Cause of by-election
Sitting Nationals MP Adam Marshall announced his retirement on 4 April 2024.
Margin – NAT 33.8%
Incumbent MP
Adam Marshall, since 2013.
Geography
Northern NSW. The seat covers most of the New England region, including Armidale, Inverell, Glen Innes, Walcha and Moree. Northern Tablelands entirely covers eight local government areas: Armidale Dumaresq, Glen Innes Severn, Gwydir, Inverell, Moree Plains, Uralla and Walcha.
History
The current seat of Northern Tablelands was created in 1980 following the abolition of the districts of Armidale and Tenterfield. A seat with the same name had also existed from 1920 to 1927, when it elected three members by proportional representation.
Tenterfield had been held by the Country Party continuously since 1927. The seat was first won by Michael Bruxner. He had first won a seat in Northern Tablelands as a Progressive MP in 1920. During that term, the Progressives split, with urban members supporting Nationalist Premier George Fuller’s government and joining the Nationalist Party. Bruxner led the rural wing, which eventually became the Country Party.
Bruxner won the seat of Tenterfield in 1927, and held it until his retirement in 1962. He served as a minister from 1927 to 1930, and as Deputy Premier from 1932 to 1941. He was succeeded in 1962 by his son Tim Bruxner.
The younger Bruxner was appointed to Cabinet as a minister after the 1973 election. He became Deputy Leader of the National Country Party in 1975. In 1976 he lost his ministry when the Coalition government lost power. He retired in 1981 when Tenterfield was abolished in the redistribution.
The seat of Armidale had a very solid record of being held by the Country Party, although the ALP won the seat on two occasions, in 1953 and 1978.
Armidale was won in 1927 by David Drummond. Like the elder Bruxner, he had also been elected as one of the members for Northern Tablelands in 1920 for the Progressives and ended up in the Country Party. He served as state minister for Education from 1927 to 1930 and from 1932 to 1941. In 1949, he moved to the federal seat of New England, which he held until his retirement in 1963.
Davis Hughes won the seat for the Country Party at the 1950 by-election. He was re-elected at that year’s general election, but lost in 1953 to the ALP’s Jim Cahill. In 1956, Hughes defeated Cahill, and went on to hold the seat until 1973, when he resigned to take up the position of Agent-General for NSW in London.
The 1973 by-election was narrowly won by Country Party candidate David Leitch. He was re-elected in 1973 and 1976, but lost in the 1978 landslide to the ALP’s Bill McCarthy.
When Armidale and Tenterfield were merged into Northern Tablelands in 1981, the seat was won by McCarthy. He held the seat until his death in 1987.
The 1987 Northern Tablelands by-election was won by the National Party’s Ray Chappell. He served as a minister in the Coalition government from 1993 to 1995.
In 1999, Chappell was challenged by former Armidale mayor Richard Torbay, running as an independent. Torbay won a large victory, winning almost 60% of the two-party-preferred vote.
In 2003, Torbay increased his margin from 59% to 82%, which was slightly reduced to 80% in 2007. Following the 2007 election he was elected as Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, despite the ALP holding a solid majority in the House.
Torbay lost the speakership at the 2011 election. He managed to hold on to his seat with a solid margin of almost 20% while rural independents lost their seats in Dubbo, Port Macquarie and Tamworth.
Torbay was preselected for the Nationals to run against independent federal MP Tony Windsor in 2012. He was forced to step down as the Nationals candidate in March 2013, and resigned from Northern Tablelands shortly afterwards.
The 2013 Northern Tablelands by-election was won by Nationals candidate Adam Marshall, former Mayor of Gunnedah. Marshall was re-elected in 2015, 2019 and 2023.
- Ben Smith (Shooters, Fishers and Farmers)
- Dorothy Robinson (Greens)
- Natasha Ledger (Independent)
- Duncan Fischer (Independent)
- Brendan Moylan (Nationals)
Assessment
Northern Tablelands is a very safe Nationals seat.
