Election officials are doing everything they can to get voters to turn out for this Saturday’s Fadden byelection, but there’s been no keeping federal politicians away.

Pre-poll attendance for the Gold Coast seat is down more than 25 per cent from the equivalent period at last May’s federal election, causing authorities to email and text voters to remind them of their democratic obligation.

“It’s more communication than we’ve ever done for a single byelection,” Australian Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers said.

On the numbers, the contest for the seat, which has been held by the Coalition for all but one year since its establishment, would appear unusually lopsided. 

Fadden is the safest opposition-held seat contested by a government at a byelection since 1988, election expert Peter Brent noted on Wednesday. 

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton suffered a historic drubbing at another byelection, in Melbourne’s Aston, in April, the worst such result in a century. 

But as a rule, voters swing away from governments at polls held between general elections at an average of more than 5 per cent in recent decades.

A live contest

And yet, in Fadden, a seat represented by Stuart Robert, an MP who displayed a remarkable ability to absorb scandal until his resignation after 15 years, there are all the hallmarks of a live contest. 

Voters in the seat were polled only late last week, a sure sign that someone believes the outcome is less than certain. 

And since last Saturday, four Coalition frontbenchers have travelled to the Gold Coast seat: James Paterson, Anne Ruston, Bridget McKenzie and Barnaby Joyce. 

The seat is also replete with advertising, mostly signs spruiking the LNP candidate vying to replace Mr Robert, Cameron Caldwell. 

Mr Caldwell has, in turn, accused Labor of disseminating a “dirt file” about his last run for Parliament, when he was disendorsed at the 2012 state election.

Party bosses sacked him after a newspaper printed a picture of him at a Gold Coast swingers’ club while dressed as a pirate and wearing a novelty moustache.

(That was condemned at the time by the Sex Party but they did raise questions about whether Mr Caldwell, an evangelical Christian running on a family values platform, could legitimately be accused of hypocrisy). 

“This is something the media sensationalised over a decade ago and was addressed at that time,” he said.

His close connection to Mr Robert has also come in for scrutiny and so too is the former MP’s record.

The former human services minister quit Parliament one week after the royal commission into the unlawful Robodebt scheme announced it would be handing down its findings.

He denies facing a referral for civil or criminal prosecution contained in a sealed section of that report handed down on Friday, and said he welcomed its findings. 

But the royal commission found Mr Robert lied knowingly to the Australian public when maintaining publicly that Robodebt was accurate while he knew otherwise. 

Mr Robert also ran a taskforce that stamped a federal police logo on debt notices wrongly sent to welfare recipients, with sometimes catastrophic consequences. 

“Stuart Robert’s disgraceful Robodebt destroyed lives,” a Labor ad running on social media this week said. “It’s time to hold them accountable.”

Labor is running nurse Letitia Del Fabbro, who previously contested last year’s election where Mr Robert suffered a swing against him of about 4 per cent.

At a candidate forum on Tuesday night, Mr Caldwell deflected questions about the issue. His campaign focus is mostly on the state issue of law and order. 

Mr Caldwell’s photo has already been added to a Liberal-National Party of Queensland’s website gallery of the party’s elected representatives. 

But one independent candidate in the seat, Belinda Jones, a progressive with a large social media following who has been campaigning alongside Mr Caldwell at pre-polling centres, said he was not as confident as that.

“Something has them worried,” she said. “[Some] people [here] have either not heard of Robodebt or think that Julia Gillard started it.

“But they are angry about having to come out and vote at all [again].”