Loyalty. It’s a good thing in a dog. What about in a voter?



Bush voters are nothing if not loyal. But increasingly, at every election, majors, minors and independents look to regional seats in the hope of shaking up their voting patterns.



In this campaign, the most high-profile of these seats is New England in northern NSW, where the former independent Tony Windsor is hoping to topple a deputy prime minister in Barnaby Joyce. This is a fight with many complexities, testing regional voters on issues such as climate change, renewables and land use. Overlaid are more personal issues such as pride and hubris in the leading candidates.

There is a sense that it was always going to come to this, notwithstanding Windsor’s decision to retire in 2013. After all, they have history.

“Country people, in my view, fall prey to being loyal to one side of politics,” Windsor said.



“New England hasn’t done that. It’s one of the great things about New England both at state and federal level. There has always been a degree of competition.”

Tony Windsor’s billboard just outside Tamworth. Photograph: Gabrielle Chan/The Guardian

The concept of loyalty usually comes with reward, but in politics, the inverse is true. Swinging voters win the spoils in elections, while safe seats receive little attention. The evidence of this is clear in the campaign map of the leaders, leaving dollar announceables behind them like a trail of breadcrumbs.



Which makes Windsor’s point about competition largely true. However, by throwing his hat in the ring, he is betting on the capacity of country voters for change. His high-risk strategy is offering a progressive platform more closely aligned with Labor than the Coalition.

Windsor is not the only one betting that the bush is open to progressive ideas. Cathy McGowan in Indi has walked a more progressive line against challenging former Liberal MP Sophie Mirabella. Labor and the Greens are courting the bush, if not to win seats then to erode the Nationals’ hold on non-metropolitan Australia for the future.

The recent televised regional leaders’ debate took the unprecedented step of including the Greens leader Richard Di Natale with Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon.



On the NSW north coast, the Greens are hoping tip out Labor MP Justine Elliot in Richmond. In Page, Labor and the Greens are circling Nationals MP Kevin Hogan. Labor spent the first week of the campaign in Queensland, suggesting they think there are gains to be had there. Mentioned in dispatches are seats such as Capricornia, Flynn and Petrie.



Will regional voters follow metropolitan seats and stray from their political owners? Or will the kelpie come back?

The bush: plural, not singular

The difficulty of writing about regional Australia is the vast differences within large seats, let alone across the country. For example, in Joyce’s seat of New England, there is Armidale, a university town of some 23,000 people. It is more progressive than the rest of the seat. The last time Windsor stood in 2010, he won the main booth at the Armidale town hall on a two-candidate basis 78.5% to 21.5%.

Two hours away via the Thunderbolt Way is Barraba, a town of 1,150. It is largely beef grazing and traditional National party country but still, in 2010 Windsor won the booth with more than 75% on a two-candidate basis. Granted, those figures were before he helped Labor form a minority government. Windsor will tell you while he got a bit of “feedback” about that, it has not featured much since the trajectory of the Abbott government. “The Liberals sacked him too,” Windsor says.

I travelled out to Barraba with Windsor in the second week of the campaign. It is a classic country town, a simple street layout, corner pubs, war memorial, the obligatory tennis courts, old verandah posts.

The 65-year-old Windsor was speaking in the Playhouse, an old pub turned flash guesthouse and theatre. Next door is a high quality kitchenware mail order business. The block reflects a transformation in many country towns which can be measured in the strength of their coffee. Gentrification, brought about by a mix of local and blow-in talent.



A small band of locals turn out to hear Windsor. The audience is a mix of professionals, a farmer or two, small business people, teachers and accountants. I recognise the restaurant manager from the NSW south coast. Regional communities have three degrees of separation. Relationships matter.



Windsor starts his stump speech to outline why he is running. His issues – climate change, land and water usage, National Broadband Network, Gonski education funding, renewable energy and a federal corruption body – represent the future, he says. The 49-year-old Joyce and his party represent the past.

Tony Windsor meets the Knitting Nannas and local indigenous leader Cyril Sampson on the campaign trail in Tamworth. Photograph: Gabrielle Chan/The Guardian

He is asked about foreign ownership of farms, the dairy crisis and the supermarket duopoly. A woman asks about the constant dumping of previous policies at every change of government. Which side will you support in a hung parliament? A principal asks how his students can get enough download data to do their homework. A mother asks why Telstra charges $110 a month for 15GB when her city friends can get unlimited data for $40?

