Are the Liberals still Australia's conservatives?
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What significant event prompted the discussion about the Liberal Party?
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And good morning! This is the Daily Oz. This is the Daily Oz.
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Oh, now it makes sense.
MUSIC
Good morning and welcome to The Daily Oz. It's Tuesday the 12th of May, Budget Day. Happy Budget Day. I'm Emma Gillespie. Happy Budget Day. Big day for all of those in Canberra. I'm Billie Fitzsimons. Change or die. Those were some of the first words of the newly installed Liberal Party leader, Angus Taylor, in February this year.
If an election was held today, our party may not exist. by the end of it. But the choice is simple for the Liberal Party. Change or die. And I choose change.
But three months later, the Liberal opposition has suffered an historic loss at the Farah by-election, losing control of a seat in southern New South Wales that it had held for nearly 80 years. The significance of that loss is overshadowed only by the significance of One Nation's victory, whose candidate, David Farley, becomes the first One Nation MP elected to the federal parliament lower house. The result has left voters and politicians wondering, are the Liberals still Australia's leading conservative party? Well, it's a question we are going to unpack in today's Deep Dive. But first, you're going to hear a quick word from TDA co-founder Zahra.
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Emma, we're talking today about a by-election. And now it's not often that we would do a whole episode on a by-election because it's only one electorate out of the 150 something like that. And so usually when there's an election in Australia, it's all of the electorates. This is only one electorate. It's because a former member left. And so they had to find a new representative for this electorate. And usually it's not that interesting. It kind of gives you a temperature check on how Australians are thinking about the political parties. But this one was different because it was very interesting in the fact that they did elect the first ever One Nation member to the House of Representatives.
Yep.
Why don't we start there in why it's so interesting that this electorate did elect a One Nation candidate?
Yeah, so you're right that by-elections tend to be a helpful temperature check of how the electorate is feeling about the major parties, but temperature check feels like an understatement on what we saw unfold over the weekend. We're talking about Farrer, which is a rural division that covers about 126,000 square kilometres of southwest New South Wales. This is a huge federal division by land. It's been held by the Coalition continuously for 77 years and 25 of those years it was held by Susan Lee, the former opposition leader who was ousted as leader of the Liberal Party and resigned from Parliament as a result... in February following that successful leadership challenge by Angus Taylor. So Susan Lee left, Farrah needed a new MP to represent it in Parliament.
And so that's how we got to the election itself actually happening over the weekend. It was a four-way race between the Libs, the Nats, a One Nation candidate and an independent candidate named Michelle Milthorpe. Now, an interesting little bit of trivia for you, Billie, is that the Nationals and the Liberals were both allowed to put a candidate forward in FARA because the seat was vacated by Lee. Normally, under their coalition agreement, the Nationals would have stayed out of that contest or they stay out of each other's contests. But there were two candidates after voting was counted or began to be counted that the Australian Electoral Commission deemed most likely to be the final two in the count.
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