The controversy surrounding Sam Dastyari’s links with Chinese donors hurt Labor during the Bennelong byelection and the result shows Labor has more policy work to do, according to the manager of opposition business, Tony Burke.



Fronting the ABC after the Liberal John Alexander prevailed in Saturday night’s critical contest, restoring the Turnbull government’s one-seat lower house majority, Burke said the take-home message was Labor needed to persist with its policy work, because voters were prepared to listen.

Burke said on Sunday the Bennelong result showed winning the next election would be hard but “there are enough people willing to change their votes that with the right work, and the right policy, we can get there”.

“People are listening to us, they’re willing to have the conversation, but certainly the policy work that we’ve continued to do since we came into opposition, we can’t hit the brakes on that yet,” Burke said. “We need to keep pushing our own policy agenda through this as well.”

Burke said the Dastyari controversy hurt Labor in the byelection contest. The accident-prone New South Wales senator resigned during the byelection campaign after a sustained Coalition attack over his contact with Chinese donors.

“There’s no doubt that the issue hurt us, no doubt about that, at all,” Burke said on Sunday.

But he said the Turnbull government had also created a dangerous precedent in its relentless pursuit of Dastyari and the demands he leave the parliament.

Burke said the rules of engagement in Canberra had changed if the government was going to demand people quit politics when they had not been charged with an offence.

“When we get back, obviously there’s issue that is we now have to work through,” Burke said. “[Liberal] Stuart Robert, he’s on the backbench, for a scandal that involved dealing with Chinese donors and his ministerial office.

“There is pressure at the moment on Michaelia Cash over questions regarding respecting the integrity of an AFP raid.”

Burke said he had consistently warned against the escalation during the Dastyari pursuit “because I didn’t want this to be how we operate”.

“But the government went along relentlessly ... and I think that the government may end up regretting that they went to that extreme.”

Labor has emerged from the Bennelong contest with a two-party preferred swing of over 5% with more than 70% of the vote counted. The positive swing on primary votes was over 7%.



The average two-party preferred swing against an incumbent government at a byelection is between 4% and 5%. Historically, byelections triggered by MPs with constitutional issues have attracted something of a sympathy vote.

The positive result for the Liberals in Bennelong allows Malcolm Turnbull to end a torrid political year on a high and Alexander on Saturday night declared the win “a renaissance of [Turnbull’s] leadership”.

The government will regroup and push ahead into the final week before Christmas with the release of the midyear economic forecast on Monday and, potentially, a ministerial reshuffle.

On Saturday night, the Liberal frontbencher Concetta Fierravanti-Wells declared the affirmation for the government meant it was now time to stop the internal sniping and rally behind Turnbull as leader.

Appearing on Sunday on Sky News, fellow Liberal frontbencher Craig Laundy said the government had “finished the year strongly and we’ve got a good story to tell next year”.

Laundy also accused Labor of “playing the race card” in the weekend contest by accusing Turnbull of China phobia, which he said was a sign of the ALP’s desperation.

He said Chinese and Korean voters were not “dopes” and cast their votes on bread-and-butter issues, not about mainland politics. Laundy also played down the role of the Dastyari controversy in the contest, saying it wasn’t relevant.

There has been speculation that Labor’s candidate in Bennelong, Kristina Keneally, will take the NSW Senate spot to be vacated by Dastyari – and Keneally has not ruled that option out.

Keneally, a former NSW premier, and Sky News broadcaster, took to social media on Sunday to thank the voters, supporters and volunteers.