Labor, the Greens and an independent plan to give Josh Frydenberg a run for his money in the blue-ribbon seat of Robert Menzies

Twelve months ago, an election defeat for the Liberal party in Kooyong, a leafy patch of Melbourne’s eastern suburbs that abounds in top-ranked private schools and expensive real estate, would have been unthinkable.

The phrase “Liberal heartland” gets thrown around a lot but in Kooyong it’s no exaggeration. This is the seat of Sir Robert Menzies. It has never been out of Liberal hands.

The treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, who has held the seat for nine years, had a primary vote of 58.2% in 2016.

That was then. The knifing of Malcolm Turnbull ruffled feathers among Liberal voters who prefer their church broad and their party moderate, and an unprecedented result in the Victorian state election in November, in which the corresponding seat of Hawthorn fell to Labor for the first time in 63 years, made a change look possible.

The first to bite was the independent Oliver Yates, a banker, former head of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and former Liberal party member, who announced his candidacy in January.

Yates is joined by Labor’s Jana Stewart, who was preselected last year, and the high profile human rights barrister Julian Burnside, announced as the Greens candidate in March.

Burnside says Greens would not block Labor’s climate change policies Read more

The driving force of opposition to Frydenberg is dissatisfaction with the Coalition over a lack of action of climate change, focused on its backing for the Adani coalmine and failure to rule out new coal-fired power stations.

As the former environment minister, Frydenberg cannot escape criticism. He has also had to contend with a mutiny among Coalition ranks about Adani approvals, which ended with his successor as minister, Melissa Price, approving the groundwater management plan for the Carmichael mine development.

A poll commissioned by the activist group GetUp, which is targeting the seat, found that 64% of Kooyong residents said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate with a plan to address climate change by replacing coal with clean energy. However, a survey by the Australian Futures Project and Roy Morgan, published in the Australian Financial Review, named cost of living as the key issue of concern for voters in Kooyong, followed by the economy.

The GetUp poll put Frydenberg neck and neck with Stewart on two-party preferred terms, with Labor slightly ahead of the Greens – 20% to 17% – in primary votes, and Yates at 10%.

Kooyong was not in GetUp’s original election strategy, but campaigner Jake Wishart said it was encouraged by enthusiastic voters and a number of grassroots environment groups who banded together to lobby for change. A climate event early in the campaign drew 350 people to a hall in Balwyn North, many of whom then signed up as a volunteer for one of the candidates.

If Josh Frydenberg loses Kooyong, then the government has no hope and Bill Shorten will win. ABC election analyst Antony Green

Unlike GetUp campaigns against Tony Abbott or Peter Dutton, it’s not personal. Frydenberg is a moderate, but he represents a government which the group says has not done enough on climate change.

He rejects that assessment, saying Australia has “a strong track record of meeting its emissions reduction targets” and will meet its Paris targets.

“The latest data indicates that we will overachieve our 2020 target by 367m tonnes, compared to the projection when Labor was last in office that Australia would miss its 2020 target by 755m tonnes,” he tells Guardian Australia.

He points to the $3.5bn allocated towards “climate solutions”, including Snowy 2.0 and Tasmanian hydroelectricity expansions, in last week’s budget. He also highlights the Coalition’s economic performance, which the party has celebrated by releasing a line of “back in black” merchandise in anticipation of a predicted return to surplus in 2019-20.

The ABC election analyst, Antony Green, says Kooyong is unlikely to fall unless there is a total Coalition wipeout similar to the Victorian election.

“If Josh Frydenberg loses Kooyong, then the government has no hope and Bill Shorten will win,” Green says. “There’s a lot more seats they lose before Kooyong.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The independent candidate for Kooyong, Oliver Yates. Goal one: get Frydenberg out. Goal two: get elected. Photograph: The Guardian

Yates says the campaign against Frydenberg has united the non-Liberal candidates behind a shared order of priorities.

Goal one: get Frydenberg out. Goal two: get elected.

“People don’t change unless they’re threatened,” Yates says. “These people [the Liberals] aren’t changing.

“I thought Malcolm was going to take the opportunity to drag the party back to the centre, that didn’t work. I thought the belting they got in Victoria would have woken them up and they would have changed, but they didn’t. And I would have thought they would not be arguing about coal-fired power stations at the moment, but they are.”

Yates has set up shop on Glenferrie Road, on the opposite corner to the Methodist Ladies’ College. Xavier College and Trinity Grammar School are just around the corner.

He is pitching to lifelong Liberal voters who feel unrepresented, united by the twin concerns of climate change and treatment of asylum seekers.

