Spare a thought for the voters of Eden-Monaro in the coming week. Having endured drought, catastrophic bushfires and savage fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic in an area reliant on tourism, they now find themselves facing a federal by-election on Saturday, July 4.
Key points:
- A by-election in Eden-Monaro, NSW, was called after the sitting Labor MP Mike Kelly stood down for health reasons
- Kristy McBain is the Labor candidate and Fiona Kotvojs is the Liberal candidate
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The Eden-Monaro by-election is on Saturday July 4.
“I think people are still reeling from what’s happened with the fires,” said Jenny Robb, who runs a small tourism business out of Kiah, a hamlet just south of Eden on the NSW far south coast.
“So there’s still a lot of people in a pretty poor way, like they haven’t gotten any permanent housing.
“It’s like, well, we don’t really need to have to deal with an election in the middle of all this.”
It is an appropriately unprecedented poll for such unprecedented times: COVID-19 means no doorknocking or baby kissing. The campaign launches and town hall meetings are all happening online.
What’s more, there are no focus groups to tell the parties what people are thinking. That is only adding to pundits’ caution about calling a result in an election in which there are so many factors at play.
For starters, Eden-Monaro was the so-called bellwether seat of federal elections: it swung with the government from 1972 until 2016, when popular former Labor MP Mike Kelly won it back from the Coalition, then held it in last year’s election.
Traditionally, incumbent governments lose by-elections. However, last year’s resul