Public servant and father-of-two Ed Cocks has been elected as the newest member of the ACT's Legislative Assembly in the seat of Murrumbidgee, following the resignation of Giulia Jones earlier this month.
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Mr Cocks was elected following a countback of votes from the 2020 ACT election on Monday afternoon.
"I'm completely honoured to be elected to represent the people of Murrumbidgee and I'm really looking forward to hitting the ground running with Elizabeth Lee and the Canberra Liberals team," Mr Cocks said.
Mr Cocks previously ran as a Liberal candidate in the 2016 ACT election and as a candidate for Bean in the 2019 federal election.
He still lives in the Brindabella electorate in Monash.
Opposition Leader Elizabeth Lee said Mr Cocks was known as being a hard-working grassroots campaigner and had been a policy convener for the Canberra Liberals.
"He's known within the Liberal Party to be a workhorse, we know that he door-knocked tens of thousands of Canberrans," Ms Lee said.
"As a lifelong Canberran, Ed knows Canberra and the Canberra community very, very well and he's raising a young family here so knows the pressures and challenges that are facing Canberrans."
Party sources had initially tipped that Liberal candidate Amardeep Singh would replace Mrs Jones as he had the third-highest first preference votes of the Liberal candidates. But the countback is based on the distribution of preferences of excluded and other elected candidates which favoured Mr Cocks.
Mr Cocks received 4.9 per cent of the vote in Murrumbidgee.
He said he hoped to spend time listening to constituents over the coming months.
"I spent a lot of time door-knocking while I was campaigning and what people told me over and over was that they wanted someone who was there to represent them and who would listen to them well," Mr Cocks said.
Mr Cocks will officially be declared as a member of the Legislative Assembly on Wednesday afternoon. During this time, he will have to resign from his current job at the Department of Health.
The election of Mr Cocks will trigger a reshuffle within the Canberra Liberals party room. Ms Lee said she would discuss shadow portfolios with Mr Cocks in the coming days.
The countback was done within a matter of minutes on Monday and was conducted at the Legislative Assembly.
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Unsuccessful candidates for Murrumbidgee from the 2020 election were able to re-contest the seat and were given 10 days to apply for the vacancy.
Six candidates took part in the countback including Mr Singh, independent candidate Fiona Carrick and Liberal candidate Sarah Suine.
No Labor candidates contested the vacancy.
The countback process for the Assembly involved recounting the ballot papers that were received by Mes Jones, which the ACT Electoral Commission says is done to "determine which candidate was the next most favoured candidate chosen by the voters who elected the vacating MLA".
Mrs Jones left the Assembly earlier this month after nearly a decade as a member. She had been on leave since January after she stepped down from the deputy leadership role.
She is now the chief executive of Painaustralia, a national peak body focused on improving the quality of life of people living with pain.
Mrs Jones, a mother-of-six, said she wanted to spend more time with family.
There had also been some internal disagreements between Mrs Jones and Ms Lee's office. But Mrs Jones said this was not the reason she left.
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