Farrer (Lib vs IND 6.2%, Lib vs ALP 12.9%)
By-Election 9 May
Cause of by-election resignation of Sussan Ley (Lib)
The rolling of Sussan Ley as leader of a floundering Liberal Party has led to a fascinating by-election for her seat of Farrer. This guide will be updated from time to time with any polling news and with items of interest re candidates etc. I will be providing live coverage on the night of May 9.
Farrer
Much of the electoral history of Farrer has been told in Antony Green's post here. It has had just four MPs since 1949, three Liberals and a National. Until very recently it had only ever been of the slightest interest when vacant. Tim Fischer easily won the seat for the Nationals at the 1984 general election. On his retirement in 2001 Sussan Ley gained it for the Liberals by 206 votes after preferences, the result being so close only because Labor ran and recommended preferences to the Nationals.
The seat has never been 2PP-competitive, only sneaking into technical 2PP-marginal territory by a handful of votes in 1972. It saw its first serious independent attempt when Albury Mayor Kevin Mack ran against Ley in 2019. This attempt was so hyped that betting agencies gave Mack a roughly even chance of winning but Ley won very easily, clearing 50% on primaries with a 60.9% 2CP.
Until the 2025 election Ley had the longest active streak of wins on first preferences in the parliament (seven) but the challenge from Voices of Farrer and Climate200 endorsed Michelle Milthorpe severely dented Ley's primary vote and Ley finished up with only a 6.2% margin after preferences. However, Farrer remained one of the most conservative seats in the country, ranking 11th on Coalition House of Reps 2PP down from 8th in 2022. Some might think its 2PP being near the top of the list was down to Ley's personal vote but this is actually not true at all; on above the line Senate 2PP Farrer was in fact the Coalition's fourth best seat nationwide.
Who's in the mix?
There are five four possibly competitive forces in Farrer. Comments re candidates will be added when known but this is not intended as a candidate guide. All candidates can be seen in a debate here.
* Liberals. Contesting. Justin Clancy (MP for Albury (Lib 16.3%)) was reported as a possible Liberal contender (setting up a scenario where he and Helen Dalton might both resign their state seats to run) but isn't running. The candidate is Raissa Butkowski, an Albury councillor.
* Nationals. Contesting. The Nationals candidate is Brad Robertson, a former military commander.
* One Nation. Contesting. Sooner than they might have liked, One Nation faces a potential get off the pot moment. If their national polling is still as high as at present following the change in Liberal leadership then they would be expected to poll strongly in this by-election and failure to do so would damage their momentum and raise some questions about their standing in the polls. The One Nation candidate is David Farley, a prominent agricultural businessman. As is common with One Nation candidates he already has a problematic past comment that has resurfaced - but this one is also attracting more endorsements than most. Oh, more trouble - he claims it was an accident. (Three times?)
Further debate broke out with news that Farley had sought to join and run for Labor in 2022 and had also donated to them as recently as 2023, although this seems to result more than anything from a dislike of the Coalition. One Nation supporters have been defensive about this but the fact is that the party has a woeful defection rate and their habit of slurping up other parties' rejects is an obvious contributing factor to this.
In the final days of the campaign perceptions that Farley is going to become an independent at some point, perhaps sooner rather than later, if elected are growing.
* Milthorpe (IND). Contesting. Michelle Milthorpe immediately announced she would run for Farrer again.
Also-rans
Interesting by-elections often attract large fields of uncompetitive micro-party and obscure independent candidates, some of whom are often paper candidates from nowhere near the electorate.
* The Greens' candidate is Richard Hendrie.
* Family First (v 2) immediately announced they would re-run Rebecca Scriven who polled 2.15% in 2025. I have not been able to verify from her S44 declaration whether Scriven is eligible for election or not - though she plausibly could be - as this apparently depends on her year of birth.
* Gerard Rennick People First announced they were running, to the vivid interest of nobody; they came last with 2.02% in 2025. Their candidate, James Bonniefin, as best I can tell has never lived in the electorate.
* Sustainable Australia is running Lucas James Ellis.
* Gary Pappin is an independent and a councillor on Murray River Council. He has experience in mining, farming and water resource management. Pappin is a Mutthi Mutthi man who has had a significant role in management of the Mungo National Park and the Willandra Lakes Region World Heritage Area. Pappin doesn't seem to be any kind of easily classifiable independent, I would probably have put him under group 5 (others) in my federal election article.
