State Liberals in shock as MP Andrea Coote quits upper house seat MP Andrea Coote had been expected to return in the next parliament. LIBERAL MP Andrea Coote will stun the Liberal Party today by announcing she will not recontest her upper house seat at November's state election. Ms Coote, who has been in the Legislative Council since 1999, is widely respected on both sides of politics and had been expected to return in the next parliament. The announcement of her exit, which comes amid a hotly contested battle between Community Services Minister Mary Wooldridge and the former Stonnington Mayor for the prize Liberal seat of Kew, will open the way for the defeated candidate in that preselection to run for an upper house seat in Southern Metropolitan Region. Ms Coote said she was making way so that younger MPs such as her colleague Georgie Crozier could make their mark. "I firmly believe that organisations with a successful succession strategy flourish and grow," she said. Ms Coote, who is the Parliamentary Secretary for Families and Community Services, was formerly Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Legislative Council until her 2008 resignation alongside upper house Opposition Leader Philip Davis, who left Parliament last month. Before her 2008 resignation from the Shadow Cabinet, Ms Coote at various times held the portfolios of Tourism, Ageing and Carers, Victorian Communities, Arts, Children, Housing, Community Services, Aboriginal Affairs and Environment and Climate Change. In Government Ms Coote has worked closely with the disability sector and hopes to continue working with them in her life after parliament. She was also a member of the committee which investigated the child-sex abuse in non-government organisations, work of which she said she was proud and which "hopefully helped restore dignity to thousands of Victorians abused as children." In 2010 Ms Coote was the second Liberal elected for Southern Metropolitan Region which includes the lower house seats of Albert Park, Bentleigh, Brighton, Burwood, Caulfield, Hawthorn, Kew, Malvern, Oakleigh, Prahran and Sandringham. Her spot will now almost certainly be taken by Georgie Crozier, the third Liberal candidate at that election, leaving the third sport open. A senior Liberal said they expected the position to be hotly contested.