You don’t hear much of Louis Mountbatten these days, but he’s not forgotten at Deniliquin RSL. Past the small artillery pieces in the foyer and up a flight of stairs, there’s a “Mountbatten Room”, complete with 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma’s picture behind the bar. But the bar is empty and closed; it’s barely 9.30 in the morning, and about a dozen Deni business people have come to have a round table with their local member, Liberal Sussan Ley.
By Ley’s standards, the two-plus-hour drive from Albury we’ve just undertaken is neither here nor there in an electorate that, since she took it off the Nationals in 2001, has expanded to nearly a quarter of a million kilometres in size. It now run from Albury west to the South Australian border and up western NSW to Queensland. Ley, a pilot, tends to fly herself if the road trip is going to be more than a couple of hours, especially to Broken Hill, 900 kilometres from Albury, where she’s based.
When I last visited in the 2010 campaign, Ley was a backbencher; she’s now opposition spokeswoman for employment participation, childcare and early childhood learning, which further complicates the travel. Thus, tomorrow she’s flying to Broken Hill with a couple of stops along the way to meet locals. From Broken Hill, she’s making a late-night drive south to Wentworth, down near the Victorian border, three hours away. From there, a lightning dash to Canberra to speak at a conference her senior shadow, Christopher Pyne, is unable to make it to, via flights from Mildura to Melbourne to Canberra. Then she’s getting almost the next flight back to Melbourne, then to Mildura and back to Wentworth (the Wentworth Show is on this weekend), before returning up the Silver City Highway to Broken Hill to collect her plane to fly herself back to Albury. One foggy morning could throw the whole itinerary out.
Ley has an office in Broken Hill, visits every six to eight weeks and has already been once since the campaign started, hoping to get her vote up over 50% there, a remarkable achievement for a town with Broken Hill’s history. She later says she dropped into Silverton, up the road from Broken Hill, to check out the Mad Max Museum. You’ve got to love highway driving to be a politician here, and it’s not revealing anything too damning to suggest Ley’s interest in Max’s V8 Interceptor isn’t just for political show. She does, however, currently have all her demerit points intact.
Back in Deni, Ley is listening to the locals rather than in campaigning mode. In 2010 she was up against a popular ex-Nat local independent based in Deni, and fared comparatively poorly in the town by her standards. The town itself is a collection of mixed signals. The surrounding country is green and lush; a real estate agent complains of not having any rental properties, compared with high levels of vacancies in recent years. Another business person talks of the growing tourism coming through and the pressures for seven-day-a-week hospitality operations versus penalty rates.
But the usual evidence of rural decline can be found if you look for it: shuttered shops, the lots in the middle of town that lie empty, the lawn tennis courts that sit overgrown. “It’s quiet,” retailers say when Ley later doorknocks some shops. A local IT provider complains of the impact of GST-free online purchasing. No one’s building new houses, the estate agent complains. The Murray-Darling Basin Plan is no longer the hot-button issue it was, but it remains a constant source of concern in a region heavily dependent on irrigation — although flooding is the greater concern currently than losing water. A businessman who owns a grain-cleaning firm complains of the cost of fuel, saying if it can’t go down; he wants it stable so he can plan better. Ley is quick to point out the Coalition will be scrapping the carbon price, a handy response that covers a multitude of economic questions.
“This is the nitty gritty of Ley’s job and the job of any regional or rural MP … Places where even a small amount of government money make a huge difference.”
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