Pauline Hanson called it a win for people who had been ignored. On May 9, the ABC projected that One Nation’s David Farley had taken the Farrer by-election, and with it a seat that has never before sent anyone but a Coalition member to Canberra. No One Nation candidate had ever been elected to the House of Representatives until now.
Farley said his focus in parliament would be water buybacks, net zero and immigration. Hanson offered her “deepest congratulations” and said Farrer would not be “forgotten people anymore”.
The Liberals take stock
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor said his party had to “take our medicine”. The Liberals, he told ABC News, needed to go back to what he called the politics of conviction, with lower government spending, immigration and energy policy at the centre. He blamed two Coalition splits and a drift from long-held principles. “You breach trust in an instant and it takes time to rebuild it,” he said.
Taylor stood by the decision to put One Nation ahead of independent Michelle Milthorpe on preferences, which both the Liberals and Nationals had done. It was “the right call”, he said. If the conservative vote keeps splitting, he added, Labor stays in government.
Sussan Ley, who held Farrer from 2001 and quit parliament after losing the Liberal leadership earlier this year, issued a statement of her own. She congratulated Farley, then warned colleagues it would be an “error” to shrink the scale of the loss by pointing at the Coalition split or the date of the vote. Her advice to the leadership was to accept the result with “humility”.
The Liberal candidate, Raissa Butkowski, said she phoned Farley to concede. She had quit her job as a community lawyer to campaign full time. “Voters did decide to send the major parties a message,” she said. Deputy leader Jane Hume told the party faithful, “We have fought to the end but today, is unfortunately not our day,” and thanked Butkowski for a “tireless” campaign.
Joyce, the Nationals and the independent
One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce said the result matched the mood he had picked up on the ground. In his view the Liberals were “not even on the paddock”. He put their 11.6 per cent primary vote on a level with “the marijuana party”, and predicted similar results elsewhere.
ABC analyst Casey Briggs saw Milthorpe’s primary vote improve, but said she was swept up in the One Nation wave. Labor did not run a candidate, and Briggs said some of its voters probably drifted to the conservative side and ended up with One Nation. He also noted that the House now has more crossbenchers than Nationals.
Nationals candidate Brad Robertson, who had spent nine weeks campaigning, said the party had “re-entered the fight in Farrer”. He congratulated Farley and promised to hold him to account. NSW MLC Nicole Overall called it an uphill battle from the start but was glad to see the Nationals outperform the Liberals.
At Milthorpe’s gathering in the west of the electorate, Griffith councillor Shari Blumer described volunteers as disappointed. “Sometimes it doesn’t go your way but you shouldn’t stop trying,” she said.
Sources
- Sussan Ley says Liberals need to 'change or die' as One Nation wins Farrer by-election — as it happened
- Farrer byelection as it happened: One Nation win in historic victory as Liberal Party lose regional NSW seat for first time in 77 years
