Voters in the regional federal seat of Farrer have decisively chosen a non-coalition candidate for the first time in its history.<\/p>\n
The sprawling southern NSW electorate was most recently held by former Liberal leader Sussan Ley for a quarter of a century before her resignation upon being ousted by Angus Taylor in February.<\/p>\n
While the Liberals and Nationals both put forward a candidate, the race was truly between One Nation’s David Farley and independent Michelle Milthorpe.<\/p>\n
Labor chose not to contest the by-election.<\/p>\n
In the end Farley steamrolled ahead to claim 59% of the two-candidate-preferred vote.<\/p>\n
He told a room of supporters he was humbled by the result.<\/p>\n
“We’re like a mason with a chisel and a hammer and we’re re-carving the letters into the Australian democracy,” he declared on Saturday night to a room that erupted in cheers and applause.<\/p>\n
“One Nation has reached the end of its beginning, we’re going through the ceiling from here.”<\/p>\n
Farrer comprises more than 126,560 square kilometres and fills out the southwestern corner of NSW.<\/p>\n
Its largest population centre is Albury, which sits on the NSW border with Victoria in the south.<\/p>\n
The race has been viewed as an electoral test of support for Pauline Hanson’s populist One Nation party, which has now won its first lower-house seat.<\/p>\n
Farley’s win is widely viewed as trouble for the coalition as it continues to lose votes to the alternative conservative party.<\/p>\n
“We have to take away some hard lessons from this and what we have seen since the last (federal) election and from the last election,” Taylor said.<\/p>\n
“For too long, we have been a party of convenience and not of conviction.”<\/p>\n
But the race coming down to candidates from a minor party and an independent also signals a broader shift in voting patterns relevant to the Labor Party as much as the Liberals. <\/p>\n
In the 1960s, more than 70% of Australians would vote for the same party in each election.<\/p>\n
By 2025, that number fell to just one in three, according to the Australian Election Study.<\/p>\n
“The Australian electorate has become increasingly volatile,” the study’s chief investigator, Griffith University senior lecturer Sarah Cameron, told AAP.<\/p>\n
“Most people aren’t feeling close to the major political parties and they’re increasingly willing to switch votes from election to election.”<\/p>\n
So far, the exodus was being felt more on the conservative side of politics but the pattern tended to align with periods of infighting and leadership spills.<\/p>\n
“Labor is in a slightly better position than the Liberals at the moment, their record lows came after the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years,” Dr Cameron said.<\/p>\n
“The current unpopularity of the Liberal party reflects people’s dissatisfaction when parties are seen as infighting rather than representing the interests of voters.”<\/p>\n
Senator Hanson also had a message for the Liberals, Nationals and Labor.<\/p>\n
“This is a journey we’re going to go on, we’re going to look forward to the future,” she said on Saturday night.<\/p>\n
“The people out there who may be watching this: we’re coming after those other seats.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Voters in the regional federal seat of Farrer have decisively chosen a non-coalition candidate for the first time…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":420424,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[85,42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-420423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-australia","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=420423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420423\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/420424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}