* Legalise Cannabis are running Aimee Lee Pearson. It appears she is ineligible for election as her S44 checklist says that she has applied to renounce New Zealand citizenship but has not received the renunciation yet.
* Roger Woodward is a serial independent candidate with a pretty random collection of policies who has also run in Cook and Berowra. He does not live in the electorate (in fact he lives in Hornsby in Berowra).
* The Shooters Fishers and Farmers candidate is Peter Sinclair.
Not Contesting
* Dalton (IND) Helen Dalton is the state MP for the district of Murray, which is the western end of Farrer. She won the seat in 2019 as an endorsed Shooters, Fishers and Farmers candidate but running a largely independent-style campaign. She quit said party in 2022 over water issues, and was returned as an independent in 2023 with an outright majority in a field of ten candidates. Dalton was already canvassing a possible run for Farrer in 2028. She would have to resign her state seat to contest. On Mar 6 Dalton confirmed she would not contest.
* Labor: I did not believe Labor could have be competitive if they ran and I could not see much reason for them to risk embarrassment by doing so, so I was not surprised they decided not to bother. Independents will miss that portion of their Labor preferences that comes from how to vote cards, but it is also possible in such a crowded field that an ALP run could have squeezed out independents and stopped them winning.
* Jordi Queiruga (IND): Announced running, has notified me he has withdrawn, website taken down.
* The unregistered Riverina State Party (which supports a new state covering the Victorian/NSW border areas) expressed interest in running but this may have been contingent on its registration being approved in time, which didn't happen. The party submitted a list of 1646 putative members to the AEC in late October 2025 but has not been advertised yet. The advertising phase followed by AEC assessment takes more than a month and party registration froze once the writ was issued for the by-election. (I've heard they may have passed AEC checking prior to advertising.)
Prospects
This section will be edited where needed to update it. As of 15 March we have a messy four-way battle where it is not obvious who the final two will be. The AEC will have a challenging task in picking which candidate pair to use for the notional two-candidate count on the night (they may go with Liberal vs Milthorpe just because those were the final two last time, though there has been one poll suggesting One Nation could make the final two.)
Farrer is a relatively strong seat for One Nation, but not super strong. Their Reps primary of just an average 6.6% is misleading because it would have been affected by Milthorpe and the relatively large field. In the Senate, One Nation polled 9.96% in Farrer, compared to a NSW total of 6.06%. If their national polling swing is real and flows through to Farrer they should be looking at a primary of at very least high 20s and probably much more (because One Nation tend to get inflated swings in strong areas) - but it's not that simple.
At the 2025 election, minor right preferences did not assist Ley vs Milthorpe, with One Nation, Family First and GRPF breaking only slightly to her and Trumpet of Patriots and Shooters Fishers and Farmers preferences breaking to Milthorpe. This suggests a lot of the voters in Farrer while anti-Labor aren't wildly pro-Coalition either and are looking for any alternative ahead of the majors (something we also saw with strong ON flows to independents in the 2022 SA election). I'd expect on that basis that any independents that run and One Nation are to a more than obvious degree fishing in the same pond. Perhaps this will make it hard for One Nation to get a really high primary - but it is also a problem for the independent.
It is possible that Milthorpe could get a large enough primary from many of the seat's non-conservative voters to lead on primaries, with the question then being how strong are the flows between the conservative parties and in what order they are knocked out. Butkowski seems a good choice by the Liberals to attempt to cover off against Milthorpe.
Dalton would have been a dangerous opponent on preferences had she run and made the final two, but with a splintered vote and having to sit between Milthorpe and One Nation it could have been hard for her to do so.
The South Australian election showed generally not very good performances by rural/regional independents, with One Nation polling fully as well as their polling implied.
All kinds of modelling and calculations may be entered into as to what might occur here but in a rural electorate and with this being a by-election and not a general, I suspect a lot of it will be about candidate quality and the outcome could therefore be quite different from any modelling attempt.
Polls etc
Single-seat polling is unreliable.
