You may have noticed that Scott Morrison has started talking about climate – he has rebadged and refunded Tony Abbott’s Direct Action emissions reduction fund and Malcolm Turnbull’s Snowy Hydro 2.0.
The Coalition’s pivots on climate echo research that centrist voters are starting to draw lines between environmental issues such as climate change, energy, clean air and water, food security and waste with capacity for leadership.
So three months out from an election, independents are emerging to challenge Coalition MPs, taking a bet that centre-right voters want action on these issues that are normally associated with the centre left.
If your attention is on the big cities, you may have missed some interesting candidates step out of the shrubbery in rural and regional seats in the past week.
Three independents have announced challenges to Barnaby Joyce, Angus Taylor and Sussan Ley at the federal election. While these would-be crossbenchers are not national household names, they are locally connected and will test the ideas, electorate voting cultures and resources of sitting MPs.
Political disengagement, climate, water and regional services rate highly on their platforms though each have local nuance which is so important in such seats.
Joyce will face a challenge from rural sustainability strategist and small businessman Adam Blakester, who comes from Werris Creek, the same place as the seat’s former independent Tony Windsor.
Joyce holds the seat on a margin of 23%, following the 2017 byelection over his dual citizenship. The contest will test Joyce’s standing following the fallout from his affair (not public prior to the byelection), but more particularly, his record as agriculture minister on issues such as live export and water management.
Blakester has been organising for four months. Like Cathy McGowan’s “kitchen table conversations”, he says he will consult with locals to construct a policy platform, but climate change and sustainability is already trending in his conversations.
But his non-negotiable priority is proper political and public governance: how politicians interact on the floor of parliament, with the media, with each other and flowing from that, an effective anti-corruption commission.
“I think there is real discontent across Australia and here in New England – I hear it’s like a school yard but as someone who has done a lot of work with schools, I wouldn’t use children as a metaphor, I wouldn’t use dogs; we need a new metaphor,” Blakester said.
“Some of their behaviour makes Taiwan’s parliament look good.”
Closer to Sydney, an adventurer, environmentalist and small businessman who was named by Time magazine as one of 25 “worldwide responsibility pioneers” will challenge energy minister Angus Taylor in Hume.
Huw Kingston won the Time title after he campaigned successfully to stop the sale of still bottled water in his hometown of Bundanoon. He needs to beat a 1o% margin in Hume which is a tricky seat that stretches from the outskirts of Sydney through the southern highlands and down to farming country near Canberra.
Kingston is more overt than Blakester about his pledge to campaign on climate change and specifically a renewable energy target of 60% by 2035 – compared with the Coalition’s abandoned target and Labor’s 50% target by 2030.
He wants to see a federal royal commission into the Murray-Darling Basin, a national policy to phase out single-use plastics, no new large-scale coalmines including Adani, an increase in the current annual refugee intake from 20,000 to 30,000, closure of Manus Island and Nauru detention centres, a very fast train link between Sydney and Canberra, and better regional health and education services.
Malcolm Turnbull’s demise got Kingston thinking about politics at a time when more reports were issued about the state of the climate. It was a “now or never” proposition.
“The story getting common for those standing and for the people out in Australia is how disappointed they are with political system over last 10 years, but it was the rolling of Turnbull in August that fired me up,” Kingston said.
“I was pissed off as a taxpayer. What other job could you do where you would be allowed to stay and do a job while destabilising inside the workplace?
“Politicians have been playing games instead of governing and it is all going on while the world continues to warm up and no one is doing anything about it.”
Different again is ex-policeman and Albury mayor Kevin Mack who is challenging Sussan Ley in the 127,000sq km seat of Farrer. Mack is more old-style country politician, reflecting the nature of his seat.
He presents as a mix of Labor and Liberal strands. Mack admires Paul Keating’s intellect in driving the agenda of the Hawke government, but says the National’s Doug Anthony was the last major party representative with “a decent regional focus”.
Mack says he is focused on the whole seat, the small towns that add ballast and productivity to the larger centres such as Albury and Griffith. Water is a big issue in the electorate, including its quality and the productivity derived from water. But he also names regional services as a concern.
“Connectivity, transport, NBN, mobile phone towers are nonexistent in Farrer,” he says. “We have 22% unemployment, which is a significant problem. If you fix water, you fix employment. And investing in mental health from the front end rather than the back end.”
Mack has connected with nearby independent candidates, including Helen Haines who is hoping to replace McGowan in Indi, and Ray Kingston, the former Yarriambiack mayor hoping to win the safe seat Mallee after the unexpected retirement of the National Andrew Broad.
It is these conversations that are changing things on the ground in rural electorates. That, combined with candidates who are more confident to challenge the notions of what a rural voter is and the policies that voters may support.
