TONY Windsor announced he is back in the farming game, but said he is not going anywhere, would be involved in many things and did not rule out another run in 2019.
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At a comfortable gathering at the Inverell Club on Wednesday evening Mr Windsor thanked all those who helped his election campaign and said he was still very interested in the important issues facing the electorate, and the country.
“I didn’t run on those issues just to get to a certain Saturday and then, win or lose, to have those issues suddenly drop out of my mind,” he said.
“In some cases I think I could probably do more by not being a Member of Parliament than being one.”
He cited the Liverpool Plains as a classic example of one of those issues.
“I’ve been working with different groups already in terms of that issue on some of the legal terms that are there,” Mr Windsor said.
“I think one of the reasons Greg Hunt has been shifted out of that portfolio was that they know, he knows, they haven’t fully adhered to the law that’s available to them.
Mr Windsor said he was intensely interested the long-term issues such as climate change, the NBN and Gonski education funding.
“They are all long-term issues and I don’t think you have to actually be in politics to prosecute one or any of them,” he said.
He observed about half of Australian voters had voted for someone other than the major parties in the Senate, an increasing trend throughout a number of elections.
“That says to me people are disillusioned with the major parties, which have voters half-locked in for the House of Representatives because the preferential voting system,” Mr Windsor said.
“Voting in the Senate is a proportional system, so that the real intent of the voter is being reflected there much more than in the House of Representatives.
“You can pick that up in the National Party for instance. The informal vote got more votes than the National Party got nationally. It’s the way this system works in terms of preferential voting that distorts the way people are actually voting, and that’s being reflected in the Senate.”