An Australia Institute seat poll (presumably a uComms poll) was reported on 9 Mar taken sometime between 5 and 9 Mar with "One Nation topped the count at 28.6 per cent of the total, followed by independent Ms Milthorpe (23.3 per cent), the Liberal Party (19.1 per cent), Labor (not running - 9 per cent), undecided voters (8.6 per cent) and the Greens (3.9 per cent), and the remaining 2.3 per cent favoured another party or candidate." The news.com.au report omitted a feeble 5.2% for the Nationals. While the media report said 64.1% of the non-One Nation voters would not consider voting for them at all ... which doesn't necessarily mean they won't preference them. After reallocating Labor and undecided thanks to the full poll report (with a few minor design issues not helping) I estimate the primaries at One Nation 31.4 Milthorpe 29.4 Liberal 21.7 National 7.4 Green 5.4 other 2.7 (an underestimate as other was excluded from the undecided voter follow-up), unaccounted for 1.8. Note that Milthorpe's support could be overestimated by her being named, so there's actually a good chance here that the final two would be One Nation vs Liberal, making it possible the Liberals could retain on Milthorpe and Greens preferences. As with many uComms polls the 18-34 age group is curiously conservative looking in this poll. A question in the form "who do you least want to win" gets One Nation 37.1 Milthorpe 29.5 Liberal 22.2 National 11.2.
A second uComms commissioned by Milthorpe and taken April 9-10 has One Nation ahead - on raw primaries ON 30.9 Milthorpe 30 Lib 16.1 Nat 7.1 Greens 3.8 FF 1.2 SAP 0.1 (yay!) Others 2.9 undecided 7.9, coming out to 52.7-47.3 to One Nation by respondent preferences (which I would expect to underestimate the margin because of Coalition how to vote cards favouring One Nation). The sample has Farley 14.6 points ahead on primaries of male voters with Milthorpe 12 points ahead among female voters. I have not found a distribution of the undecided. The major candidates were named. One Nation's social media account has misleadingly published the breakdown for male voters as if it was the overall poll.
Sky News said that "leaked" (by which they mean given away) Liberal polling had One Nation winning easily but provided no further details, other than it sounds like One Nation are ahead on primaries.
In non-poll news:
A projection tweeted by the 6 News @auspoll6 Twitter account (with One Nation very narrowly winning) was incorrectly claimed to be a poll by some accounts despite being explicitly labelled as a projection based off Newspoll and as not being a by-election prediction. The tweet has now been deleted following criticism, including from Pyxis who conduct Newspoll. What was not stated in the tweet was that the projection (with One Nation narrowly beating Liberal) was not even a uniform swing projection off Newspoll but was a projection of what would happen in Farrer if a general election was held now based on various (as far as I'm aware) unpublished assumptions about how the primary votes found by Newspoll would be reflected in particular seats. There is a danger even if someone grasps that such a model is a projection of them thinking that there is one particular way to project a seat off a national poll, or even that projecting a seat off a national poll is any kind of reliable exercise.
Other projections such as MRP outputs are of limited value too. MRP outputs are meant to be collectively indicative of groups of seat types, and not reliable for a single seat at the best of times. But also they are not designed for by-elections. For a by-election what we want to see is seat-specific polling, preferably neutrally commissioned, transparent and certainly without any "aided vote" preambles.
Betting
Amusingly, seat betting has been seen. Seat betting is not reliably predictive. As of 16 Feb an early offering was NAT 2.00 Ind 2.99 ON 4.50 Lib 4.75 ALP 34 Greens 67.
23 Feb: Ind 2.50 Nat 2.60 ON 3.50 Lib 7 ALP 51 Greens 101
5 Mar: Ind 1.91 Nat 3.40 ON 4.33 Lib 7 ALP 51 Greens 101
As of 13 Mar the above odds hadn't moved, a different site had Ind 1.65 ON 2.75 Nat 4.50 Lib 8.00. On 15 Mar Ind was out to 1.75 and Nat in to 3.75 on that one.
16 Mar: Second market now at Ind 1.90 ON 2.40 Nat 3.75 Lib 9.00.
18 Mar: Both markets similar now: Ind 2 ON 2.60 Nat 5.10 Lib 8.00 vs Ind 1.85 ON 2.5 Nat 5.50 Lib 9.00
24 Mar: 1.95/2.39/6.40/8.50 vs 1.80/2.30/7.50/8.00
8 April: One is offline, the second is 1.75/1.95/9/13, so the market increasingly sees this as a Milthorpe vs One Nation race.
24 April: Not sure when it finally flipped (had done so by April 20) but now ON 1.40 vs 2.80 and 1.38/3.10
30 April: 1.33/3.30/19/51.
7 May: 1.18/4.75/19/51. Another site had 1.09 vs 6.50
