The Fadden byelection’s main candidates said voters were focused on cost of living issues before polls closed in their battle to replace the former Coalition minister Stuart Robert.
The Liberal National party’s Cameron Caldwell, who was the favourite to win the byelection in the northern Gold Coast electorate, cast his vote with his wife, Lauren, at a polling booth on Saturday morning.
Asked if Robert’s involvement in the robodebt scandal that engulfed the previous Coalition government was affecting voters, he said they had other things on their minds, such as cost of living and crime.
“Those are issues that are really starting to bite in their households and it’s whether people can put food on the table and keep the lights switched on,” Caldwell told Sky News. “That’s really what’s on their mind as they walk into the polling booth today.”
Under Robert, whose resignation from parliament in May triggered the byelection, the LNP held the seat with a margin of 10.6% after the 2022 national poll.
Robodebt is the name given to an unlawful debt recovery program that saddled almost 500,000 welfare recipients with hundreds of millions of dollars in false Centrelink debts between 2015 and 2019.
A royal commission investigation into the scheme released earlier this month laid the blame at the feet of senior public servants and Coalition ministers including Robert, Scott Morrison, Alan Tudge and Christian Porter.
Labor has tried to use this to bolster its candidate for Fadden, Letitia Del Fabbro, who said any swing to her would be a blow to the Coalition in one of their safest seats.
Del Fabbro, who is running for the seat for the second time, was credited with whittling down Robert’s margin from 11.2% at the 2019 federal election to 10.6%.
“Any swing against the LNP would be a loss to them,” the nurse educator told reporters on Saturday as she cast her vote.
But she agreed cost of living issues had dominated the campaign, although there was also interest in the robodebt scandal and the Indigenous voice to parliament.
“People have definitely been talking to us about the voice and they’re interested in hearing about the voice when we’re knocking on doors and making phone calls, but it’s really the cost of living issues that people are mostly interested in,” she said.
The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, said the average swing against a government in a byelection was about 4% so anything less would be embarrassing for the opposition leader, Peter Dutton.
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“Our expectations are tempered, but we couldn’t have put forward a better candidate and we’re focused on the issues that matter to people here,” he said after handing out how-to-vote cards.
Labor has won Fadden only once – in 1983 under the election of the Hawke government.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, was not expecting a result like the historic Aston byelection, which Labor claimed in April.
“That was an extraordinary result, the first time in 100 years that the government have won a seat off the opposition,” he said on Friday.
A total of 13 candidates were running in Fadden including from the Greens, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and the Australian Democrats.
Robert served as the veterans’ affairs, national disability insurance scheme and government services ministers under the Turnbull and Morrison governments.
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