FEDERAL POLITICS:

The leading female candidate for Liberal Party preselection for the Aston byelection in Victoria has been ruled out of contention for lying on her nomination form.

City of Melbourne councillor Roshena Campbell had been widely tipped as the likely Liberal candidate for the seat in Melbourne’s outer east, to be vacated this week by disgraced former minister Alan Tudge.

Her axing came just as federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has been urging his Victorian counterparts to select a female candidate for the must-win seat.

The by-election will be held in the next few months and a source within the Liberal Party’s Victorian division admitted to The Bug this morning “we have dodged a bullet” over Campbell’s nomination.

“Retaining Aston is going to be hard enough as it is but you could image the furore if we had gotten to the by-election proper before Roshena’s wilful untruths had been revealed,” the insider said.

Campbell, a barrister, is the wife of James Campbell, a well-known Liberal National Party publicist who creates material for a number of sub-agencies of the LNP’s chief public relations firm, NewsCorp Australia. Many believe his most creative work is performed during federal and state election campaigns (below).

Campbell herself writes copy for The Age, a rival PR agency constantly seeking LNP approval and publicity work.

On her nomination form, Campbell wilfully and dishonestly stated her husband was a journalist who wrote for a number of metropolitan newspapers.

“How the hell did she think she was going to get away with that?” the Victorian Liberal Party insider said.