THE United Australia Party candidate for Mallee in the looming federal election says his party wants the Murray-Darling Basin Plan overhauled.
Stuart King, a member of Swan Hill Council, is standing against incumbent Nationals MP Anne Webster, whose party’s popularity in the lower basin has been eroded by perceptions of excessive water extraction in its electoral heartland upstream, and Cohuna independent Sophie Baldwin, who has a professional background in irrigator advocacy.
Other candidates are expected, but have not been announced.
When he announced his candidacy in February, Mr King admitted he was not fully across water politics but knew that the basin plan should be a priority.
In Mildura this week, he said that he had “learned lots about the Murray-Darling Basin and the Murray-Darling Basin Plan”.
“It’s a massive issue. We’ve got some ideas, we’re formulating things at the moment, but you can expect an announcement from us that represents a significant overhaul of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, as opposed to just keeping it going as it is with a few tweaks around the edges,” he told Sunraysia Daily.
Asked if this would mean effectively throwing the existing plan out and starting again, he said the party’s plans were “closer to that, but I’m not going to go to that extreme at this point in time”.
Mr King, 52, the owner of a hire business and father of four daughters, plus five stepchildren from his second marriage, said he had chosen to represent the Clive Palmer-led party because of “common values, common beliefs”.
“The policies of the party appeal to me and there’s a support framework in the background to be able to run as a candidate.
“It has a prominent image that I believe is going to give me a really good shot at the seat of Mallee.”
Mr King accepted that winning the seat would be “a tough challenge”.
“Nobody else (other than The Nationals) has been able to do it, obviously, in 73 years, so it’s a tall ask, but I just believe that if there was ever a time for a change in Australian politics, this is the election where there’s going to be a significant upheaval and not just between the two typical major parties,” he said.
The Nationals had “deserted their heartland” and Dr Webster had let the Mallee electorate down.
“I believe she’s failed the electorate in terms of representing what regional and rural people want, and I haven’t seen her do anything different to stand out,” Mr King said.
“She just goes along to toe the party line, simple as that.”
Tax relief for regional Australia would be one of the party’s main platforms and, while this policy was yet to be defined, “it generally applies to income taxes”.
Mr King said that he was so far “the only candidate that’s prominently putting my hand up to stand for freedom, for democracy, for constitutional rights”, and that he would drop all pandemic mandates immediately if it was his choice.
“I’m not saying that COVID’s not a serious disease, because it is a serious illness,” he said, but believed the way it was handled in regional areas was unacceptable.
“None of the regional parties fought … for governments to differentiate between metro requirements and regional requirements,” he said.
“People are still stopped from working, there’s still mandates in place that stop people from working because they’re choosing not to have an experimental vaccine.
“If something like that (the pandemic) comes along in the future, that’s exactly how they (major parties) are going to respond again.”
Mr King said that, if elected, he would most likely base himself in Mildura, the seat’s major population centre.
A federal election has not yet been called, but is expected by the end of May.
