THE leading candidates in Saturday’s state election remain coy about their respective chances of claiming the Mildura seat despite almost 80 per cent of votes counted.
On Sunday the Nationals challenger Jade Benham was leading the count on 17,895 votes on a two candidate-preferred basis ahead of incumbent independent Ali Cupper on 16,978 votes.
While not conceding defeat on Saturday night, Ms Cupper took to social media to lament the trend of preferences votes heading to the National Party.
Ms Benham was hesitant to claim victory with less than 3 per cent of the two candidate preferred-vote between herself and Ms Cupper.
The Liberals’ Paul Matheson, who collected almost 20 per cent of first-preference votes, on Sunday conceded he was likely too far off the pace to claim the seat outright.
“If people did follow the how-to-vote cards, I would say so,” Mr Matheson said.
“Probably the difference in this election to maybe even the previous one where Serge Petrovich ran in the federal election (for the Liberal Party) is that he got a lot of the Labor preferences,” he said.
“Our motto from the start was to put Labor last so I wouldn’t expect too many preferences to be flowing my way.”
Mr Matheson, a serving member of Victoria Police, said he had endured a “character assassination” by political opponents and the media over an internal investigation over an incident that happened almost a decade ago.
“They talk about smear and slander, well, the impact that that has on my friends and family is pretty massive when you can’t talk about these things because they’re a confidential investigation,” he said.
“There is no secret that I got demoted, that wasn’t the issue. What the issue was that the confidential information that I can’t talk about being leaked to people to make it sound like I was a sexual predator … when I wasn’t the actual target of that investigation.
“It probably did have a fairly big impact on the results.”
Mr Matheson said he would “most definitely” pursue the leaking of information to the media through “official channels”.
He claimed a “pretty dirty play” by The Nationals to approach Mildura councillor Glenn Milne to run as an independent and direct preferences to that party was also “fairly significant”, “whether that was to take votes off me or whether that was to take votes off our other independents”.
Mr Matheson said he believed Ms Benham would hold her lead in the contest, which should prompt a rethink at Liberal Party headquarters.
“If Jade is successful, which is what I expect, it’s going to be very difficult in opposition and disappointing for the Liberal Party in regard to the agreement that we have that we won’t be able to run against Jade for as long as she is the incumbent,” he said.
“As a party we need to go back and work out what do we stand for and what are our values.
“I’ve been a big believer that the Liberal Party can represent regional Victorians.
“You have really got to go back and unpack why people didn’t vote for us.”
Mr Matheson said he was “shocked” by the statewide result, which is likely to return Labor with a majority government.
“The state result is absolutely devastating because it effectively means we can’t deliver on Coalition promises and that’s the hard facts of it.
“I can’t see what the incentive would be for the Andrews government to spend in regional Victoria.
“You would have thought that if he was fair dinkum we would have actually seen our hospital master plan, for example, before the election.
“If we get treated with that contempt before an election, now that he has got so many seats I think we would be kidding ourselves to think that he’s actually going to govern for all of Victoria.”
