Updated ,first published
Wherever you travel across Farrer, someone has a Michelle Milthorpe story.
In Albury, a cafe owner remembers the school concerts. In Finley, a grazier says his niece was taught by her. In Leeton, a woman recalls Milthorpe helping her friend’s son through a difficult year at school. In Howlong, a volunteer laughs that “everyone’s somehow connected to Michelle”.
It is the sort of social thread that still binds regional communities together across impossible distances. In the city, you can live in the same apartment block for years and never know your neighbour’s story.
Sprawling across irrigation towns and farming communities along the Murray River to the South Australian border, people here carry each other’s histories. They know who taught their children, who fought for water, who stood beside them through drought or during a family tragedy.
“I think what we are seeing at this election is the sense that we want better than is being offered by the major parties,” says Milthorpe, who grew up in Cootamundra but now lives in Jindera. “The way politics has worked for a while now isn’t serving the best interests of regional communities.”
That sense of regional solidarity has drawn unlikely political allies. During the campaign, veteran north Queensland independent Bob Katter travelled south to endorse Milthorpe, declaring “the real leadership in this country has always come from rural Australia”. Katter described her as “tough” and “very knowledgeable”, framing her candidacy as part of a broader rural backlash against the major parties.
Milthorpe says that community connection sits at the centre of the movement now building across the electorate. At the federal election last year, she came within striking distance of unseating Sussan Ley, cutting deeply into a margin that had once looked immovable.
More than 800 volunteers have joined this campaign, triggered by Ley’s toppling as Liberal leader and subsequent resignation, to doorknock 16,000 homes in cities and towns scattered across Farrer.
“I am a community independent,” Milthorpe says. “That’s the process that I came from.”
For decades, Farrer was the sort of seat the Liberal Party barely had to think about. Held safely by the Coalition for generations and, most recently, under Ley, many locals came to feel politics was happening somewhere else – in Canberra and Sydney, not in the towns along the Murray.
The frustration built slowly through years of water fights, disappearing services and a growing belief that safe seats had become neglected seats.
“One of my criticisms of Sussan Ley, who I voted for many times, was that the higher she got in the party, the less time she had to be present and consistent here in the electorate,” Milthorpe says. “I think that’s probably a real challenge for anybody that’s in that party setting. And I had all of these people who told me stories and had real needs that needed to be addressed.”
Now that anger is splintering in different directions. Some voters are drifting towards Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and candidate David Farley, drawn to the anti-establishment rhetoric and frustration with the political class. Others are backing Milthorpe’s community independent campaign. But both movements are being fuelled by the same sentiment: that the major parties stopped listening long ago.
The rise of candidates like Milthorpe poses a deeper problem for the Liberals than the possible loss of a single seat. Across Australia, the party has steadily lost support to organised independent campaigns led by women presenting themselves less as ideological crusaders than practical community advocates.
In wealthy city electorates, those campaigns reshaped federal politics after 2022. In Farrer, the revolt is more regional and more conservative in flavour – driven by water security, healthcare, childcare shortages and frustration at a Coalition many believe no longer understands rural communities.
The Liberals have fought hard to brand Milthorpe a “teal”, repeatedly targeting her backing from Climate 200. Milthorpe says the label never fit.
“When I announced in 2024 that I was running, I’d never had a conversation with anyone from Climate 200. And I was already being called that,” she says. “That’s just an easy, lazy way for the parties to attack independents.”
She’s never hid, nor does she regret, her connection to Climate 200 and confirms it had donated $20,000 at the start of her campaign. She says Climate 200 makes up just 2 per cent of her donations, but has not disclosed this figure. Climate 200 says it will comply with election disclosure obligations.
Regional Voices Fund, which relies heavily on money from some of the inner-city teals’ biggest donors, kickstarted her campaign in February with a $60,000 donation. Left-wing advocacy group GetUp has splashed more than $500,000 on anti-Hanson advertising, but Milthorpe’s campaign says it was not requested.
Despite the funding, Milthorpe’s policy positions often sit well outside the assumptions attached to inner-city independents.
The self-described lifelong Coalition voter says net zero by 2050 in its current form is “untenable”, argues coal and gas must continue to play a role in maintaining grid stability and says Australia should consider expanding refining capacity to strengthen fuel security.
“We do need balance right now,” she says. “We can’t do it all by renewables.”
She insists her politics are shaped by regional realities rather than activist movements.
“My policies reflect the community that I hope to represent, and have been informed by them,” she says.
Among Milthorpe’s supporters is Vicky Meyers, a longtime Liberal supporter from Deniliquin who spent years campaigning on irrigation issues before concluding regional communities had stopped being heard by the Coalition.
Meyers traces her political break to the water crises of the early 2010s, when irrigators saw allocations collapse after crops had already been planted.
“It’s all about the water,” she says. “This hasn’t surfaced overnight. This has been a groundswell for quite a few years.”
Over time, she says, frustrations over water became symbolic of something larger: the feeling communities like Deniliquin had become politically invisible.
“We tried to help with Sussan,” Meyers says. “We tried to engage.”
Instead, during the Coalition’s time in government many locals felt they were being managed rather than represented. Meyers says people realised that remaining a safe seat meant little pressure on governments to respond.
“We needed to be a marginal seat,” she says. “We needed to start working on that for what is right for Farrer.”
The movement has clear parallels with neighbouring Indi across the Victorian border, where Cathy McGowan broke the Coalition’s hold on the seat in 2013 before handing it to fellow independent Helen Haines.
McGowan says the same dissatisfaction that transformed Indi is now emerging in Farrer.
“The level of dissatisfaction that we felt being a safe seat … and the community getting organised is exactly what I see happening in Farrer,” she says.
“People look across the river and go, ‘we want some of what you’ve got’.”
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Rob Harris is the national correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age based in Canberra. He is a former Europe correspondent.Connect via email.