1 week Ago By James Massola, Olivia Ireland
Follow our live coverage of the 2025 federal election here . The Liberal candidate for the inner Melbourne seat of Wills pleaded guilty to obtaining financial advantage by deception and made to pay fines and compensation worth more than $10,000. Jeffrey Kidney, who lives in the suburb of Boronia, pleaded guilty in March 2024 to the charge and was ordered to pay $10,640 in compensation to the Victorian Work Cover authority.
Kidney’s breach occurred between May and October 2019. The Liberal candidate for the inner Melbourne seat of Wills, Jeffrey Kidney. Credit: Liberal Party A conviction was not recorded against Kidney’s name, so the matter would not have shown up on a national police check.
Kidney also gave the Ringwood Magistrates Court an undertaking of good behaviour, was ordered to pay costs of $2000 and to pay $500 into the Court fund. The unearthing of Kidney’s court appearance makes him the latest in a series of Coalition candidates to have had issues from their past resurface during the campaign. Whitlam candidate Ben Britton was dumped for saying women should not serve in combat in the army, while Bennelong candidate Scott Yung faced scrutiny for his links to a Chinese Communist Party figure.
Candidates in Liberal, Bradfield and Kooyong have also faced difficulties, prompting questions about the quality of candidate vetting undertaken by state divisions. Underscoring the growing number of candidates who have faced scrutiny over their past, one Liberal Party operative joked that “it’s harder to get a real estate licence than it is to run as a candidate for the Liberal Party”. Kidney has paid the costs ordered by the court and the money to the court fund, but has not yet paid the fine according to the Magistrates Court.
He does not appear to be disqualified from standing for election as a result of the guilty plea because under section 44 of Australia’s constitution, a person is disqualified from standing for parliament if they have to serve a prison sentence of more than 12 months. It is also not clear what type of financial advantage Kidney obtained from Work Cover. Kidney offered a series of “no comments” when contacted by this masthead and would not even confirm his own date of birth.
The Liberal Party’s campaign headquarters did not answer a series of questions about whether the party had been aware of the guilty plea, whether it had been disclosed during the candidate’s vetting and what financial advantage he had obtained. A Liberal Party spokesman said: “This was a matter involving WorkCover that related to work done between 2019 and 2021. When the case came before the Magistrates court more than a year ago, it was adjourned with no conviction recorded”.
Meanwhile, Liberal leader Peter Dutton confirmed that several “deeply concerning” issues led him to dump Britton, while opting to keep the specifics of the allegations private. After stating that he respected Britton’s service in the ADF, Dutton told 2GB’s Ben Fordham on Thursday he held a “number of views that I don’t agree with” and that was the “grounds on which his candidacy was cancelled”. One Liberal MP, who asked not to be named so they could discuss the party’s selection process, said they could not believe Britton got through the preselection process.
“You have to go out of your way to hide things. I had to give the party passwords for all my social media,” they said. “I was grilled by a former police detective, so I thought to myself ‘how did [Britton] get through that?’” Another Liberal operative said the vetting process was “a live problem” as the party selected more people who did not have a politics background than Labor, who tended to pre-select individuals known to the party for years after going through student politics and unions.
Labor has more resources assigned to research Coalition candidates, the source said. “Labor’s dirt unit is better than ours, they will f--- us on Friday when all the [candidate] nominations will be shut,” the source said. Each state division of the Liberal Party has a separate process for selecting and vetting candidates.
The contest in Wills is between Labor MP Peter Khalil and the Greens’ former state leader Samantha Ratnam, who is attempting to switch to federal politics in the party’s key target seat, but the Liberals attract enough votes to affect preference flows. In 2022, Liberal Party candidate Tom Wright finished third in the race and attracted 17.3 per cent of the primary vote.
Kidney is described as a “National Operations Manager” on the Liberal Party’s website “with strong experience in business and community events”. He has previously put his hand up to be a Liberal Party candidate for the Victorian state seat of Mitcham when it was vacated in 2023 by former state premier Daniel Andrews. Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis.
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