This is how it works. This is how you fool some of the people some of the time.
Whack on the mole skins, the hat, chew on a bit of straw, speak with a nasal drawl and voila, your transformation from city slicker to the farmers friend is complete. Or so they thought….
“…..How could such a collective madness have settled over a party that exists only to serve the people of regional and rural NSW?
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In part it is because the party has been infiltrated by politicians in NSW who hold views that are better suited to the Greens, with their preoccupation with issues such as same-sex marriage and euthanasia, and their advocacy for Safe Schools, the social engineering ruse on sexual and gender fluidity that poses as an anti-bullying program.
Too many of these Nationals MPs are ambitious city slicker elitists posing as country people, who just slum it with the deplorables as the price to pay for a parliamentary career. Educated at schools like Cranbrook and Newington, with law degrees earned while playing politics in the Young Nationals or Young Liberals, they have careers as party apparatchiks before being launched into a safe seat or an upper house berth.
Scott Barrett, the Nationals candidate for Orange, was cut from a similar cloth — a former political staffer and ABC reporter.
While he’d grown up in the area, he left when he was 12 to go to school and the only family left in the district was a grandfather in a nursing home.
“He hasn’t ever had a mortgage, or owned a home here or raised a family or run a business or lived though the droughts,” says one lifetime local who also didn’t vote National for the first time.
“He’s seen the floods in the last two months but he hasn’t lived it … he already spoke like a politician. He was already one of them.”
He won preselection over four good local candidates with ties to the community, but locals say he seemed to have the inside running, knowing the names and addresses of the Nationals members who he needed to butter up before his rivals did.
At a time when the Nationals were on the nose, the last thing they wanted was another careerist political apparatchik parachuted in….” Trump’s Code Orange has hit rural NSW