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He says lack of understanding at a government level of the capacity of different sectors of the economy to divest from carbon without taking a financial hit is “disappointing and appalling … particularly for Liberals who are supposed to understand economics”.

Burnside, who is best known for his legal advocacy on behalf of asylum seekers and refugees, says he never considered a career in politics but was motivated to stand by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, released last year, which said the world had 12 years to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Affluent areas such as Kew and Hawthorn make up most of Kooyong, but Burnside says wealthy residents share the desire to leave a liveable planet for their children.

“I suspect that the people who live in Kooyong do understand that a future for their kids with lots of money but nowhere you can actually survive is not worth anything,” he says.

Burnside is also a local, having grown up in Hawthorn and lived all his life in Kooyong.

His legal chambers, 30 floors above the Melbourne CBD, have been overtaken by campaign plans. The office is overflowing with books, art and marble busts: one each of Cicero and Damascius and two of Beethoven, on whom he can talk at length.

Burnside says the community reaction to his candidacy has been “very encouraging”. His campaign raised more than $200,000 in donations within two weeks.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The human rights barrister Julian Burnside announced in March that he was running for the Greens in Kooyong. Photograph: Julian Smith/AAP

Like Yates, Burnside did not plan to go into politics. He was encouraged by his wife, Kate Durham, who told him running as an independent was “narcissistic” and he should go with the Greens as it was the only party whose position on asylum seekers he would find tolerable.

He cannot speak as authoritatively on climate change as Yates can, just as Yates cannot match Burnside on refugee policy.

Yates supports the removal of refugees from Manus Island and Nauru, saying the use of that purgatory as a deterrent has “gone past unreasonable to horrifically unreasonable”, but he still supports boat turnbacks.

Both are equivocal on constitutional recognition as set out in the Uluru Statement, which Bill Shorten has promised to put to a referendum if Labor wins government.

Likewise Stewart, an Aboriginal woman and qualified family therapist, who worked on the Victorian treaty process for the Andrews government, can talk extensively on the Uluru Statement and on Labor’s health, education and communities issues, but is less strong on climate and asylum seekers.

If the 31-year-old Wamba Wamba and Mutti Mutti woman were to win the seat she would be the first woman to hold it, and the first Aboriginal federal MP from Victoria.

She is a sharp contrast to the other three lead candidates, being a woman, black and at least 15 years younger. While Yates, Frydenberg and Burnside all embody the stereotypes of the upper-middle-class electorate, and have all lived there for a number of years, Stewart is an outsider from North Fitzroy with an uncomfortable habit of calling her competitors on their privilege.

When Burnside admitted on International Women’s Day that he was a member of the exclusive men’s only Savage Club, prompting him to apologise and resign his 40-year membership the next day, Stewart asked if he could arrange for the club to return its collection of stolen Aboriginal artefacts before he left.

Julian Burnside: Greens Kooyong candidate quits all-male social club Read more

Asked if candidates like Stewart, who come from a diverse background, offer something to public office that those born to privilege cannot, Burnside says: “If I can’t be a member of every minority around I apologise for that, but I do understand the importance of diversity.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Labor candidate, Jana Stewart, has a strikingly different background from her Liberal, Greens and independent opponents. Photograph: Calla Wahlquist/The Guardian

While Yates attended four private schools because his father was a teacher, Stewart went to 12 primary schools as her mother reckoned with drug addiction and domestic violence. Her grandmother intervened as she began high school and brought her and two of her siblings to Swan Hill to finish school.

She recounts sitting in a classroom at Swan Hill college as a teacher listed all the ways her life would go badly and rattling off statistics that applied to Indigenous Australians.

“I remember being outraged that these kind of statistics were supposed to define who I was without me getting a say,” she says.

Stewart views her background as an advantage and says she knows what it is to represent a community of diverse views because, as an Aboriginal woman working in politics, she is forced to do it all the time.

“I could be the first Aboriginal woman, knowingly, that people have met,” she says. “I feel like I’ve got to make sure that I am putting my best foot forward because people are going to judge a whole group of women based on their interaction with me. That responsibility is something I carry with me all the time.”

Candidates have already begun regular early morning visits to train stations and given over their weekends to booths at shopping centres and community festivals. Fleets of blue-shirted Liberal volunteers have been appearing on suburban streets, and Frydenberg was even spotted kissing a baby in between selling the budget last weekend.

Despite the added pressure, he is looking forward to the contest.

“I look forward to the local contest at the next election and I continue to work hard to earn the respect, trust and support of my local community,” he says.