It was not unreasonable to expect that some combination of the candidates at the forum - which included Leyonhjelm along with Mark Latham of One Nation and Dr Greg Walsh of the Australian Conservatives - along with the Christian Democrats and members of the Shooters, Farmers and Fishers Party will hold the balance of power in the NSW upper house after the election, he said. In this case, the way in which the next government learns to negotiate with the men on the CIS panel would have significant impacts across the state. The major parties are failing, the minor parties are the voice of policy reason. One Nation's Mark Latham Leyonhjelm said he would focus on getting the government “off your back and out of your pocket” and declared he would do it through calculated pragmatism. Experience in the Senate told him that at times his vote would be needed an upon these days he would deploy “straight-up political blackmail”, selling his vote to either party on issues that were not central to his platform in return for concessions on key issues.

Those issues remain cutting taxes and regulations and crippling what he and Latham agreed was the new nanny state. Indeed he and Latham agreed on quite a lot, with Latham asserting at one point that the main differences between the three men were of “degree and emphasis.” In order to cut energy costs Latham would block any attempt by either party to cut the state’s carbon emissions. He attracted some of his most robust applause from an audience which skewed old and white when he trespassed into territory that the Australian Conservatives had sought to make their own, vowing to stamp out the “evil political program” of gender fluidity in the state’s schools, by which teachers sought to cause confusion and distress over identity among students to help shape them into political activists. “The major parties are failing, the minor parties are the voice of policy reason, please back us,” he said. This theme that the major parties were out of touch was raised again and again, and receive well whenever it was.

“It is beige on beige,” Latham said, describing the competition between Labor leader, Michael Daley, and Premier Gladys Berejiklian. Loading Walsh argued that a decade or two ago it would have been unthinkable to fear a terrorist attack in Australia, but that it was now a part of daily life that the major parties were ignoring. By comparison, his party leader, the former Liberal Cory Bernardi, was focussed on investigating halal certification of products and dealing with the “threat” to social cohesion posed by women wearing the burqa. In power he would fight to defend religious freedom which he said was under attack from the major parties.