THE POLL BLUDGER
House of Representatives Election 2007

ASTON
Liberal 13.4%

Taking in the outer eastern Melbourne suburbs of Wantirna, Knoxfield, Rowville and Bayswater, Aston is best remembered as the scene of a morale-boosting pre-Tampa by-election win for the Liberals on 14 July 2001, when Labor's Kieran Boland managed a swing of just 3.7 per cent after the death of sitting member Peter Nugent. The seat has been drifting in a Liberal direction since its creation in 1984, due partly to redistributions and partly to demographic changes. Nugent picked up the seat from Labor's John Saunderson following the seismic swing to the Liberals in Victoria at the 1990 election, and it has remained with the party ever since. His successor was Chris Pearce, a Knox councillor and managing director of a company specialising in “e-commerce infrastructures”. Typically for an outer suburban seat, there was a heavy swing to the Liberals in 2004, when Pearce added 7.9 per cent to his primary vote and 7.4 per cent on two-party preferred. It was widely noted that this left the seat with a bigger Liberal margin than the famously blue-ribbon Kooyong.

Beyond the range of the usual Victorian suspects, Aston, Dunkley and Flinders were included by Simon Benson of the Daily Telegraph in a list of seats which Labor insiders claimed were “in play” two weeks into the campaign.