Rural Aussies flex political muscles

Tony Windsor. Photo / Getty Images

Five hours' drive from Sydney at the top of the Great Dividing Range, a mountainous stretch that runs from Queensland right down the east coast of Australia, Guyra is a typical Australian farming town.

Low-rise buildings with ageing facades line the windswept main street. The locals are used to the hardships that come with lives lived far from the excitements of city life.

The unusually dry, hot weather has caused financial difficulty for many farmers here. Cattle have been transported at great expense to far-flung corners of the state in search of feed. And because of a severe winter, grass won't grow now for some time yet.

Normally, such complaints and anxieties would be lucky to get a hearing in Canberra. But these are not ordinary times in Australian politics. The August 21 general election has left the country's future on a knife-edge, facing a hung Parliament in which three independent MPs hold the balance of power.

One of them, Tony Windsor, is the MP for this area, in the New England region of New South Wales. Negotiations between the "kingmakers" and the main political parties will begin in earnest this week.

In the Royal Guyra Hotel, where the main bar is dressed with purple, black and white bunting in honour of the Guyra Ghosts, the town's rugby team, there is a palpable air of expectation. The poll has placed the concerns of rural Australia at the heart of the national conversation.

Farmers like Craig Waters intend to make the most of it.

Waters was forced to send 250 of his cattle out to Brewarrina, five hours' drive to the west, because of the drought. The recent rains mean it'll be a better spring in Guyra, but the money he spent on freight is gone.

"Everyone thinks Australia revolves around Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and country people don't get much of a say," said Waters, 42.

"We'll get a say now because of the hung Parliament. We'll certainly get things happening around here."

Windsor is a wheat farmer but has just sold his property to a coal mining company. He has said he'll push for better broadband and telecommunications in the bush.

In Guyra, the need is also for better healthcare outside the big regional centres, meaning better government subsidies to encourage doctors to come to the bush. Many of the doctors who come to small country towns stay for only a short time and then disappear again.

Interest rates are also a prime rural concern. Farmers tend to be asset rich and cash poor, so high interest rates can be crippling.

Despite the strong electoral performance of the Greens and the recent drought, climate change is not top of their agenda.

"People around here don't connect the drought with climate change. We think it's a cycle," says Waters. "If you look back, there was a big drought in '68 and another in '77."

According to Waters, neither the Greens nor Labor are interested in the "man on the land. The Greens are anti-rural".

Mark Atkin, also a farmer, agrees.

"Country people are not allowed to clear their land because of the Greens. They want you to stop cutting down trees. Farmers own freehold land and they want to be able to clear if they need to."

Their concern is that Tony Windsor might side with Labor in a minority government also containing the Greens. According to the latest polls, 55 per cent of voters in this region back a coalition government - the traditional alliance between the Liberals and the Nationals.

If Windsor used his new-found influence to prop up Julia Gillard's Labor, they say, he'd never get another vote in this town.

Alan St Clair is a member of the Nationals, for generations seen as the country party. He, too, fears Windsor may side with Labor.

That, he believes, would be a vote for the Greens (who would be part of a Labor minority government) and it's not what country people want.

"We believe the Greens are a bunch of tree huggers and radical socialists," he says. "If you look at their website, they want to go back to higher taxes and redistribution of wealth."

There are dissenting voices. A few kilometres away at Black Mountain, John Ross, a sheep farmer, expresses a strong concern over environmental issues and hopes the solar panels outside his country house will one day be commonplace in New England.

But the views of St Clair are more representative: "Yes, the climate keeps changing and it's been going for millions of years. If you cut carbon dioxide it'll make absolutely no difference, but it will radically change the way we live."

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