Joe McGirr doesn’t like labels.
And the country doctor who supports renewable energy and describes himself as “not pro-choice” on abortion defies them too.
McGirr is still coming to terms with having wrestled the seat of Wagga Wagga in regional New South Wales from the state Liberal party after 60 years when he speaks to the Guardian.
“I still can’t quite believe it, to tell you the truth,” he says.
But the incoming state MP – a former emergency physician and University of Notre Dame academic who supports the South Sydney Rabbitohs and admires the writer Tim Winton – is quickly learning that, in politics, avoiding a tag can be hard graft.
“People want me to tell them what I am, not who I am,” he says.
“They want me to describe myself somehow. But I’m reluctant to say that I’m left or right, conservative or liberal. I’m independent, and I think that people should be able to judge me on what I do.”
Attempting to shoehorn McGirr into an ideological box would be a tricky task. The father of four whose wife, Kerin Fielding, was the first female orthopaedic surgeon in NSW, has published extensively on the health-related impacts of climate change.
“Most of the community would accept that we need to get our power sources sustainable, and we need to bring the whole community with us on that,” he says.
“I think really it’s the lack of certainty in direction that is frustrating. Business is pretty good at sorting this stuff out when they know what the rules of the game are, and the frustrating thing is that they aren’t being given certainty.
“And look, in the medical literature, I don’t want to sound like an academic, but in the medical literature no one is arguing about whether climate change is real. What they’re trying to work out is how we’re going to die from it.”
But McGirr is also a practising Catholic who describes himself as “not pro-choice” and during the campaign faced suggestions from the deputy premier, John Barilaro, that he might be pretending to be a National.
Access to abortion is a live issue in Wagga. The city is without an abortion clinic, and women are forced to travel to Albury, 120km away, for the procedure.
Advocates also say accessing the abortion drug RU486 is difficult because many of the town’s local GPs are Catholic and conservative.
“I’m not pro-choice but having said that there has been an ongoing issue with access to services here [and] the community has made it clear about the services that need to be available,” McGirr says. “They need to be available in a safe and appropriate way.”
McGirr said he acknowledged “it is the government’s responsibility” to deliver those services.
These positions aren’t contradictory, of course, but in a political landscape increasingly defined by tribalism, McGirr takes his independence seriously.
“During the campaign I kept getting asked who I was going to preference. Well, the answer was no one because if I do that I’m not longer an independent,” he says.
McGirr’s brother, Michael McGirr, believes part of the new MP’s unwillingness to belong to one ideological camp or another may stem from his family’s long history of involvement in politics on both sides of the aisle.
His great uncle, James McGirr, was a loyal supporter of Jack Lang and later became the premier of NSW for the Labor party, from 1947 to 1952. His grandfather and another great uncle were ministers in Labor governments in NSW in the 1920s.
On the other side of the fence is his great aunt Trixie Gardner, better known as Baroness Gardner of Parkes. The 92-year-old Tory member of the British House of Lords is the only Australian to be elevated to the peerage and is also a devout Catholic.
Michael McGirr – a writer and former Jesuit priest – says politics “was always part of the family conversation” growing up in Cammeray on Sydney’s lower north shore.
The family, he says, were Labor supporters of the “conservative kind”. His mother was the secretary of the Willoughby branch of the ALP, while his father was “sympathetic” to the Democratic Labor party.
“Mum was not really that into politics but in those days she believed she was keeping the position from falling to a communist,” Michael McGirr says. “I don’t know if there were ever that many communists in Willoughby, but that’s why she was there.”
It’s partly for that reason that Michael McGirr was not shocked when his brother made his first foray into politics, garnering 30% of the primary vote in 2011.
“Joseph’s focus is pretty much on getting results,” he says.
“When he ran in 2011 I think he very much wanted to win, but when he lost and the government committed to rebuilding the hospital he thought that was a great outcome. I think that meant more to him than whether he won or not.
“I wouldn’t like to speculate too much on his motivations [but] really for him I think it’s about service.”
And, in the age of the career politician, he said his brother’s life as a medical doctor would give him real-life context to the rigours of political life.
“When he was in charge of accident and emergency Wagga, he told me once about going out to an accident on the Hume [Highway]. There was a minibus crash [and] some large number of people had been killed. Joe was talking about trying to ring the families in Indonesia to tell them what had happened. The bear pit couldn’t compare with something like that, could it?”
While McGirr’s victory in Wagga was by no means expected, any shock is tempered by the conditions that existed the electorate. A disgraced outgoing MP, a mishandled local campaign by the government and the residual impact of the chaos in Canberra, combined with McGirr’s existing local profil all meant that in many ways Wagga was ripe for the picking.
But McGirr is still processing his new life as an MP, and struggling to figure out quite how it happened. “We had three weeks to campaign and we just had to go from zero to 100,” he says.
“We had two professional teams against us; the Liberals and the ALP had campaign managers who knew all the tricks while we were on pre-poll still trying to organise T-shirts.
“I have had a great team around me, of course, but I think I’m still working out how we did it.”
If nothing else, the result will serve as a warning for Australia’s big parties.
“There is certainly a disaffection with the parties and I think in Australia today people see them as very professional organisations,” McGirr says. “They appear very concerned about themselves.
“All this game-playing, anger and debate, whereas people just want them to run the country and collaborate.
“My job now is to just reflect the wishes of the community. That’s why I’m here.”
