Labor Bids To Break The Long Drought

The Age

Friday May 25, 2001

ANNABEL CRABB

ONE month ago, Kieran Boland was one of a faceless league of Labor candidates plugging away in slightly out-of-reach Liberal seats.

But the sudden death of popular Liberal MP Peter Nugent thrust the 27-year-old into the glare of a byelection campaign that will be a litmus test for his party.

Boland, a former Gareth Evans staffer who was preselected to contest Aston in May last year, learnt at 9am on Tuesday, April 24 that his opponent had died suddenly of a heart attack.

Horrified, he and his campaign team scrambled to cancel a mailout of electioneering pamphlets due to go out that very morning. By 9.30am, Boland's campaign for Aston was officially on hold.

``Unfortunately, some of them had already gone out, which was obviously distressing," says Boland, who went to great lengths to avoid the media after Mr Nugent's death - even hiding upstairs in his parent's Wantirna home when reporters came to the door. ``I just didn't want to be seen as campaigning during a period that was obviously a time of respect for Peter Nugent," he says.

Nugent was elected as Aston's first Liberal MP in 1990, swimming against the tide of a general election won by Bob Hawke.

He held the seat through three elections, building a name for himself within the Liberal party room as a determined campaigner for human rights and Aboriginal reconciliation.

Boland's principal policy interests are similar to those pursued by Nugent: foreign affairs, human rights and Aboriginal affairs.

The average swing against a sitting government in Australian byelections since 1949 is 5 per cent, and Labor only needs a swing of 4.3 per cent to seize Aston.

The Liberal Party is nervous about the seat, but Labor is equally playing down its chances, and avoiding comparisons with the Queensland seat of Ryan, which the Opposition captured this year with a swing of nearly 10 per cent.

``We haven't won a state seat out here since 1988 and we haven't won a federal seat here since 1987," says Boland of the outer Melbourne area covered by Aston. ``While we're trying to give ourselves every chance, it was never going to be easy and it won't be easy."