite astonishing overall.

As counting continued yesterday, Ms Gambaro was 839 votes clear of Mr Bevis and hotting up as the favourite to take the seat.

It has been some week. Stricken with a cold, she had to endure a seesawing count that seemed to shift one way or another each time another batch of votes went through.

The margins are razor thin. The 1200 absentee votes processed yesterday split Ms Gambaro's way by just nine, while recounting then added another 90 votes to her ledger.

If she does defeat Mr Bevis -- who was one of only two Labor MPs in Queensland to survive the 1996 Howard onslaught -- Ms Gambaro should give Mr Abbott the 73rd seat he needs to do a deal with the regional independents and form minority government.

For now, however, she doesn't want to get ahead of herself. Uncle Michael's champagne at Gambaro's in Caxton Street is firmly locked away. "I'm taking it a day at a time -- an hour at a time, actually," she said. "It's nice to be ahead. It's where we want to be."

When the first round of counting closed on election night, Ms Gambaro had opened a seemingly winning lead of more than 800 votes on the Labor man.

In subsequent counting, however, Mr Bevis clawed to within 360 votes of her, before she kicked away again. Labor, while not giving away the seat, admits the odds are against it.

The Gambaro name certainly didn't hurt her in a part of town she grew up in, and where the family's restaurants and long-established seafood business command a hearty following.

If Ms Gambaro returns to parliament, she said she would push to improve roads and infrastructure in her inner-city seat, running from the riverside precinct of New Farm through to the leafy streets of Ashgrove.