Communications are a potent issue in the electorate. Due to the independent’s agreement with Julia Gillard to form minority government in 2010, Armidale was the first place in Australia to receive the NBN. The neighbouring town in the seat, Tamworth, was originally on the list for the network but has now dropped off.



Windsor characterises this concept as the “reverse Mirabella”. Where Mirabella sabotaged her own campaign by declaring Wangaratta hospital was punished because Indi voted independent, Windsor says the electorate lost a defence contract with BAE Systems in Tamworth because he decided to retire. (The contract moved to Sale in Victoria.)

“If it had been the Labor party who stopped NBN at Armidale and said it was too dear to go to Tamworth or Barraba, we would have been outraged,” said Windsor.



“Because it is the Coalition saying it, a lot say that’s the way the world is. Well it’s not the way the world has to be. We’ve got to stand up on these issues. This is highly reversible.”

This idea goes to the 2016 campaign in the bush, where Windsor’s re-entry is a large bet over whether electorates will remain stubbornly loyal to one side of politics.

Loyalty and the mercenary voter

John Howard is one for talking about the loss of major party support. Howard’s assumption was the 40-40-20 rule — that is, 40% of the electorate would always vote for the Coalition and 40% for the Labor party with the remaining 20% moving between the two.

“It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that such has been the dilution of rusted-on party allegiances that we are now closer to a 30-30-40 rule, with a much greater proportion of the electorate disposed to give their support to the minor parties,” Howard has said.

This means the largest support bloc has no loyalty. It is roving, looking for a politician or party, major or minor, who can satisfy their requirements, whatever they might be.

Liberal pollster Mark Textor believes that as the government rewrites the contract of what they provide for the voter, voters are rewriting their own contracts. Loyalty is old hat. We want to be romanced. We have less patience and we are time poor. If you want an answer now, it has to be no.

The other element at work is that voters are more savvy about what is going on around them. In many conversations in mid and far north Queensland, in Victorian dairy country, in the tiny autumn-washed towns of the central west and the main street of Tamworth, their view could be characterised as: I don’t know much about politics but I know what I like.



But they know whether their seat is safe. They make decisions on who they think will win and how that factors into the larger political landscape. It is a refinement of the state-federal government balancing act which eschews wall-to-wall governments of one political party. This is clear if you spend time talking to voters outside the beltway.



And then consider one more concept from Textor, who described the modern “mercenary voter” to Lenore Taylor.



“The big lesson from the UK poll was the rise of tactical voting, voters making choices not just on policy or personality ... but on understanding and gaming what might happen with a certain poll outcome,” Textor said.



If this holds true in New England, Windsor’s best chance may be a close result, using the leverage of a hung parliament.

Windsor says he has learned from the 43rd parliament that he does not need to pick a side to form government. He will not support no confidence motions and he will assess each piece of legislation on its merits. Independent Tasmanian MP Andrew Wilkie agrees – particularly after Julia Gillard failed to honour their deal on poker machine reforms. McGowan is more vague, saying it is “hypothetical”. They all say no agreement is necessary.

Barnaby: the national brand

I had hoped to spend similar time with Joyce. He was not available in New England, which appears to be a deliberate strategy to limit national media access in his seat.

Luckily, Joyce took the opportunity for a swing through Indi and Murray in the second week of the campaign. I drove down there to watch him open the office of Indi’s Nationals candidate Marty Corboy, before speaking to National party supporters at a drinks function. There, he mocked Mirabella and used Windsor’s time in New England as a reason never to vote for independents. In his mind, it would appear independents must never be independent. They must vote for the same side, every time. (Windsor supported the Coalition’s Greiner government in the NSW parliament.)



By the sweat of your own brows you can go through the social and economic stratification of life to the top Barnaby Joyce

“We had that problem in New England. Everyone thought everyone was a jolly good chap, hail fellow well met and then when it really mattered, they found out New England had become a Labor seat.



“And I don’t want Indi to become a Labor seat. And who is going to make that difference? You are. Don’t make our mistake.”



Joyce is often described as an excellent retail politician. His schtick is a mix of homilies, often mangled in a similar way to his hero Joh Bjelke-Petersen. His confidence has grown and he has successfully transitioned from the original “maverick” to a coalitionist in a maverick suit. It is the great irony that Joyce’s strength is to appeal to protest voters from the second most powerful seat inside the government.



