Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and Labor candidate for the Northcote byelection Clare Burns 

“I’m tough and I’ve heard it all before.” In the cavernous main bar at “Welcome to Thornbury”, a former plant nursery that is now a collocation of bar and food trucks, Greens candidate for Northcote Lidia Thorpe was giving her launch speech last night, and finding it necessary to divert from her main positive message — the first Aboriginal candidate likely to make it into state parliament — to address rumours swirling around about her past.

“I have had family violence in my past, and I did have to go bankrupt,” Thorpe said, addressing issues that were hitting The Age and Herald Sun websites, even as she spoke. “People — guess who — have been shopping this stuff round the meeja for days,” a senior Greens adviser told me, as Batman candidate Alex Bhathal ran an online fundraiser in which the screen names of real-time donors came up (“David Feeney”, “John Howard’s Ghost”).

The story is simple enough: Thorpe was in an abusive relationship; her partner ran up debts in both their names; bankruptcy was the legal, straightforward, and simplest way to rule it all off and start again. Doubtless those shopping the story around in a byelection — in which the Liberals are not running a candidate — believe that stories of bankruptcy will appeal to some baser prejudices in some voters in the electorate. Sounds a bit panicked, if that’s the motivation; Thorpe’s story is as likely to generate respect, and a sense that she might understand people’s dilemmas as anything else.
And Labor would not be so foolish as to raise the issue of bankruptcy would they? After all, parachuted-in Senator and Shorten favourite Kimberley Kitching is married to Andrew Landeryou, sometime Shorten adviser and former bankrupt, having fled Australia after an online gambling venture went belly-up. Kitching and Landeryou don’t really need the spotlight on them, after Kitching bungled an easy estimates interrogation concerning a lost parliamentary security manual, and had to be rescued by Penny Wong. Surely, Labor would not want attention drawn to the one thing that could sink Bill Shorten: his fondness for promoting and protecting mates, which is guaranteed to persuade wavering voters to take their vote elsewhere.

Besides, the Northcote byelection is being held because of the sad and sudden death of Fiona Richardson, the Labor MP who made family violence a key focus of the Andrews government. Labor has put up as candidate speech pathologist and Trades Hall officer Clare Burns (sadly, we were denied the Labor candidacy of former Mamamia editor Jamila Rizvi, whose name was being floated for the seat, then suddenly wasn’t — could be Mamamia‘s fat-shaming of African-American author Roxane Gay wouldn’t have gone down so well in the gluten-free bakeries of the socialist republic of Ruckers Hill). Surely the Right faction around Burns would realise that Thorpe’s past struggles — surmounted to the point where she could enter parliament — make her not only the sort of person that Richardson was fighting for, but her natural successor? Surely the Labor Right would not be so blinkered, bitter, and vengeful about the Greens to have their perceptions of the electorate entirely screwed up?

Would they?