Tony Windsor: Scone Will Benefit

TONY Windsor said Scone will benefit from a hotly contested seat following Barnaby Joyce claiming yesterday that he is the underdog in the federal election battle for the seat of New England.

“…the seat is competitive and one of the great things about independents is that they make the seat competitive and they start to fight and we are seeing that already in the last three or four days, when they do that the electorate benefits irrespective of who the winner is,” said Mr Windsor.

“When there’s no competition there’s no need and particularly in country seats they tend to be neglected,” he said.

“There was $600,000 spent in Walcha yesterday, there was $400,000 spent in somewhere else the day before, so I think it will be an interesting time for the Scone bypass, I’d say there will be a fair bit of focus on it.

“There again I think we’ve seen in the last few days the deficit has disappeared and money is raining.

“I’ve been there when both ends have been blocked so I know the issue and we have all of those same trains come past our place, anything that goes through Scone goes past us” he said.

Yesterday Barnaby Joyce described the role of an independent in parliament as being in opposition, something Tony Windsor refuted.

“You are never in opposition, the opposition is in opposition there is a 50 percent chance of either of the major parties being in opposition at any particular time,” said Mr Windsor.

“I think my history demonstrates I’ve been able to work with people of different political persuasions over the time, my vote got Nick Greiner in, in 1991 and Julia Gillard in 2010,” he said.

“We’ve had a lot of things happen up this way outside a hung parliament including the big equine centre that’s here I wasn’t in a hung parliament when we got the money for that but I was a state member when we got the state money and a federal member when we got the federal money,” he said.

“Now neither of them gave it to us because they particularly liked us, the money eventually came because they thought they could buy the seat with it and it was completely logical to have something of that magnitude in this area, so there is any number of those sorts of things that I can refer to,” he said.

“Saying unless you’re in the balance of power you can achieve anything, history says that’s not right,” said Tony Windsor.

In response to Mr Joyce, Mr Windsor questioned how someone in government and as a Minister could achieve so little.

“I’ll turn that around a little bit to in that we’ve had a very senior National up here and very little has happened, in fact the flying college contract is gone, the standard of internet coming into the major towns is gone, the issues on the Liverpool Plains, very little is being done by the federal representative, even though he is the Minister,” said Mr Windsor.

“So before people protest that you can’t get anything done as an independent I think they should display that they can do it as a member of the government,” he said.

Tony Windsor said he would be visiting Scone in the next week to begin talking to people on a range of local issues and around Easter Scone will be the second town, after Armidale, where he will hold a series of public meetings.

“I’m not going to wait for the election campaign, we’ll start work now,” said Mr Windsor.

“And that will give me a broader idea of what the issues are down that way,” Tony Windsor said.