He used the trip to jump next door into Murray, where retiring Liberal MP Sharman Stone’s seat stretches around the inland city of Shepparton. It will be a three-cornered contest with the Nationals running a former state MP Damien Drum, up against the Liberals’ candidate Duncan McGauchie. Liberal health minister Sussan Ley gatecrashed the dairy rescue package to promote McGauchie, but Joyce insisted on continuing the Nationals press conference in front of three plastic cows. Ley and McGauchie were left to lurk awkwardly.

It was a strong contrast with his predecessor Warren Truss, who would not even urge a vote for Corboy over Mirabella during his Indi campaigning. Truss was also reticent to speak to the media and rarely enunciated a philosophy for rural and regional voters. Joyce wades in, boots and all at the Milawa drinks. When I film him, he comes closer for maximum effect.



“You can start from the bottom in life, with not the best education and not the greatest wallet and by the sweat of your own brows you can go through the social and economic stratification of life to the top,” Joyce says.

For Joyce, it is all about the performance, the presentation to draw in the voter and convince that he will argue your case while sitting in the famous “seat at the table”. Certainly, under his leadership, Joyce (and deputy leader Fiona Nash) have broadened the rural debate to include more about the poverty of their electorates. But will it translate into policies apart from agriculture?



There have been dollops of money here and there for things like mobile blackspots. A bit for dams, though the long-term prognosis for those projects is debatable. More coherent narratives are still missing. For example, on education – the issue that has the capacity to improve rural lives and demographics – NSW National education minister Adrian Piccoli grabbed the Gonski funding model as a game changer for rural schools. The federal party has resisted, in spite of Nationals seats languishing at the bottom when it comes to income, education and health outcomes.

Sophie Mirabella is hoping to regain her seat of Indi – a typically complex and diverse country electorate. Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/AAP

Joyce’s real talent is differentiation and in Malcolm Turnbull’s age of agility, he excels. While he was prepared to mock Mirabella in 2016, he sang her praises in 2013.

“When the bullets are flying in Canberra and you’re looking for a mate, if you’ve got Sophie Mirabella on side then you’re going to get somewhere,” Joyce told the Border Mail in 2013.



“I like to go into bat with people I think are going to be effective and I want to make sure in our struggle for regional Victoria that I’ve got allies around I can count on. I was amazed to think there could be any better person than [her].”

Now she is persona non grata.

Joyce, though, is consistent with one key message. Independents cannot deliver because they are not in government. His problem is in his own electorate, Joyce stands surrounded by large concrete examples of an independent who delivered. The first NBN site, the Tamworth equine centre, a sports centre, hospital university accommodation, a cancer treatment centre. The list is long. In a country town, they are some of the largest buildings in the joint.

But.

Joyce is the deputy prime minister. New England is currently calculating what that is worth. The outcome may come down to the very simple question. Does Barnaby deserve to lose?

A return to the house of Windsor

When I arrive at Windsor’s home in Werris Creek, I can hear the mine working next door. This is the controversial coalmine Joyce has used as an example of Windsor’s hypocrisy in opposing the Shenhua Watermark coal mine. He sold the land to the mine, reportedly for $4.6m (the original mine had been there since the 1920s). Windsor says it was the type of land that should be mined – goat country – compared with the black fertile land of the Liverpool Plains. The Shenhua mine remains a big issue even though the site itself has been redistributed out of the seat. Its value for Windsor and others is in pushing conservative voters – who oppose the mine – to consider climate change and therefore a raft of previously forbidden policies. (Joyce, a fairly consistent denier, himself suggested maybe climate change was a thing in a recent profile.)

Windsor is being interviewed by Four Corners before we take the hour’s drive to Barraba. He has reassembled the old band of advisers and supporters. The audience knows him well. He answers questions using first names. But at the dinner afterwards, some appear pessimistic about his chances.

“I think a lot of people outside the electorate are projecting their own support in,” says a Windsor supporter at the pub.

“I would love to see him win, but I can’t help feeling that he will not get there.”

Windsor tells the audience he is sanguine.

“When I went to the polls in 2010, I fronted the electorate on significant issues, NBN and climate change,” he says. “In 2008 I introduced a bill that looked at mechanisms that could start to address the emissions issues. That was my mandate.

