“He can’t decide, months after the preselection, that now it looks better for him and he wants to throw his hat in the ring,” she said.
Mortlock, who founded advocacy group Hilma’s Network to encourage Liberal women, said Hamer was the sort of candidate the party needed to bring women and others back to the Liberals after several prominent Liberal men lost their seats at the last election.
Amelia Hamer, the 31-year-old Oxford-educated grand-niece of former Victorian premier Sir Rupert “Dick” Hamer, won preselection to replace Frydenberg in Kooyong.Credit: Eddie Jim
The AEC draft decision on Friday, which could be challenged by political parties before being finalised in coming months, moved about 30,000 voters from Liberal strongholds such as Armadale, Toorak and Malvern into the electorate of Kooyong.
ABC election analyst Antony Green posted estimates late on Friday that suggest Kooyong would be an even tighter contest between the Liberals and Ryan, raising hopes in some quarters that Frydenberg would be the best option to regain the seat.
Andrews said the party had to reconsider its options in light of the redistribution, despite the vote in March to choose Hamer.
“I think the game changed when there was such a significant redistribution,” she said.
Karen Andrews is the first senior Liberal to go on the record about a Josh Frydenberg return.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“I think that now there’s an opportunity to reassess who is going to be the best candidate and to make sure that the members of the party in the Victorian seats that have been affected have the opportunity to preselect the candidates that they want.
“So I think that this is an opportunity to bring Josh Frydenberg back, but I also think it’s an opportunity for the party to look at who is going to be [in] the best possible position to not only win the seat, but then to go on and take a strong leadership role in the party.”
Ryan won 52.9 per cent of the vote in two-party terms at the last election, with some Liberals saying former Scott Morrison dragged down their vote among women. Frydenberg lost by 6,035 votes against the “teal” campaign on climate change, public integrity and putting women into parliament.
Any decision on Kooyong is likely to wait until the AEC finalises the Victorian changes, which are also expected to weaken the Liberal Party’s hold on other Melbourne seats such as Deakin and Menzies.
The key decision on Friday, to remove the electorate of Higgins, leaves incumbent Labor MP Michelle Ananda-Rajah in limbo and means the former Liberal member for Higgins, paediatrician Katie Allen, must reconsider her options.
The new borders could make the electorate of Chisholm easier for the Liberals to win, raising conjecture about whether to seek an alternative candidate. The party chose Theo Zographos as its candidate in a preselection where he was elected unopposed.
Liberals said on Sunday that Allen had not given up on her quest to return to parliament and was a strong contender for Chisholm, which now includes about one third of the electorate of Higgins on the new borders.
One concern among women in the party is that any decision to reopen ballots in Victoria could encourage a similar move in NSW after the electoral commission releases its draft borders for the state’s federal electorates this coming Friday.
The NSW redistribution could make big changes to Liberal and “teal” electorates including North Sydney, Bradfield and Warringah.
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