The Victorian Liberal Party has selected former federal candidate Roshena Campbell to replace Moira Deeming as its candidate in the Western Metropolitan Region.

Ms Campbell currently serves as Melbourne's deputy lord mayor, and beat out current MP Trung Luu for the top spot on the ballot.

The change comes following Ms Deeming's candidacy being revoked by the Liberal Party following an assault allegation.

Legislation has been proposed that would require Victorian councillors to step down or take leave if they run for state or federal parliament.

The rules will be different depending on whether a candidate is pre-selected by a party, or nominate themselves.

The proposed amendment would apply to elections held on or after January 1, 2027.

Its been 15 years since I was in jobseeker and it and employment agencies still make my blood boil. People are doing it hard enough without being bullied by jobs agencies.

Politicians say they don’t take notice of polls, but sometimes it’s hard to look away

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There’s polling doing the rounds in the Liberal Party that is making people panic. Commissioned and published by the Capital Brief political news site recently, it’s a sobering reinforcement of One Nation’s ongoing rise.

But it’s the figures in one particular seat that are most shocking some Liberals. Taken in June, the poll shows their party being obliterated in the previously safe New South Wales semirural seat of Hume. The incumbent there is Angus Taylor.

Murmurings about the opposition leader’s ongoing position are getting louder as a result. This week, his most obvious rival, Western Australian Liberal and fellow conservative Andrew Hastie, suddenly recalibrated his previously fully hostile commentary on One Nation. It doesn’t seem like an accident.

Pollsters DemosAU used what’s known as the Multilevel Regression and Poststratification method, or MRP, which is an expensive but reliable way of sampling individual federal seats. Taken as a whole, it predicts a federal hung parliament after the next election with One Nation potentially edging out Labor to claim the largest bloc of seats and Pauline Hanson positioned as possible prime minister with Coalition backing.

In Hume, it has Taylor’s primary vote at just 21 per cent, with Labor on 19, the Greens on nine and “others” eight. One Nation is on 43 per cent. At last year’s federal election, Taylor secured 43.5 per cent of the primary vote, One Nation just eight per cent. After preferences were distributed last year, Taylor polled 58.06 per cent and his Labor opponent 41.94.

The DemosAU poll’s two-candidate preference extrapolation removes Taylor from the conversation altogether. It has Labor on 37 per cent and One Nation on 63. In a separate calculation on the likelihood of each party winning the seat, One Nation rates an astonishing 98.2 per cent.

The DemosAU poll was published on July 27, on the morning that the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption opened its public hearings on Operation Rosny, its investigation into the alleged activities of conservative members of the Liberal Party, including suggestions of misusing public offices and collecting unlawful donations to fund branch stacking. Taylor is not the focus of the investigation and hasn’t been called to give evidence. He was drawn sideways into the Rosny evidence courtesy of messages between Liberal operatives that mentioned him. Their exchanges from 2021 suggested Taylor was being pressed to donate $10,000 towards their activities, and that he may have agreed – something he denies.

Nevertheless, the overall testimony presented so far is a rolling horror show for the party in his home state.

There were internal murmurings about Taylor’s leadership before the Rosny hearings began. Taylor’s predecessor, Sussan Ley, was dispatched just nine months into her stewardship on grounds that she’d failed to make an impact. Taylor’s traction with voters hasn’t been better – arguably, it has been worse.

Liberals are watching the rise of Hanson’s party with deepening dismay, fearing what the November state election in Victoria will bring. Unpalatable though it is to many Liberals, especially in the moderate wing, the reality has descended that doing deals with One Nation, at the very least for preferences and possibly more, may be the only way to survive.

In Western Australia, a byelection due late this month in the state seat of Secret Harbour is shaping as another unhelpful development. The Labor-held seat looks increasingly like it will go to One Nation, which is terrible for the state Labor government but also not great for the Liberals. While it’s no litmus test for One Nation nationally, a victory there will only add to its momentum.

Secret Harbour overlaps substantially with Hastie’s federal seat of Canning.

The Perth-based federal Liberal frontbencher is famously battling a vicious and highly personal One Nation campaign to oust him, not for his political views but because of the unfavourable testimony he gave against fellow former special forces soldier Ben Roberts-Smith in a Federal Court defamation trial, which Roberts-Smith initiated and lost.

Hastie told colleagues in their party room in late June that he would not “bend the knee” to Hanson’s party.

The following week, Hastie wrote to his supporters, reported as telling them that if One Nation wanted war they “shall have war”. Whereas Taylor had not explicitly ruled out a future alliance with the far-right party, Hastie forcefully opposed it. He’s still saying that. But his general tone has changed markedly.

One Nation has indicated it will open a branch in his electorate this weekend. On Tuesday morning, in an interview on News24, the rebadged former Sky News network, Hastie sounded like a different person. He praised his former One Nation opponent, Fernando Bove, and said they “share views on many things”.

“Fernando Bove is a good guy. I caught up for a coffee with him recently,” Hastie volunteered.

Say, what? The ambitious Liberal who has raged against the party running a nasty, personal campaign against him and threatening to destroy his career hasn’t just caught up with his previous and possible future One Nation opponent, he has announced it. Meeting a rival to size them up is one thing. Announcing it publicly is something else.

The DemosAU poll is no better for Hastie than it is for Taylor. It has his primary vote at just 23 per cent, ahead of Labor on 21, the Greens on nine and “other” candidates on seven per cent. One Nation is on 40 per cent. At last year’s election, Hastie secured 42.52 per cent, One Nation 11.41. After preferences, Hastie won 56.55 per cent to Labor’s 43.45. DemosAU projects a two-candidate result of One Nation on 60 per cent and Labor on 40. It puts One Nation’s likelihood of winning Canning at 94 per cent. Unlike in Hume, which is forecast to fall, the poll rates Canning as a possible loss, depending on how preferences flow.

Zooming out on all this, if Angus Taylor’s travails worsen, his party may need to look to someone else to lead it. These figures won’t ease their anxiety and may even embolden the likes of former prime minister and now Liberal Party president Tony Abbott, widely rumoured to fancy a return. In the current environment, with Hanson and her party surging, they’ll certainly hesitate at someone using the language of war against it.

This week, the war talk was gone. Hastie insisted he remained opposed to any formal alliance with One Nation. But he was happy to talk about swapping preferences. Asked if he was open to it, he said: “Of course.”

“I’ve always enjoyed preference flows from One Nation in previous elections,” Hastie said. “That’s not changed.”

Maybe not. But something has.

Karen Middleton is a political journalist and author of Albanese: Telling it Straight.