“Abbott thought climate change was crap and he thought the NBN was just about downloading movies. Those were his words.

“If I supported him when he did not support the issues I had been elected on, I could have rightly been called a hypocrite. They said, if you support us, we won’t run a candidate against you. What’s the point of that? What is the point of being there for the wrong reasons?

“That’s why I’m back, like it or not. It will be a challenge to see if those in the electorate are really interested in the future or will they be bluffed by the short term opportunism that they fall for on occasions.”

All politics is local

The bush is not a single entity. If politics are local, it is never more true than in the regions. People in Townsville talk to me about jobs for family members who are unemployed or on short term contracts as the town struggles with the closure of Clive Palmer’s nickel refinery. In New England, they talk about telecommunications and mining. In Shepparton, they talk about the economy and the dairy crisis. In southern NSW, around my home town, they are exercised by the NSW council amalgamations and the failure of the National party to stop them. Drill down further and it magnifies. One side of the main road is worried about an intensive piggery. The other side is not.

Then there are certain cultural dynamics at work in country seats. Incumbency is gold. Country members are more visible in their electorates, their personal relationships wind into social groups and take hold like ivy. I know if I go to the local show, there is a pretty good chance that I will be able to collar my local member. Contact breeds loyalty. As a result, retirement is usually the only chance for new members to get a foot in the door.

This is why the 2013 Indi result was such an upset. To tip out Sophie Mirabella on a margin over 9% was no mean feat in a regional seat. Which means I keep returning to the question: will more of the rusted-on vote in the bush peel away from the Coalition?

Putting the country in Country Labor

Joel Fitzgibbon served as Labor’s agriculture minister for only the few months of the second Rudd government. But that spell, combined with a post-election therapy project which examined Labor’s country seats, took hold of his psyche.

He represents the seat of Hunter – classification rural – which perfectly reflects the teeth-grinding tension between mining and agriculture. It has old coalmines and old agriculture, in a place where under-the-radar skirmishes have been happening for decades.

Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon, left, holds the country seat of Hunter. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

There have been times in Labor cabinets when Fitzgibbon has been the only rural member around the table. So in the aftermath of Labor’s defeat, he examined the numbers of rural seats held by Labor in the past 30 years. He came up with the magic number 13. Labor has never held government with fewer than 13 rural seats. It currently holds five.

He set up the country caucus, a group of rural and regional MPs who meet every parliamentary fortnight and travelled to unwinnable rural Coalition seats. The idea was to build party infrastructure to start the conversations which could deliver down the track.

In the first week of the campaign, Bill Shorten told me he was serious about working on the regions – he would say that, wouldn’t he? But he does know regions through his time at the Australian Workers Union. The union began in 1886 as the shearers’ union and still represents a lot of rural workers, includingin mining and farming, construction and horticulture. It has its own regional infrastructure.

The view in Labor is that regional seats are shifting, in some cases becoming more progressive, and they say generally the National party does not reflect that. The strategy has been to neutralise the “Labor haters” (generally out of towns) and to win over the more Labor demographic in town.

The other element pushing Labor to look at the regions is the demographic change in Sydney and Melbourne, where you don’t get much change from $1m for a house. As the coast prices also rise, tree changers on the east coast look westward. At the same time, land use issues and climate have pushed rural communities to question solidly held beliefs that climate change is crap, as a prime minister once put it.

“I think in the past we have had policies that haven’t fully appreciated the effect on the regions,” Fitzgibbon says.



“The carbon tax [the fixed price before the ETS] was one example, where there were fears around jobs in smelters and the effect of energy prices on dairy farmers. Although it was mostly a fear that was unfounded, that is the nature of politics.



“You only get good policy outcomes if you have people from a regional setting around the table.



“No policy is considered in shadow cabinet or leadership group without considering the impact, whether positive or negative, on the regions. There was a period of time when that slipped a bit.”



It can be better than this – but it demands real change from what we’ve been served up for the past 12 years Matthew Fraser, Nationals candidate

But Labor has dropped farmer and firefighter Vivian Thomson from a previously winnable spot down the NSW Senate ticket to last, in favour of NSW ALP vice president Tara Moriarty.



Thomson had been preselected to widen Labor’s reach and she had been travelling the countryside talking up Labor’s commitment for two years. There was no preselection for Moriarty. Thomson’s valuable relationship building will be lost, causing her rural audience to again question the party’s commitment.

