With the Farrer by-election on 9 May approaching, an independent campaign is challenging decades of Coalition dominance by turning up, listening and building support town by town.
A team of warriors drove 1,500 kilometres through the western edge of the Farrer electorate in recent weeks. Deniliquin. Balranald. Wentworth. Gol Gol. Hay. Darlington Point. Narrandera and back to Albury. Door-knocking for Michelle Milthorpe, the independent candidate trying to do something that hasn’t been done since 1949: take this seat from the Liberal/National Party. The deficit is about 600 votes. The race is statistically tied. But numbers don’t knock on doors. People do.
His nose had been introduced to a few brick walls in its time. Flat as a tack. His cheeks – you could read the whole Murray-Darling Basin in them. Creeks, tributaries, the odd billabong. A landscape that’s seen floods and more than a few droughts. Up top, a few scattered strands of hair still put up a fight. They had a go at being blond once. Now they just hang on out of sheer habit.
We’ve still got real characters out here. Earthy. Legitimate. They’ve copped a few blows – some self-inflicted, most not – and they’re still standing. Working pedigree: shearing, dam building, excavation. But the certainty. That’s what got me. He’s not angry at me. I’m just the furniture. But the governments? The institutions? He’d line them up against a wall if he could. The urgency is there. Like an army general waiting too long for permission to attack. He’ll vote One Nation. She’ll shake the place up. “Full of shit. All of them.” You nod. You came to listen.
Hay is different. Michelle called it a “cup half full” place – she was right. The refurbished John Houston Memorial Swimming Pool opened last December: $8.1 million, Council contributing just $200,000, the rest from a solar company and government grants. It includes a 50-metre pool, a children’s splash area, all-abilities access, and motion-detection AI for swimmer safety – the first of its kind outside a metropolitan area. That’s Hay. Not sitting around whingeing. Getting on with it.
We stopped for coffee at the Bakery in Deniliquin on the main street. The owner was a Vietnamese woman who’d been in Deni for 20 years. She arrived with nothing. Learned the trade from the old bloke who owned the place. Bought him out when he retired.
“Hard work,” she said, “but good work.” I asked about the town. “People here are good. When my husband was sick, the neighbours brought meals every night for a month. You don’t get that in the city.” I asked about politics. She shrugged. “I don’t talk politics. I just make pies.” Then: “Michelle came in last week. She sat right there.” She pointed to a table by the window. “She listened. That’s more than most of them do.” She wrapped a pastie and handed it to me. On the house. I tried to pay. She wouldn’t take it.
A young bloke in Narrandera, maybe 25. A tradie. He answered the door with a toddler on his hip. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m voting for Michelle.” I asked why. “Because she showed up. No one else has. The Liberals take us for granted. One Nation just yells. Labor doesn’t even bother. But she came here. She knocked on this door. She asked what I thought.” He shifted the toddler to his other hip. “I told her about the hospital. How we have to drive to Wagga for anything serious. How my mum waited six hours in emergency last year with a broken wrist. She wrote it down. In a notebook. Like she actually cared.” He shrugged. “So yeah. She gets my vote. And my mum’s. And my old man’s. That’s three she didn’t have before.” The toddler waved. “Good luck,” he said. And closed the door.
The Murray at Wentworth is wide and slow. The junction with the Darling is a muddy, beautiful meeting of waters. You stand there and understand why people fight over this. The Murray-Darling Basin Plan was supposed to end the water wars. For many towns it has hastened a slow ruin instead. The buybacks – billions spent purchasing irrigation entitlements in the name of environmental flows – stripped productive water and with it the economic lifeblood of communities. Farms running on fractions of former allocations. Businesses closing – the hardware store, the café, the contractor who serviced the pumps. When you remove the productive capacity of a farming community, you don’t just lose farms. You lose mechanics, school enrolments, football clubs. You lose the reason for the town to exist.
A local told me the rains in March had broken the drought. “Best autumn break in years. The feed is back.” They don’t ask for much out here. Just rain at the right time. And a government that stops selling their water to fix a plan never properly explained to the people it was meant to help.
One man claimed he’d seen the best and the worst. “Tip the whole show upside down,” he said. “It’s full of shit right now.” Then something that stuck. “In my life, I reckon I’ve seen the best of this country. And I never expected I’d see the worst. But I have.” He paused. Looked at nothing in particular. “We are all fucked.” Not angry, exactly. Just sure. The way a man is sure when the sun’s going down and he’s run out of reasons to think tomorrow will be any different.
The verdict: we drove over 1,500 kilometres and we knocked on hundreds of doors. We talked to farmers, mothers, teenagers, publicans, retirees, and tradies. There were positive stories, but the water, the hospitals, the businesses closing tend to eclipse them. The towns are running thin. Not abstract policy debates – the texture of daily life out here. The people living it want to be heard. They want someone to show up and write it down.
Trust is built on doorsteps, not billboards. The community independence movement aims to empower electorates like this – and when people understand that, they jump on board.
Tony McDonald
Tony McDonald volunteered for Michelle Milthorpe’s campaign in April 2026. With a team from all over he drove nearly 1,200 kilometres, enjoyed meeting his fellow Australians, and was barked at by more small dogs than he cares to remember. Tony, who comes from the Federal seat of Indi and supports community independents, has a professional background in agriculture and environment.