Greens ditched in key seat
The Greens' stance triggered a Jewish-led campaign for voters to preference them last.
Traditional Labor voters chose Liberal candidate Rachel Westaway over Greens candidate Angelica Di Camillo, ending the Greens’ almost 11-year hold on the Victorian state seat of Prahran in Saturday’s by-election – an outcome that will have federal repercussions.
Anticipating it had no chance of victory, Labor did not field a candidate in the by-election, which independent candidate Tony Lupton, a past Labor MP in the seat, sees as a litmus test for Greens’ and Labor’s federal election prospects.
“People have woken up to what the Greens have become,” said Lupton, who has been scathing of the party’s consistently anti-Israel policies and pronouncements.
The Greens’ stance triggered a Jewish-led campaign for voters to preference them last.
Lupton, a former Labor MP for Prahran, whose partner and children are Jewish, drew an anticipated 15 per cent of the vote. He told The AJN that disenchanted ALP voters, many who voted for him in the years 2002-10, switched to the Liberals last Saturday.
“Effectively they are Labor voters who may have swung over to the Greens at some point in time but have now woken up to the extremism that the Greens are involved in.”
Lupton’s how-to-vote material preferenced the Liberals, sinking the Greens’ preferences share from 80 per cent in 2022 to 44 per cent. And he added, “I depressed the Greens’ primary vote.”
He noted that if voting trends are similar at this year’s federal election, Greens leader Adam Bandt may be in trouble in his seat of Melbourne.
“The Greens vote was not what [the party] expected it to be in the part of Prahran that is now in the new redistributed seat of Melbourne,” he said, noting the federal seat has expanded southwards and there are “a lot of people there who don’t have the kind of attitudes that are conducive to voting in large numbers for the Greens”.
And with the Allan government’s struggle to retain blue-ribbon Werribee, the weekend’s by-elections did not bode well for Labor federally and at state level.
Lupton endured “shameless antisemitism” during his campaign — a verbal assault about his family and the defacing of an election poster with a sticker of a toilet and the word “Shitrael”. He said antisemites have been “emboldened” and the Greens “are the main culprits”.
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