Illustration: Edd Aragon Yet more emotion has been spent vituperating Mirabella than welcoming McGowan. Mirabella, at her nadir, has fallen (or been pushed) into the piranha pool. Suddenly she is the MP we all love to hate. Indeed, what first struck me about the Mirabella-McGowan duel is the barbed terminology in which Mirabella is typically enveloped. Words like hard-line, hard-faced, firebrand, cruel and bomb-thrower pepper every report. Firebrand? Bomb-thrower? Always partial to a bit of bomb-throwing, I went seeking the cause. Mirabella's first sin is being a Melbourne lawyer, not an agri-type. This makes her every bit as distant from rural concerns as, say, Banjo Paterson. Then again, if parachuting MPs into safe electorates was a crime, the parliamentary numbers would look different indeed. But that's not all. Press reports dwell pruriently on Mirabella's much older "live-in" lover. (Heavens! Stone her!) This man, now dead, is himself branded as "'cruel" and "sneering" although he mentored Mirabella, gave her money and gifts and left her a legacy that involved her in a court battle with his family. (Scandal! Stone her!)

Conceded: Sophie Mirabella. Credit:Andrew Meares Mirabella is typically described as brash, caustic and incendiary in her parliamentary utterances and has twice been ejected from Parliament. What exactly has she said? She called Wayne Swan a "bagman", then withdrew it and called him a "pathetic liar" instead. She told Bill Heffernan to keep taking his Alzheimer's pills. She quipped that Julia Gillard would not be needing a nanny allowance. She called Mark Latham on his description of a journalist as a "skanky ho", insisting – rightly – that Labor women should have done so too. She shouted at the speaker. She was the butt of Belinda Neal's attack, "Your baby will be turned into a demon by evil thoughts," and of Tony Windsor's quip that she would "win the nasty prize" in Parliament.

Personally, I've never heard Mirabella speak and doubt that I'd support many of her views, especially on indigenous rights or asylum seekers. But that doesn't make her nasty, or wrong, or even a bad MP – though she may be that. Two things should be said in Mirabella's defence. One, that much of the nastiness cited was actually directed at, not by her. (What a difference a preposition can make.) And two, had she been a left-leaning bloke not a right-leaning woman – a Paul Keating, Bob Carr, Simon Crean or Mark Latham – these quips would be recorded as daring witticisms and adoringly exchanged by subsequent generations of the faithful over doting martinis or ginseng. Try as I might, I can only see all this Mirabella-hate as political disagreement mistranslated as emotion. Catherine McGowan, AO, is an entirely different proposition. Fourth in a family of 13 children, she grew up on a farm, trained as a teacher, bought her own property, did a Masters on women in agriculture, adopted a "bloom where you are planted" life-theme and set up AWiA – Australian Women in Agriculture. She articulates what we all know, that the "house-paddock fence" threw an invisibility cloak around women. "My mum always said she didn't work," recalls McGowan. "Inside the fence was Mum's territory. Her vegetable and flower garden, her hen house, her eggs, her house and importantly – the manufacturing centre of our existence – her kitchen." Even with 13 children, women's work – being inside the fence – didn't count. Only "outside the fence" work, or men's work, was seen to exist.

In her early days as a farmer, McGowan says, a male relative told her: "You'll never be a farmer because you cannot lift a fly-blown wether onto the back of a ute." "A local woman farming friend came to my rescue," she writes. " 'Of course Cathy's a farmer,' she said. 'She'll farm in such a way that her sheep won't get fly struck.' " One-eighth of all Australians are farmers, says McGowan, and a third of these are women. All but 4 per cent of Australia's 120,000 farm businesses are family-run. McGowan's work – apart from being a merino-wool farmer – is to make these facts, these people, visible. McGowan quotes a government report that values women's contribution as “48 per cent of total real farm income . . . worth almost $14 billion in 1995-96." The 2009 Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation update of that report takes this to 49.2 per cent, concluding: “The inescapable policy implication is that men and women are equal partners in the viability of agricultural activities and communities.”

And community is the key word here. McGowan, indie for Indi, showed what can be done when you lose the party from party politics. Recognising that "a groundswell of community wanted to make the seat marginal", she began by refining a system of dinner-party consultations and used a "whole-of-community" approach to mobilise 600 volunteers: scheduling teams, social media teams, banner-makers, drivers and "the joy-and-love teams". Mirabella went down still spouting the party line that cost of living mattered most to her constituents. McGowan disproved it. If she wins, she'll fight for trains, rural health, education, and visible women. Loading There is something exhilarating about the spectacle of mass humans – the fed-up yous and mes of democracy – rejecting foisted-on leadership and collectively choosing their own. Imagine what Parliament could be like if we all mobilised thus; if our leadership prep-school did not entail 20 years of head-stomping and arse-kissing on the way up. Democracy might actually mean something. Who owns the farm? We all do. Our paddocks. Our rules.