Robert Borsak and his party The Shooters Fishers and Farmers will be looking to attract votes from all of the electorate and in particular, traditional National Party voters.

The Shooters Fishers and Farmers party will be launching an assault on 7 National Party seats they think they can win in the 2019 State election. The 7 sitting members have a common theme in that they did little or nothing to stop forced amalgamations or vigorously pushed for forced mergers. Paul Toole – Bathurst Former Local Government Minister, Adrian Piccoli – Murray, Kevin Humphries – Barwon, Katrina Hodgkinson – Cootamundra, Troy Grant – Dubbo as well as Michael Johnson – Upper Hunter and Deputy Premier John Barilaro – Eden-Monaro, are the seats in which the Shooters believe they will have the best chance of unseating National members.

The Shooters said that they will run a candidate in every bush seat if they can but that they would be focusing on Southern NSW. The seat of Cootamundra where Harden is situated seems to be of great significance to the party. Former Policeman Phil Donato won the seat of Orange and several candidates have already been confirmed for NSW in 2019. In an interview with The Australian following the historic Orange win, Mr Borsak described The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers as “the original deplorables”.

In the past others have written off the Shooters a niche party, a group whose advocacy for recreational pursuits is too narrow to translate to mainstream success, with any win surely a protest vote. But Mr Borsak says anyone who thought the Orange win was a flash in the pan hadn’t been paying attention. “The reality is, there is a swing on. The bush has really copped it. And people are hurting,” he said.

The level of dissatisfaction with the National Party seemed to take the Shooters Party by surprise “It was far deeper than we thought.” Since Orange the party has tried to make the Coalition government squirm by campaigning for the relocation of the Rural Fire Service headquarters to a regional base and not in the city. The Shooters are working against the privatisation of the LPI office as well as casting an eye over power prices and irrigation issues, health, education, and roads.