South Barwon could be key to next government

THE recent state byelection result in Northcote where the Greens won the seat from Labor has made South Barwon an even more important seat in the lead up to next year’s state election.

If Labor loses more seats to the Greens at the November 2018 poll, Labor will need to take seats such as South Barwon off the Liberals to retain power.

The November 18 result in Northcote saw the Greens’ Lidia Thorpe defeat Labor candidate Clare Burns, signalling Labor’s vulnerability to the Greens in inner Melbourne seats.

South Barwon is held by Liberal MP Andrew Katos by a margin of 2.86 per cent.

Labor’s recently preselected South Barwon candidate Darren Cheeseman knows what it’s like to hold a marginal seat, having won the federal seat of Corangamite in 2007 and retained it in 2010, when it was officially the most marginal seat in Australia.

“I’ve enormous experience campaigning in marginal seats,” Mr Cheeseman said.

“I used Corangamite’s marginal status to secure funding for a great deal of fantastic projects in the region. If elected to South Barwon as part of a re-elected Andrews government, I would use the skills and knowledge gained when I was Member for Corangamite to make sure that South Barwon wasn’t taken for granted, and we got our share of the government infrastructure spending.”

Mr Cheeseman said he would campaign in a positive fashion in his bid to win over voters in South Barwon.

Mr Katos said he was happy to stand on his track record of delivering infrastructure to the communities of South Barwon, and said the Greens were a problem for Labor.

“In Northcote, Daniel Andrews tried to go further left than the Greens and he was comprehensively beaten.

“In seats like South Barwon, I don’t know what’s going to make any swinging voter think Labor won’t keep going further left.

“Look at what the government has done in South Barwon in the last two years. There’s been very little activity. They were dragged kicking and screaming to the Jan Juc Surf Life Saving Club project, which was a credit to the community campaign for funding.”