Two years ago Craig Gallpen and his partner, Rachael Napier, were enjoying their life, milking 500 cows with 10 or 11 staff. Now they employ one person, with 200 cows. Their wage bill has dropped from $450,000 to $50,000.
“Those people spend their money in town and so do we,” Napier says. “All that money is gone now.”
Their single biggest issue is water – this year they have zero allocation – and as a result their feed bills have doubled. Gallpen rejects outright the argument from government MPs that the only thing that can help the river system is rain.
“The more I learn about the Murray-Darling basin plan, the more I think it’s flawed, but I don’t really know. I’m just a simple dairy farmer.”
Gallpen says while southern New South Wales farmers have given up their water, others are harvesting floodplains in the basin. He thinks water management has been overrun by politics and “maybe we haven’t kicked up enough fuss in this area”.
“I’ve been a Liberal-National voter all my life,” he says. “My family is the same. I will probably vote for [the independent] Kevin Mack to see whether we can have some change.
“[Otherwise] we will be out of the industry, we can’t keep doing this.”
The couple live in the seat of Farrer, which runs for 126,000 sq km on the NSW side of the Victorian border. It takes in the state seat of Murray and a portion of Barwon, two seats that fell to the Shooters Fishers and Farmers in the recent state election.

If there is one theme that runs through the political conversations, it is uncertainty. People are angry and worried about their future, and that may decide the future of the sitting Liberal MP, Sussan Ley. Water is the key issue driving her challenger, Mack, the mayor of Albury and a former policeman. Even on a margin of more than 20%, Liberals are beginning to worry. Betting agencies have already priced Mack for the win.
Central to all the election issues – whether it’s the basin plan, drought policy, mental health services, housing or political integrity – is a loss of faith in government.
This idea connects metropolitan centres such as Albury with the small towns in the rural parts of the electorate. Farrer voters see government as the foundation on which to build their ambitions, whether it is a job, a business or just a decent safety net.

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They describe government decisions which, far from protecting citizens’ ambitions, have left them feeling more exposed to risk. Decision-making processes are incomprehensible and voters believe other citizens and companies with greater political connections have reaped the benefits.
In a cottage tucked under the Hume Highway, accountant Emily Lightfoot spends her days doing other people’s finances but her overriding concern as a single mother is her rental accommodation. Yet asked to name her most important issue, Lightfoot nominates a “functional, well-run government with integrity” and cites cases such as the $443m grant to a little-known Great Barrier Reef Foundation.