‘Doing it my way’: The battle is on in Daniel Andrews’ old seat of Mulgrave

The suburb of Noble Park, 25 kilometres south-east of Melbourne's CBD, rarely features in glossy real estate brochures or in Melbourne tourism campaigns.

Wedged between Springvale and Dandenong, it’s thought to have been named after Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist and inventor of dynamite, after explosives were tested in the area in the early 1900s.

Eden Foster is seeking to replace Daniel Andrews as Mulgrave’s MP.Credit: Joe Armao

But for Eden Foster, who is seeking to replace former premier Daniel Andrews after he stood down from state parliament, it’s home.

“I really haven’t left this area,” she told The Sunday Age. “Once you’re here you are always attached to it.”

Next Saturday, more than 40,000 residents from Noble Park, Dandenong North, Springvale and Wheelers Hill will cast a ballot to decide who will replace Andrews, who represented the seat for more the 20 years before resigning in September.

Working-class electorates, like Mulgrave, have traditionally been safe Labor territory – making Foster, a clinical psychologist and the mayor of Greater Dandenong Council, the bookies’ favourite to retain the seat for Labor.

But at recent elections, Labor’s support in its tribal heartlands has started to wane.

Foster, 42, sees this as a local incarnation of the Trump effect, where the conservative former US president managed to break the Democratic “blue wall” by harnessing support in former manufacturing hubs by targeting voters disillusioned by politics.

Mayor Eden Foster was endorsed as Labor’s candidate for the seat of Mulgrave.

“I think it has really sort of filtered down this way on the outer suburbs,” Foster said.

“That access to information, whether fact or not, is there, and if you fall into that space and find information that feeds a particular narrative, you tend to only look for that information sometimes and not challenge your own thinking”.

To counter this, Foster is determined to be honest and authentic, listening to people’s concerns.

“Someone local, like me, is experiencing the same things that everyone here is experiencing. Being relatable is important.”

You can’t help thinking that if Labor officials set out to design a quintessential candidate for Mulgrave, Foster’s resume would set the brief.

A psychologist who worked as a drug and alcohol counsellor at the local Centrelink office, Foster has barely lived away from the area in the past four decades and purchased a home in Noble Park in 2010. She ticks all the requisite boxes.

Daniel Andrews stood down as premier in September.Credit: Getty

Born in 1981, Foster was raised by her Indian-born mother Patsy in a unit in Springvale and went to school in Noble Park.

As a single working mum, Patsy was unable to do overtime, racing home from her job as a stenographer at State Trustees to meet her young daughter, who was dropped off by childcare workers every night.

“She would come in early and leave early, she would do her hours, but she couldn’t stay back and do overtime, and an ultimatum was given,” Foster said. “She was effectively made to choose between her family and her job.”

Foster recalls helping her mum juggle the budget during primary school so that they could remain in their unit and pay the mortgage with Patsy’s single-parent pension.

Independent candidate Ian Cook is again contesting the Mulgrave byelection.Credit: Eamon Gallagher

A practising Catholic, Foster attended St Anthony’s Primary School in Noble Park and founded her local Vinnies Youth branch. She still goes to church there each Sunday. After graduating from Heatherhill Secondary College (now Keysborough Secondary College), Foster went on to study psychology at university and is passionate about mental health support.

In 2019 she joined the Labor Party, and, as a first-term councillor, was elected as Greater Dandenong mayor in 2022.

Labor holds the seat by a strong margin of 10 per cent but faces competition from the Liberal Party, as well as business owner Ian Cook, who ran as an independent candidate on an anti-corruption campaign at last year’s state election.

Cook has been locked in a four-year civil dispute with the Department of Health and Human Services, claiming health authorities planted a slug on his company’s premises.

Preferences from Cook – who received 18 per cent of the vote and finished second on primaries last November – will be crucial to the result and could aid the Liberal Party, which wants to build on swings in suburban Melbourne and target Labor strongholds.

The Liberal candidate is 38-year-old political advisor Courtney Mann, who believes seats like Mulgrave are key to the Coalition’s future.

The father-of-two no longer lives in Mulgrave but was raised in the north of the electorate in Wheelers Hill, where he worked in the local bakery after school.

“It’s the first time the party has fronted up properly in Mulgrave,” Mann told The Sunday Age at an early polling booth during the week.

“We have to take the attitude that these can be our seats. These communities need a strong alternative.

“I am getting a sense that there is a mood for change, a mood for people wanting an alternative.”

One year on from the state election, the temperature at early voting centres in Noble Park and Mulgrave has dropped compared to the heated 2022 campaign, when Cook’s high-profile bid attracted a small army of volunteers from across the state motivated to remove Andrews.

The chaos of last year’s campaign kept Andrews away from local booths. This time he has again stayed away from the local campaign, but penned a letter of support backing Foster.

Foster said Andrews has always been “friendly and supportive”, but neither she nor the former premier has had a “chance to reach out” during the byelection.

“If I am the member for Mulgrave it’s about doing it in my own way,” she said.

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