In spite of this self sabotage Labor remains hopeful, but don’t expect a swag of Nationals seats to fall. They do have a sheep’s eye on Eden-Monaro, Page, Gilmour, Capricornia, Dawson, Herbert, Lyons and Braddon.

The Greens wild card

Richmond on the NSW north coast is old National party country. The seat was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Anthony family: first Larry senior, then the Nationals leader Doug, followed later by his son Larry, now president of the party and sometime lobbyist for Shenhua.



Labor’s Justine Elliott is the sitting MP with a notional margin after redistributions of 1.6%. The change took in stronger National party areas but the Greens are gunning for the electorate, which stretches from Tweed Heads down to Ballina.



While Richmond and New England grew from the same National heartland, demographic change is advanced on the coast, transforming dairy country into tourist centres like Byron Bay, Mullumbimby and Lennox Head.



The state seat that underlies the southern end of the electorate is Ballina, which swung to the Greens’ Tamara Smith in the 2015 NSW election off a 24.5% margin - the first time a National party seat had swung to the Greens.



That was a game changer in the minds of Greens looking to move into regional areas. Greens Tasmanian senator Peter Whish-Wilson, who has headed regional capital inquiries, says there are delicate transitions for the Greens when it comes to rural voters.

As he campaigns through the more remote parts of Tasmania, Whish-Wilson says its important to stick – don’t be fly-by-night – and to build trust. It starts by convincing people in rural areas that the Greens will not “eat their babies”.

Whish-Wilson believes the Greens are past that now. Gone also are the days when volunteers were loath to be seen in small communities, door knocking and raising corflutes. Being Green is not the societal “kiss of death” it used to be in country communities.

The Greens candidate in Richmond is Dawn Walker, a former policy adviser to the Victorian government, who won 17.7% of the first preference votes in 2013.



The Nationals candidate, Matthew Fraser, also ran, polling 37.6% of first preferences. Fraser is a small businessman, via franchises such as Wizard Home loans and Hungry Jacks.



Fraser’s website reflects the electoral shift in National in response to the progressive threat. It is a direct pointer to what appeals to regional voters, by marketing Fraser as the candidate against the big political machine.



“Like so many parents and small business owners in local communities across the Northern Rivers, I’ve been disappointed to see the tight-knit relationship between big political parties, big corporations, and big unions make it easier and easier for them and tougher and tougher for people like us.

“It can be better than this – but it demands real change from what we’ve been served up for the past 12 years.”

The italics are his and the 12-year time frame is interesting, given it suggests that good government has not been around since John Howard. Never mind the Abbott years.



But the message is key. Them and us. It fits a bush v city narrative that goes back to Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson. We are small and they – big parties, big corporations and big unions – are all powerful.

Except the problem for the Nationals is they are the government in every Coalition.

While Fraser spruiks his anti-coal seam gas credentials, his state party has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to sell licences in the area. His federal leader, Joyce, has ruled out a ban on CSG.

The CSG issue has sufficiently spooked Labor that Elliott and the Labor candidate in neighbouring Page, Janelle Saffin, have signed a pledge organised by 350.org. It calls for an end to their party (and others) taking political donations from fossil fuel companies and giving those companies subsidies like the diesel fuel rebate. This is not Labor policy.

Beyond the conservative old guard

All the Greens, Wilkie and McGowan have also signed the 350 pledge, which is a little red flag that signify changes in the bush. On the other end of the political spectrum is the re-emergence of Pauline Hanson, running for the Senate in Queensland. The final results in the bush will land somewhere in between.

But change requires organisation – as with McGowan’s first campaign – or money, as with Clive Palmer’s 2013 vote harvest. (Palmer lower house candidates polled 7.17% in non-metropolitan seats in 2013, compared with 4.29% in metropolitan seats.)

In the end, what all this means is political competition and political conversation. And that has got to be a good thing. Rural people (and safe seats everywhere) deserve more than 18-year-old university students – as hopeful and heartwarming as they are – sent out to mind seats and hand out brochures.

There will be no massive shifts in regional electorates, nor will we see regular marginal seat campaigns in Boulia, Balranald or Bourke anytime soon. Even someone like Windsor has his work cut out for him. The simple point is that rural and regional voters are increasingly prepared to look at beyond their regular conservative candidates. If they ever find their electoral voice, these campaigns will become a whole lot more interesting.