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing |
| Adam Marshall | Nationals | 35,575 | 71.6 | -1.8 |
| Yvonne Langenberg | Labor | 5,045 | 10.2 | -0.8 |
| Elizabeth O’Hara | Greens | 2,369 | 4.8 | -0.8 |
| Michael Hay | Shooters, Fishers & Farmers | 2,239 | 4.5 | -5.1 |
| Peter O’Loghlin | Legalise Cannabis | 1,148 | 2.3 | +2.3 |
| Billy Wood | Independent | 980 | 2.0 | +2.0 |
| Margaret Hammond | Liberal Democrats | 783 | 1.6 | +1.6 |
| Alan Crowe | Sustainable Australia | 595 | 1.2 | +1.2 |
| Natasha Ledger | Independent | 496 | 1.0 | +1.0 |
| Gary Hampton | Public Education | 425 | 0.9 | +0.9 |
| Informal | 1,039 | 2.0 |
2022 two-party-preferred result
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | Swing |
| Adam Marshall | Nationals | 37,654 | 83.8 | +0.7 |
| Yvonne Langenberg | Labor | 7,255 | 16.2 | -0.7 |
Polling places in Northern Tablelands have been split into four parts. Polling places in the Armidale urban area have been grouped together as “Armidale”, and the remaining booths were grouped between:
- North-East – Glen Innes Severn and Inverell council areas
- North-West – Gwydir and Moree Plains council areas
- South-East – Armidale, Uralla and Walcha council areas
The Nationals won a large majority of the two-party-preferred vote in all four areas, with 69% in Armidale and between 85.7% in the south-east and 88.6% in the north-east.
| Voter group | NAT 2PP % | Total votes | % of votes |
| Armidale | 69.1 | 6,248 | 12.3 |
| North-East | 88.6 | 5,438 | 10.7 |
| South-East | 85.7 | 5,165 | 10.2 |
| North-West | 86.3 | 4,976 | 9.8 |
| Pre-poll | 86.1 | 21,853 | 43.1 |
| Other votes | 82.8 | 7,014 | 13.8 |
Election results in Northern Tablelands at the 2023 New South Wales state election
Toggle between two-party-preferred votes and primary votes for the Nationals and Labor.
Could the Nats win this by-election unopposed? It doesn’t look like Labor or the Greens are going to bother fielding a candidate.
Interesting fact – In Toomelah in 2023, there were no votes for the Nationals out of 26 formal votes. This is probably the first time I’ve seen a polling booth with no votes for the winner of the electorate, though to be fair, 26 is a small amount.
@oguh, Nominations open on 31 May. SFF is looking for a candidate. There might even be some Joe Blow or Jane Citizen who will run as an independent.
Who got the other votes in Toomelah other than Labor?
@Daniel T Labor got 15 votes, the Legalise Cannabis party got seven, the Sustainable Australia Party got one, the Greens got one and the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers got two.
Toomelah is a very small Aboriginal community (I think there’s a movie about it) so not only is there low turnout plus low population but Indigenous communities have traditionally voted Labor (though that is starting to change). Toomelah had the only non-Nationals booth in Northern Tablelands in 2023.
The last time Toomelah had a federal booth was in 2007. Labor won 82% TPP (+4%) and the Nationals won 18% TPP (–4%). Labor won 74% (+2%) of the primary vote, the Nationals won 16% (+4%) and the Greens won 10% (+8%).
69% in Armidale…. this is beyond the normal vote. Mr
Marshall must have had a huge personal vote.
He was way more popular than Barnaby Joyce in the parts overlapping with the federal electorate of New England.
Nominations for candidates does not close until 6 June so there is still time for someone to come out of the woodwork. I would be very surprised if no one did. When was the last time there was an Unopposed election at state or federal level? The last one I recall was John Hatton being unopposed in South Coast in 1981.
@Michael Quinlivan one little thing that inflates the Coalition vote in the regions on the state level is that donkey voting is less prevalent because of OPV. Having lived in the regions a small minority of people are donkey voters or informal voters whereas in the city it’s rarer.
@redistributed the most recent one I’m aware of is the 2021 Mersey election for the Tasmanian Legislative Council, but given the unique nature of the Tasmanian upper house (and potentially COVID being a factor) I’m not sure I’d count that
As always, I’m a random guy on the internet so take this with a grain of salt…
Word from the ground. The Greens and the Shooters have both selected candidates and will be announcing soon. From what I hear the local Labor branch are set on not running anyone, so this looks to set up a battle for second place.
