It’s a long way from the United Nations to the beauty salons of Bentleigh, the “sandbelt” seat in Melbourne’s south-east where foreign minister Julie Bishop was deployed on Friday morning.
It was to the popular West Australian that the Victorian premier, Denis Napthine, turned on Friday to revive his flagging election campaign, which polls suggest will end tomorrow in a historic first-term defeat.
He held Bishop like a talisman as he guided her through the main streets of Bentleigh, which sits on a knife-edge 0.8% margin, one of four seats along the Frankston train line that flipped to the Coalition in 2010.
“You go, girls!” one passerby shouted from her car at Bishop and the local member, Elizabeth Miller.
An exuberant Napthine waved back. “I don’t think she means you,” Bishop said.
Together the trio glad-handed inside the street’s salons, coffee shops and greengrocers, trailed by media and Miller’s sign-toting campaign staff.
Napthine’s avuncular charm blared – not a baby remained unkissed, uncoddled – but Bishop was the real drawcard.
Drivers honked their horns at the sight of the foreign minister. Grown men embraced her in the street. “You’re doing a sterling job, Julie,” one admirer said.
Noticeably absent was the prime minister, Tony Abbott, who had been taunted in question time on Thursday about whether he would join Napthine on the campaign trail before Saturday’s poll.
“I have been campaigning in Victoria three times – three times since the election was called,” Abbott said.
Bishop hewed to the same line. “The prime minister’s been here on a number of occasions,” she said, dismissing suggestions he was political poison as “absolute rubbish”.
The four Victorian cabinet ministers, too, have been virtually absent from the trail.
What the campaign has lacked in federal Liberals it has made up for in a relentless focus on the dangers of electing the state’s opposition leader, Daniel Andrews.
“Victorians can choose a premier who is honest, who has integrity, and who gets the job done,” Bishop said on Friday. “Or they can choose … a leader of the opposition who quite frankly is more at home with the CFMEU and the criminal elements that taint the CFMEU than decent Australians.”
She repeated Abbott’s threat on Wednesday that federal government funds pledged towards the state’s controversial East West Link tunnel would be snatched back if Labor refused to build the road.
“Vote Liberal and you’ll get the East West Link. Vote Labor and not only will you not get this important infrastructure, but $3bn will have to be given back to the federal government,” she said.
The rock star tour might keep Bentleigh blue on Saturday, but the adoration of Bishop has only emphasised the unpopularity of her Canberra colleagues.
Napthine explained that Abbott was busy in Sydney at the commissioning of a navy ship. A reporter shot back: “Is he sinking yours?”
