Bennelong candidate defends herself against Coalition claims Senate seat being kept warm in case she fails in byelection

Labor’s candidate in Bennelong, Kristina Keneally, has said Bill Shorten has not offered her the Senate spot to be vacated by Sam Dastyari, and that she is focused on fighting for the local community.

The two usually adept communicators danced around the issue of who would replace Dastyari in the Senate next year following his resignation, and what role Keneally would play if she failed to win this weekend’s byelection.

“I am here running as a candidate for Bennelong,” she said. “The only thing I’ve been offered by Bill Shorten is to be Labor’s candidate for Bennelong. This is where I live. This is the community I’m fighting for and what I will do every single moment until polls close. Let me be clear – I’ve been offered Senate seats before by Labor, and I’ve turned them down.”

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The government seized on Dastyari’s departure, which capped off a damaging two weeks for Shorten and Labor, with foreign minister Julie Bishop suggesting it was a choreographed exit to create a vacancy in the Senate for Keneally.

“This is all stage-managed by Labor as a back-stop for Kristina Keneally should she not succeed here,” Bishop said from Bennelong. “The people of Bennelong deserve a local champion, John Alexander cares about the people. Kristina Keneally is shopping around for a seat in parliament.”

The head-to-head in Bennelong has already been fierce, but will only intensify over the coming days given the stakes. Tuesday’s Newspoll, published by News Corp, showed Keneally had narrowed Labor’s gap in the formerly safe Liberal seat, with the two parties level at 50-50 on the two-party preferred measure.

A Labor win in the seat would help upset the balance in parliament, removing Malcolm Turnbull’s one-seat majority in the House of Representatives. Alexander holds the seat on a margin of just under 10%.

Keneally, whose record as New South Wales premier was the subject of government dixers in the last week of parliament, said she expected the last days of the campaign to get personal. “It is only going to get nastier,” she said. “Malcolm Turnbull has accused me of everything short of ‘it wasn’t the dingo, it was Keneally’.

“I expect that is where he’ll go in the next few days.”

The Dastyari controversy had proved a growing distraction for Labor’s campaign in Bennelong, which has one of the highest Chinese-Australian populations in the state.

Shorten made a point of repeating that Dastyari had made his own decision to leave politics. He said Dastyari was “no traitor” but it was clear his “career was going nowhere” in the wake of revelations he had contradicted bipartisan policy on the South China Sea and warned a donor he might be under counter-intelligence surveillance.

“I think he’s done the right thing,” Shorten said. “I want to say that he is a decent person and loyal Australian. I don’t for one minute accept the government’s characterisation of him being a traitor to Australia. I think the government needs to use this opportunity to drop their China-phobic attacks and get on with the issues affecting everyday Australians.”

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In the last days of the 2017 parliamentary sitting, the government introduced new legislation in response to the Dastyari controversy, to tighten foreign interference laws and ban foreign donations.

Labor vowed to stop accepting foreign donations following the first controversy in relation to Dastyari’s links with Chinese donors in August 2016.

The finance minister, Mathias Cormann, was forced to defend the WA Liberal party accepting a $20,000 donation for his campaign in the lead-up to the last federal election.

“Firstly, there is a world of difference between personal donations as the one secured by Sam Dastyari, and campaign donations for political parties,” he said. “Both the Labor and Liberal parties receive donations in the context of elections. All of those donations are lawful and declared, consistent with our disclosure rules.”

Shorten said Labor would move to lower the declaration threshold for disclosure, which is indexed at $13,500, with another increase to come in July. “I want to lower that, I want to lower that,” he said. “Then we’ve got the issue about foreign donations. I want to get rid of that.”

The Greens have also seized on the issue, with leader Richard Di Natale pointing out the issue was “bigger than just one person” and using the controversy to renew calls for a federal independent corruption commission.

Both Turnbull and Shorten have suggested in recent weeks they could be open to creating one, but neither party has made a firm commitment.