'It's all hate': How a small country town was overtaken by One Nation

Les Lewis is part of a community of One Nation supporters in the small NSW town of Hay. (ABC News: Jeremy Story Carter) Link copiedShareShare articleIn just a few short weeks, a small country town became One Nation heartland. Annette Smith didn't want to approve the post, but she couldn't think of a reason not to. Two of the things the 68-year-old takes most seriously – free speech, and her role as the local community Facebook administrator – were in conflict. She clicked approve, allowing words of support for Michelle Milthorpe, the Climate 200-backed independent candidate in the NSW by-election seat of Farrer, to populate the "Hay Matters" Facebook group. Ms Smith considered herself non-political, but with a strong anti-renewables streak ("It's just this massive, rampant ravaging of our land," she said of large-scale wind and solar projects). She had tried to keep the private Facebook group for the small town of Hay much the same. "In order to be fair game so that everybody received the same amount of information from every quarter, I telephoned and wrote emails to all the other parties that had indicated they were putting up a candidate," Ms Smith said. Her phone rang the following Saturday morning. It was David Farley from Narrandera, two hours west. He had recently been announced as the candidate for One Nation and hoped to replace the toppled Liberal leader Sussan Ley as the Member for Farrer in the upcoming by-election. "It sort of gave me confidence that One Nation had a bloke that we could trust," she said. When the results of the Farrer by-election were called last month, Smith and a newly animated orange army drank sparkling wine. Their town and electorate had given One Nation a once-unimaginable foothold in Australian politics. For every person who walked in to cast a vote at the Hay War Memorial High School, more than half walked out having put One Nation as their first preference. "The votes were already there. They were just hiding," she said. "We are the voice for the words they were too scared to say." On the outskirts of town, crows opportunistically pick at kangaroo carcasses left behind on the roadside. Tufts of cotton float downwind from the nearby gin. George Miller used the long flat plains around Hay as the backdrop to his 2024 post-apocalyptic epic Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. A stream of production staff into the town's shops may have provided a brief boon during filming, but business has dried to a trickle. "There's just so many empty shops in our town," local butcher Garry McCrae said. "We don't have a local veggie shop anymore. Everything's just so wrong. It's not in McCrae's broad-shouldered, jovial nature to be downbeat. The self-described "old school" butcher double-pumps his fists when talking, physically accentuating the points that matter most to him. "All us country people have just been neglected and no one wants to help us," he said with a punch. "I see the town just getting smaller and smaller." Hay's population of around 2,200 is aging and shrinking. It is a story repeated around rural Australia, but locals increasingly finger the blame in the direction of environmental policies created in cities hundreds of kilometres away. "The environment is important, but so is feeding Australia," said Sandy Symons, one of McCrae's customers, and a local farming identity. For years, the federal government has offered voluntary "buybacks" from irrigators in the region, to return water historically used for farming back into the Murray-Darling Basin to improve the environment. When farmers sell their water entitlements, it typically leads to reduced agricultural production, fewer jobs, less money flowing through the community. Locals don't see the tension between ecology and economy as ideological. "There's a lot of jobs created through water," said 62-year-old Hay farmer Paul Porter, who partly links the town's decline to the water buyback policy. "Someone in Sydney or Melbourne may not understand this, but water is life and water is commerce." David Farley knew how to speak to those concerns. A former agricultural executive, he made water reform a core part of his campaign. "Water buybacks [are] a sign of a nation that's given up on its future. We're totally against water buybacks," Farley reportedly told a candidate's forum in the lead-up to the election. A few months ago, Farley was in Hay spruiking his case to 15 or so people on a street corner. Sandy Symons was driving around town and only stopped by because a mate was already there. "I listened to him for 15 minutes. I was a disciple after that," he said. What he heard was a portrait of regional decline, accelerated by bad water policy and the decisions of out-of-town, out-of-touch bureaucrats. "I voted more for David Farley than I did for One Nation." There were only a few weeks to go in the campaign when Symons and Annette Smith joined forces. They met with a handful of other locals,

'It's all hate': How a small country town was overtaken by One Nation

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'It's all hate': How a small country town was overtaken by One Nation

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