Last year, ahead of the federal election, David Farley jumped on Facebook to hail independent candidate Michelle Milthorpe as a “straight shooter” and a “good” woman.
This year, he wants to beat her for Pauline Hanson in Farrer.
You might call that evolution. Others might call it something else.
Because before the questions about his failed attempt to run for Labor, before the talk of a long political search for a home that matched his values, there is this remarkable fact hiding in plain sight: the One Nation candidate in Farrer was publicly supportive of the independent he now wants voters to reject.
And it didn’t stop at kind words. Receipts show Farley made a personal donation – $52.55 – in 2023 to Voices for Farrer, the movement that launched Milthorpe’s rise.
Read that again. The man now warning darkly about “teals” was recently endorsing one – and helping fund her campaign vehicle.
Farley insists all this is part of a political journey.
“Like many Australians, I explored my options before finding a political home that actually reflects my values,” he wrote on Facebook after this masthead revealed a two-year flirtation with joining Labor under Anthony Albanese.
“I briefly spoke with Labor, but their support for the Voice and net zero made it clear we were worlds apart. I found that home in One Nation because Pauline Hanson says what she means and means what she says, something neither major party can claim.”
At 69, that is quite the voyage. Because what Farley is asking conservative voters to swallow is not that he once held different views and evolved. It is that he spent two years trying to join, win preselection for and donate to a Labor Party he now says was always “worlds apart” from him – while also backing the independent he now casts as a threat.
Farley says Labor’s support for the Indigenous Voice and net zero drove him away. Yet those were hardly secret doctrines when he approached Labor in 2021. They were core business.
If he found them intolerable, why was he trying to run under them? You might have thought for someone with an interest in politics, suspicions would have dawned earlier.
Farley on Wednesday said former Labor voters he’s met feel like their values haven’t changed, just that the party has abandoned them and stopped representing working people.
“On immigration, net zero and woke issues, Labor has drifted further and further away from these formerly loyal voters, and for many, their patience has finally snapped,” he wrote.
But it is the Milthorpe endorsement that really bites. If her politics are now so dangerous, why was Farley praising her judgment only last year and donating to her movement?
That makes the Labor chapter look less like an aberration than a pattern.
Nationals member. Labor aspirant. Labor donor. Milthorpe supporter. Voices donor. Pauline Hanson insurgent.
At some point, a political journey starts looking like a weather vane.
Or, less charitably, a man adopting the views of whatever room he happens to be standing in. Milthorpe and Nationals leader Matt Canavan have been right to press it.
Her point is not that people cannot change their minds. She says she was a Coalition voter herself.
It is whether voters are being sold a political identity assembled for this election.
And yet, the bigger absurdity may belong to the Coalition parties prepared to preference him. Some are now questioning that decision.
As James Campbell wrote in the Herald Sun, there is “a world of difference between having clean hands in the election of a Hansonite MP and being responsible for that outcome”.
If Farley wins – and published opinion polling suggests he may – it will probably be on Liberal and Nationals preferences. That would not merely deliver One Nation its first elected lower house MP. It would legitimise it.
And it would be through a candidate whose own ideological coordinates appear, at best, fluid. The revelations incensed One Nation’s leadership behind the scenes, who, as ABC’s 7.30 program revealed, learnt of them in this publication.
The Coalition seems to believe Farley would be easier to dislodge at the next election than an independent. It is a colossal bet, but reeks of short-term tactics over long-term strategy. Never mind a strong set of political beliefs or values.
In a seat that resembles countless regional electorates, the consequences travel well beyond Farrer. It lends substance to a Taylor-Canavan-Hanson axis some have until now dismissed as fevered talk.
All this for a candidate whose defence boils down to saying he was still politically workshopping himself in his mid-60s.
Farley says he chose One Nation because Pauline Hanson “says what she means and means what she says”.
But after trying to run for Labor, then endorsing Milthorpe one year and running against her the next, voters might reasonably ask whether David Farley means any of what he says.
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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.