Of the five contests taking place on 28 July, two appear to be heading for a tight finish

There are five byelections due at the end of this month in five different parts of the country, but two of them are likely to grab attention as we close in on Super Saturday.

The byelections in Perth and Fremantle look unlikely to produce a surprise result, with the Liberal party not contesting those two seats. The Liberal challenge to Rebekha Sharkie in the South Australian seat of Mayo is not going well – recent polls put her in front by a long way.

But the race looks much closer in the Labor-held seats of Longman in Queensland and Braddon in Tasmania. Polling points to a tight contest and there are local factors that could explain a swing to the Liberal party even as Labor maintains a small national lead. If Labor were to lose either or both these seats, it could have a huge impact on the next federal election.

Longman

Susan Lamb – Labor



Lamb won Longman at the 2016 election with a 7.7% swing, defeating the LNP’s Wyatt Roy. The result was a bit of a shock, as Roywas expected to hold on to his seat. Lamb held the seat by a margin of just 0.8%, making Longman Labor’s fourth-most marginal seat in the country.



Trevor Ruthenberg – LNP



Ruthenberg is making a second attempt at a political career after serving as the state MP for Kallangur (slightly to the south of Longman) from 2012 to 2015. Ruthenberg won Kallangur with a 17% swing in the LNP’s landslide election victory. Three years later, he suffered a swing of 18.6% to lose easily.



Mayo

Rebekha Sharkie – Centre Alliance



Rebekha Sharkie won Mayo in 2016 as a candidate for the Nick Xenophon Team. She challenged Liberal minister Jamie Briggs for the seat he had held for eight years, and won with just under 55% of the two-candidate-preferred vote. Sharkie’s party has since been renamed Centre Alliance following Nick Xenophon’s defeat at the March state election and his subsequent departure from politics. We’re yet to see if her performance will hold up without Xenophon’s presence, but recent seat polls have pointed at a result of about 58% to 62% for Sharkie.

Georgina Downer – Liberal



Downer is the fourth generation of her family to enter politics. Her great-grandfather was premier of South Australia in the late 19th century, and her grandfather as well as her father (Alexander Downer) served as senior ministers in Liberal governments. Downer has connections to the conservative Institute of Public Affairs, and was based in Melbourne until recently. She contested preselection for the Victorian seat of Goldstein in 2016 before returning to her family’s home state to contest this byelection.

Braddon

Justine Keay – Labor

Keay won Braddon in 2016, when Labor swept away three sitting Liberal MPs across northern Tasmania. Keay was a Devonport local councillor from 2009 to 2016, and had previously contested the state election in the same area in 2014.

Brett Whiteley – Liberal

Whiteley has been elected to represent the people of Braddon three times and lost that seat twice. He was first elected to represent Braddon in the state parliament in 2002, but lost his seat in 2010. He then moved to federal politics, winning Braddon in the Abbott-led Coalition’s landslide victory in 2013. He will be seeking to win back his seat yet again on 28 July.

Fremantle

Josh Wilson – Labor

Josh Wilson won the seat of Fremantle in 2016 after previously working for his predecessor Melissa Parke. He originally lost Labor preselection to Maritime Union of Australia’s Chris Brown despite winning the local members’ ballot. Brown was later forced to withdraw, leaving Wilson to run at the last minute (possibly leading to his difficulty in renouncing his British citizenship before nominations closed).

Dorinda Cox – Greens

Cox was a previous candidate for the Greens in Jandakot at the 2017 state election. She’s running in a seat that covers some of the Greens’ best areas in Western Australia (polling more than 28% in five booths in central Fremantle), but stretches further south to cover more suburban parts of southern Perth.

Perth

Patrick Gorman – Labor

In the four other byelections, the previous MPs are running again, but this is not the case in Perth, , where Labor MP Tim Hammond is retiring for reasons unrelated to citizenship. He is being succeeded as Labor candidate by Patrick Gorman, a former Rudd adviser, who served as the party’s state secretary from 2015 to 2018. He is the third new Labor candidate to run for Perth since 2013.

Caroline Perks – Greens

Perks is running in another strong seat for the Greens – the party managed 17% of the primary vote in 2016. She is a former senior sustainability officer at the City of Perth, and will be hoping to pull in more of the inner-city progressive vote that has helped elect Greens candidates in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.