Casey Briggs

And it's got some pretty big names associated with it.

Obviously, Susan Lee, a former leader of the party, and her predecessor was Tim Fisher, who's a giant of the National's party.

So the Liberal Party feel, you know, some ownership over this part.

of the country because it is quite literally where the Liberal Party of Australia was sort of founded, if you can point to any one place.

But the other thing is, this is a huge seat, 126,000 kilometres.

It's bigger than many small countries, bigger than South Korea, Iceland.

It's almost the size of Greece.

And it means there are many, many local issues and sub-local issues that are at play here.

And it means we may well see different candidates doing well in different parts of the seat.

And so what we might end up seeing is this dynamic where Michelle Milthorpe, as she did last time, is going to take a big chunk out of what would formerly have been the Liberal Party vote, especially in a city like Albury, where Michelle Milthorpe won last year.

But outside of Albury, One Nation might end up doing really well and clobbering what would otherwise have been, you would think, National's vote.

And so it's this demonstration of the squeeze that you've got on both sides of the coalition of independents and, you know, more moderate voices on one flank trying to sort of peel away one part of the traditional liberal broad church.

while you've got One Nation and other sort of populist parties and candidates on the other flank trying to pull away other parts.

And then you've got the coalition stuck in the middle trying to work out what to do with that.

And that is a microcosm, a little mini diorama of what we're seeing nationally to different levels in different seats.

But we're getting a good sense of that national squeeze just playing out in this one seat.

And that's what's making this election so interesting and so significant, because it may well inform the strategies that Matt Canavan, that Angus Taylor

Pauline Hanson and One Nation and that the independence movement all take from here.

Yeah, we're seeing an interesting, complicated mix of local issues.

This is a local by-election where local people are campaigning to be a local member of parliament, overlain with lots of national issues as well and national polling surges.