No word on any independents looking to make a run, but someone might pop up out of the woodworks just before close of nominations.
I stand corrected, Antony Green has updated his blog post about the by election and has independent Duncan Fischer as a declared candidate.
https://www.duncanfischer.com/
The Greens have announced Armidale Councilor and former principal research scientist at the Department of Primary Industries, Dr Dorothy Robinson as their candidate.
Nominations close today, so it will be interesting to see if anyone else puts their hand up last minute.
Ballot draw was today. The only other emerging candidates was Ben Smith for the Shooter, Fisher and Farmers (who I don’t have any other info on) and Natahsa Ledger who has run for both State and Federal Parliment before as an independent at various elections.
The interesting thing to watch will be second place here, and who the Labor votes goes to.
I predict the Nationals TCP to be somewhere between 82% and 92%.
Just a weird thought – imagine running as an independent candidate and making a buck getting $5.30 per vote when a major party is abstaining. If you get 10%, that’s $25,000 or so, depending on turnout.
https://elections.nsw.gov.au/funding-and-disclosure/public-funding/election-campaigns-fund#amountspayable
Having read Natasha Ledger’s policies, the Nats are probably the left wing candidate … something new every day!
I’m really sorry, I just read her policies and to be honest they are hard to understand. Illegible might be the correct word.
Nationals should easily retain but I am curious about who makes second. The Greens seem to have a candidate with some profile, and they usually do well in Armidale because it is a university town with UNE. Could the SFF make a comeback? Or is it one of the independents that will finish second.
@James the Labor vote will be split between the Nationals (main rural party), the SFF (economically closer to Labor but socially and environmentally/agriculturally closer to the Nationals or One Nation) and the Greens (progressive voters). But really I honestly don’t think the Greens will benefit much from Labor not contesting as they’ll be seen as being way too progressive. The Nationals and SFF will get most Labor votes outside Armidale while the ones in Armidale will go to the Nationals and (to a lesser extent) the Greens. It will be interesting to see how Toomelah votes (again, Toomelah is a small Aboriginal community near Boggabilla that traditionally votes strongly Labor in contrast to everywhere else in the Northern Tablelands region which vote strongly Nationals; so it’s a small booth with low turnout therefore it doesn’t effect anything margin-wise but it still gets its own polling place). This will be the first time Toomelah doesn’t vote Labor and that could be a trend like we’ve been seeing in other Indigenous communities around Australia (take Purfleet (an Aboriginal-majority suburb of Taree; a very disadvantaged community with locally-well-known crime problems) for example).
2nd place will be a race between the Shooters and the Greens for sure. Duncan’s main issue seems to be a rail service connecting the major towns (which is a big ongoing issue in parts of the Tablelands), but otherwise he seems to lack policy and doesn’t have a large profile. Natasha, as others have pointed out, is an interesting character.
I think you might be underestimating how much the Greens will benefit from Labor not running though Nether Portal. Since their exodus of MPs before the last state election they seem to have shifted focus to being more of a fringe right wing party, rather then presenting themselves as a organised alternative regional party to dissuaded Nats voters. And they seem to be effectively just running dead (or at least I haven’t seen any campaigning as of yet). This leaves the Greens as the only left wing party with name appeal for any left of center voters. And although it was close the Greens did outpoll the Shooters when they ran dead here at last years state election. What will hurt the Greens is Uralla is their second best area of the electorate, and the Shooters candidate and both independents are from there.
It will also be interesting to see what happens to the Nat’s vote with the loss of Adam Marshall personal vote, which was high. The Tablelands is already the safest electorate in the state by a large margin off the back of that personal vote, I’d have to imagine there will be some sort of dip as a result of having a new candidate.
@ NEO the left vote will probably galvanise behind the greens
By-election today. I’ll be in four towns today: Glen Innes, Inverell, Armidale and Walcha.
I’ll be in Walcha until Monday so I’ll be also watching the Euro 2024 (European soccer) from Walcha.
Polling places are now closed! The count has started!
If the sff had finished second they could have finished with close to double that of the greens on 2pp