Independent candidate for Tamworth Stan Heuston writes:
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I should preface my remarks on the election with a comment on the position of the media.
The situation where I declared the result of the election on Facebook at 8pm on the Wednesday before polling day, in historical rather than governmental terms, is pretty much an impossible one for the media.
The media must report the election in terms of voting outcomes and their likelihood. Without those, our democracy is already dead. The sign of the end is when “crisis in the state” means the election has to be postponed.
That notwithstanding, it is now appropriate to say I ran because I could see no likelihood that otherwise any result in the election would affect anything. I saw the electorate like Yeats’ Kiltartan poor:
“No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.”
It was easy for me to to concede that the specific campaign issues – electricity, mining.etc – were important; they are indeed the substance of government. But to my mind, and what the media could hardly say, was that the Tamworth debate of those issues was like debating cyclones, earthquakes or sunspots - important, but you can’t affect them.
In brief, I fully accept Mr Anderson’s commitment to reconciling mining and farming, and private and public electricity ownership, and am at a loss to see, if Mr Draper had won Tamworth, how as an independent he could have prevented the Baird government’s continuation of these policies.
This is why I was so comfortably able to imply throughout the campaign that its central issue – historically speaking – was that only 39 per cent of 18 to 29-year-olds think democracy is the best system of government (Lowy Institute). It is why I can acknowledge the historic contribution of both Tamworth’s state political leaders, Peter Draper and Kevin Anderson.
It is the nature of leadership that the ideas leaders embrace become their own.
What history will record, I suggest, is that the first time democratic reform of the political parties was extended out of party conferences and review panels to the people in an election, the electorate’s two leaders had given that reform a winning bipartisanship by 10am on Wednesday, March 25.
History will acknowledge moreover that this agreement occurred because both our leaders personally supported political party reform and both responsibly recognised that such support expressed the views of their constituents.
Quite a few voters at the polling booths said fixing up politics was impossible; none opposed it. As one journalist said when I ran through the planks of my platform: “Who’s going to oppose that?”
On this issue, we made a difference. The reform efforts of Howard, Faulkner, Kelly, Rudd now have the backing of the people - in Tamworth first, once again.
I’ll thank my Facebook friends separately, but thanks to my nominators and all who voted for me.
As I write, I have had no indication of how many votes I got because the television was only reporting the main candidates. It is not an issue since my main campaign, on Facebook, had to be aborted, as my Facebook friends know, on Wednesday night, one of those actions one happily takes for greater gain that is just part of politics.
On this count I am all the more indebted to those who voted for me.