A high-profile Liberal candidate running to reclaim a former blue-ribbon seat has been accused of keeping voters in the dark about her property interests.

Amelia Hamer, the grand-niece of former Victorian premier Rupert Hamer, has repeatedly pitched herself as a renter to appeal to frustrated young voters in the seat of Kooyong in Melbourne’s inner-east.

But the 31-year-old has been forced to come clean ahead of the May 3 federal election, admitting she also owns two properties outside of Melbourne.

“While working in London and Canberra, I took out mortgages to buy the apartments that I lived in,” Hamer said on Monday.

“Now that I’m back living in Melbourne, I am renting in Hawthorn.”

Hamer studied at Oxford University before working in banking, venture capital and technology.

Her profile on the Liberal Party’s website says she wants to “help more locals achieve the dream of home ownership” and will “fight for policies to make home ownership more achievable for young Australians”.

Hamer has previously told media outlets that she rents a one-bedroom apartment but did not disclose she was a landlord.

“I know my rent’s gone up significantly, I’m a renter,” she said on Nine’s Today show.

It’s the first major misstep of her push to win back Kooyong after teal independent Monique Ryan unseated former Liberal deputy leader and treasurer Josh Frydenberg in 2022.

Ryan accused her political rival of trying to deceive the people of Kooyong.

“The issue here isn’t that she owns two properties,” she said.

“It’s that by painting herself as a millennial renter she misled people by not disclosing she was also a property owner and landlord.”

City of Boroondara councillor Rob Baillieu, who volunteered on Ryan’s 2022 campaign, went further by claiming Hamer had lied about being a “struggling renter” while owning millions of dollars worth of property.

“She’s been a politician for five minutes and has already lied to you,” he wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“Why would you vote for her.”

Ryan, a former paediatric neurologist and medical researcher, was among a raft of community independents to oust sitting Liberal MPs from former heartland seats in 2022.

She won Kooyong by 2.9 per cent. A redistribution has notionally whittled the margin down to 2.2 per cent, although demographics are skewing younger as more millennials and members of gen Z move to the area.

The head-to-head battle between Ryan and Hamer has heated up on the ground since the election was called.

Ryan’s spouse Peter Jordan apologised after video footage emerged of him removing a sign promoting her main political rival.

Hamer also came under scrutiny for pulling out of a candidates forum at short notice to participate in a mass phone call to residents with shadow treasurer Angus Taylor.

Deadline for voters

In other developments on Monday, public servants have been assured they won’t be forced back to the office as the opposition tries to quell fears Australians could lose the right to work from home.

The Coalition had pledged to end pandemic-era work-from-home arrangements for public servants if it won the May 3 election.

But just weeks after it was announced, Dutton buried the policy.

“We got it wrong, we’ve apologised for it, we support flexible workplace arrangements,” he said in Adelaide on Monday.

The backdown came amid polling that suggested voters were worried the ban would encourage the private sector to follow suit, and had begun to turn away from the Coalition.

In February, according to YouGov data, the Coalition was in the box seat to win the election. But within three weeks of the work-from-home announcement, Labor’s support had lifted to a level that would almost secure majority government.

“If you want to win working-class votes in working-class seats, you have to be on the side of people at work,” YouGov director of public data Paul Smith said.

“The Coalition had a strategy for working-class seats, but their policies were not on the side of working-class people.”

Meanwhile, legal advice for the Australian Council of Trade Unions said the opposition could revoke work-from-home arrangements for public servants only by changing laws in a way that would also remove the rights from all Australian workers.

“Australians cannot trust Peter Dutton with our rights at work,” ACTU secretary Sally McManus said.

The policy has also risked putting off female voters, with Labor saying flexible work arrangements particularly benefit women who can take on more work while looking after children at home.

The share of women working full-time has increased from 54 per cent to 58 per cent as work-from-home arrangements have become more common since Covid-19, Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows.

This may also be, in part, due to increased public spending in traditionally female-dominated industries such as health and child care, but studies have shown that working from home has reduced the gender pay gap.

“[Dutton] wants to rip the heart out of fairness in our industrial relations system,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in Melbourne on Monday.

“He’s pretending that the policies he announced … just don’t exist and that everyone will just forget about all that.”

In a second major backdown, the Coalition has also abandoned plans to fire public servants after it claimed Labor had added 36,000 Canberra-based bureaucrats since coming to power.

Between June 2022 and 2024, only 7400 public servants were added in Canberra.

Opposition finance spokeswoman Jane Hume maintained the sector would still be whittled down by tens of thousands of jobs over five years through a hiring freeze and natural attrition.

Dutton claims this was “always the plan” and has accused Labor of “contorting that into something else”.

But the backflips have raised questions over how the Coalition plans to find savings after saying its public service cuts would save $7 billion.

As the second week of the election campaign began, Dutton visited a cafe in Adelaide while Albanese visited two Australians who work from home.

The latest Newspoll has Labor ahead of the Coalition 52 per cent to 48 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis.

-AAP