Incumbent Member for Riverina Michael McCormack has unsurprisingly retained his seat with a solid swing in his favour, even with a drastic change to the electorate boundary before Saturday’s election.
Riverina lost Parkes, Forbes and Bland, took on Yass and Upper Lachlan which turned out to be part of the new battleground where bush meets city capital, in the area leading up to the ACT border. Lockhart was the most western Council area, located to the west of Wagga, while Yass was the most eastern Council area, with travel times to the extremities taking more than 3.5 hours to traverse.
McCormack and the Nationals were in relatively unknown territory in the Yass district, something we will discuss further afield, with more than 40 thousand votes, McCormack claimed 40.97 per-cent of the vote and a swing towards him of +6.58 at the time of writing.
The seat summary on the AEC Tally Room showed a swing of 3.37% One Nation secured the ‘donkey vote’ the top of the ballot and brought home 9,578 or 9.72 percent a swing towards them of +2.37.
Labor went backwards compared to the Nats with 17,833 votes or 18.10 percent, they had a swing against them of -6.83.
The independents went better than some of the smaller parties including the Greens and the Shooters Fishers and Farmers.
Jenny Rolfe secured 6,519 or 6.62 percent after a campaign was run where she bumped another community candidate from the race to secure the “community backed” candidate role.
James Gooden picked up 4,965 votes or 5.02 percent from what was a grass roots campaign.
The Greens were represented by Phoenix Valxori who picked up 4,120 votes or 4.18 percent.
Rarely sighted Desiree Gregory, who represented the Shooters Fishers and Farmers was criticised for not being visible in the seat, yet still picked up 3,790 votes or 3.85 per-cent.
Richard Foley after admitting publicly that he believed Riverina voters were “the dumbest f****s on the planet,” after standing on pre-poll, still managed to pull in a reasonable vote of 2,218 or 2.25 percent.
Christine Onley managed 2,092 votes and 2.12 percent for the Libertarian Party.
Mark Burge represented Family First and received 1,965 votes and 1.99 percent.
Grant Hardwick pipped Jake Davis for second last place, coming in just three votes ahead as an independent.
Davis, a local of Young did not use up much of his political capital, receiving just 1,728 votes across the seat to secure 1.75%. The youngster of the bunch could no doubt put his hat in the ring in the future and beat the oldest contender Barbara Baikie who ended up with the wooden spoon.
Baikie collected 1,648 votes or 1.67 percent and will have to go back to the drawing board even though began campaigning at the start of the year and Davis put some corflutes out at the start of pre-poll.
Mr McCormack spoke with the Times after his resounding victory.
“I looked through the figures and discounting Nichols, because Nichols was a three-corner contest and obviously the biggest skewed because he’s got all the Liberal Party vote. But outside O’Connor and Flynn, I think the Riverina has done the next best of the coalition seats as far as swings go in the country. Now, given the fact that we had the second highest number of candidates only behind Calwelll of the 150 seats, that is pretty remarkable,” Mr McCormack said.
“Our candidates, it felt like it was the world against us. They were helping each other, put each other’s corflues out and at pre-poll and on election day, they were helping each other with their preferences. They were helping each other with their social media and then the other thing too is the boundary changes had an impact, but to think that despite all of that, people still found the name, number 11 out of 13 on a ballot paper. I think it says something about the representation I’ve given, the delivery I’ve done, the hope I provide and the fighting work ethic that they know I’ll continue to have and show. Even in the new parts, I think people respected the fact that I turned up. I think people respected the fact that I am a former deputy prime minister and I’ve got that experience. They know how and what I say I’ll do.”
Mr McCormack was the heavy favourite ahead of the election, with bookmakers offering as low as $1.02 for him to keep his seat. Still Mr McCormack says his campaign exceeded his expectations.
“The only shining light, I can see is that the Greens have done very, very badly and hopefully they won’t have a single lower house, though I expect Elizabeth Watson Brown will win in Ryan. Labor’s Milton Dick is a very good speaker and a good friend of mine I have been texting him to say, well, at least we’ll still get you as speaker, which I think he deserves. He’s been a good speaker and he’s doing a lot in the education of children to understand the difference between the various spheres of government. And I think that is actually a good thing. So they are the shining lights from a defeat that I will take out of it, but we just have to re-group, restock get better, don’t get bitter, we need to get better.
“Yes, we’ve made mistakes, Liberals and Nationals. I mean the Nationals can’t just pat ourselves on the back and say, well, we’ve retained all our seats and well done Nats. We’ve also got to do a bit of soul searching, see where we can improve. That’s what politics is about.
“But to think that people are saying, oh, this sort of guarantees us for another two terms, not necessarily. They say a week is a long time in politics. I mean, three years is an extraordinary long time and anything can go right or wrong in that period of time.
“It’s going to be a fair bit of hubris when we go back to parliament, it’s going to be harsh, we probably deserve it.”
McCormack spoke of the impending reviews.
“The trouble with some of these reviews is that in the past, they’ve actually asked the review to be done by people who go in there with either, not a vested interest, but they do go in there and the people seeking the review are getting the answers they want, not necessarily the answers that are probably the truth. And there is a difference in that,” Mr McCormack said.
“I think whoever does this review by the Liberal Party they’re right. They probably should look at how the National Party goes about their business.
“People can say what they like about the Nats, they’ve been writing us off for a hundred years, but we do turn up, whether it’s the school event or the sports afternoon or the public meeting or and in our offices, we employ good people.
“The number of people who have handed out for me who are not necessarily rusted on National Party people, but who handed out because they believed in me and they were thankful for the services that my office and I provided them was extraordinary, extraordinary.
“The polling also, what worries me is that the Nationals and the Liberals have the same pollsters. I don’t think we’ve actually done that in the past. I think we’ve had our own polling. Now, admittedly, Bendigo is doing very, very well, but we were being told that we were going to be doing well in Bullwinkle and we’ve run and we had a good candidate there, but it was always going to be a tough seat. Expenses and resources are hard to come by and you don’t want to be throwing good money after bad.
Mr McCormack is already back at work after visiting the Vatican for the Papal funeral during the campaign. Sometimes boundaries change, in Mr McCormack’s world, the representation will stay the same.
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