Worth a read. My (wonderful) wife is from just outside Tamworth...

Worth a read. My (wonderful) wife is from just outside Tamworth in the New England electorate. Some may despise Piers Akerman - my wife's parents still live there and the feedback they have received in relation to Tony Windsor is pretty much summed up in this article.

Piers Akerman

Saturday, March 12, 2016 (10:38pm)
SURELY Tony Windsor is having a lend of the good people of New England.


SURELY Tony Windsor is having a lend of the good people of New England.
Having betrayed the conservative constituency by succumbing to Julia Gillard’s siren song and enthusiastically leaping into Labor’s bed in 2010, he now wants the voters to give him another opportunity to see how much havoc he can create with the political system. Naturally, he enjoys the support of the ABC and Fairfax, and locked-in Leftist organisations such as GetUp!, because he is running against a principled conservative incumbent, the National Party leader and Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce.
It was more than telling that Windsor opted to announce his decision in a tortuous address to the press gallery in Canberra on Thursday rather than in his old electorate.
Those who know him best would not have given him the same fawning attention he received in the national capital, and it is also revealing that the letters of support for his candidacy come from inner-city addresses, not from rural and regional Australia. Indeed, while Windsor makes much of his farming background, those who live in New England are well aware that he trousered a fortune from leasing a chunk of his family farm to a coal mining outfit.
But it is easy for the simple-minded Greens and anti-mining lobbyists of Newtown, Marrickville and Balmain to cut Windsor more slack than they might otherwise give a man who has profited mightily from the coal industry because Windsor is a hater and there is nothing the Left revels in more than someone who passionately hates.
The principal target of Windsor’s hatred is the National Party because he harbours the delusion that he was once dudded on a preselection deal. He wasn’t. There was no conspiracy but in his squirrelly mind, there must have been.
Judging by just some of the policies he supported when he gave his all to the Gillard government, the Nationals knew what they were up to when they decided not to let him run under their colours.
Windsor likes to paint himself as conservative independent but that is hardly true, any more than he truly represented the majority of New England voters when he turned his back on the Abbott government.
In 2010, the Senate vote in New England for the Coalition was 43.73 per cent and Labor 28.67 per cent, yet he went with Labor. In the House of Representatives election, the Labor candidate polled just 8 per cent — enough, apparently, for Windsor to justify his support for the Left and Labor in Canberra. Most of the locals are onto Windsor now, which may be why the new farms he purchased with his coal earnings are further west and why he may wish to spend more time in Canberra than New England. It’s a matter of record that Windsor supported the carbon tax (how does that square with the coal cash he took?) and refused to answer questions from a local Inverell radio reporter who put it to him that the electorate was vehemently opposed to Gillard’s economy-destroying measure, citing his station’s listeners’ poll and another poll organised by the Inverell-based National Party Senator John Williams, which both rejected the tax.
When challenged to conduct his own poll, Windsor hung up. Today’s man of the people didn’t give a flying fig for the views of the people.
He had a chance to stand up for the people in the bush when the Gillard government scandalously opted to peremptorily shut down the cattle trade, sending northern cattlemen broke and throwing Aboriginal stockmen out of work.
Windsor and his buffoonish partner in politics, Rob Oakeshott, went along with the damaging policy. There can be no doubt as to where Windsor’s sympathies lie, no matter how much he might sound like a genuine country bloke.
The record of the Parliamentary Library shows he voted with the Gillard government 376 times during divisions and just 85 times with the Opposition during the life of the 43rd parliament.
In the Left-wing press, Windsor and Oakeshott were adoringly described as “popular” independents but that would only have been with the Greens. They were not so popular in their electorates and both bailed out in 2013 rather than face the wrath of their constituents.
Windsor entertained the ABC’s audience but his local newspaper, the Armidale Express, which has its readers’ interests at heart is not as kind as the luvvies in Ultimo.
In an editorial last Wednesday, it said: “Tony Windsor knew when to make a dignified exit from the federal political arena and paved the way for Barnaby Joyce’s significant victory in the seat of New England in 2013.
“But it seems no sooner did he bow out of parliament than he wanted in again and he’s hardly missed an opportunity to bag, rebuke and criticise Mr Joyce.
“Some of that may well be justified, however, much comes across as sour grapes. He should learn the lesson so sorely heeded by Peter Draper, the popular Independent MP who served Tamworth from 2003 to 2011.
“Four years on and he had a change of heart, recontesting his old seat in last year’s state election only to be trounced by Nationals incumbent Kevin Anderson … It’s all very well to snipe from the sidelines, however a prudent assessment shows Mr Windsor retired before the government he supported suffered one of the most humiliating defeats in Australian political history.
“Some said he abandoned a sinking ship just in time.”
Windsor is a bitter man, he ran from the voters and now he wants to woo them. He has his pension, he has his coal earnings, he just doesn’t have the respect of the people he was meant to serve.

http://blogs.news.com.au/dailyteleg...s/windsor_has_already_lost_his_bitter_battle/