Nationals candidate Nichole Overall appears to have scored a surprise win in the contentious Bungendore booth to shore up her widely predicted byelection victory in the NSW seat of Monaro on the weekend.
As expected, Ms Overall held the seat vacated by former deputy premier John Barilaro despite strong community division in the country town east of Canberra over the proposed location of a new high school, which would carve a large chunk of the historic Mick Sherd Oval.
Ms Overall, a former journalist and crime blogger, had come into the byelection with the Nationals holding a 9.1 per cent margin from the 2019 NSW election. She will hold the seat comfortably on primaries, albeit with a reduced margin.
She received a text message from her main rival, Labor's Bryce Wilson, on Sunday, conceding the byelection and shortly after received a congratulatory phone call from NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet.
Her win is expected to be verified, once all postal votes are counted, on February 24. She will have to do it all again in 13 months, when the next full NSW election is scheduled.
While it was a predictable win in Monaro, some uncertainty had lingered around the level of the protest vote against the incumbent Perrottet government in the wake of its rapid COVID reopening and the bitter infighting within the NSW Liberal-National coalition which contributed to Mr Barilaro's resignation in October last year.
The former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian was forced to go a short time later due to her becoming the subject of an anti-corruption inquiry.
The big surprise out of so-called Super Saturday, in which four NSW seats, including that of Ms Berejiklian's in the Sydney inner-north suburb of Willoughby, were being contested, was a loss in the government's Bega stronghold.
Bega previously had been held by high profile Transport Minister Andrew Constance who bowed out to run for federal politics this year. It was the first time Labor has won in Bega since the seat was created in 1894.
Ms Overall wouldn't be drawn on the Bega upset, saying she intended to keep her focus on how best she could serve the people of her own electorate.
Carrying the most populous booths around Queanbeyan, Jerrabomberra and Karabar was always going to tip the balance strongly in Ms Overall's favour and she said she was buoyed by her strong results in booths much further south, including Cooma.
The wife of long-serving Queanbeyan-Palerang mayor Tim Overall, she said that she was "ready to step up" as the minority Liberal-National coalition fights to hold power with the support of independents.
Ms Overall had always predicted a close vote, saying that Barilaro's big margin in 2019, when he carried all 27 Monaro booths - including Karabar by just one vote - was "an anomaly in the history of the electorate".
"But it still looks like it will be the second-highest margin in the history of the electorate, so that's still pretty good," she said.
She had she believed her effort in getting to all corners of the big electorate multiple times in the four months since her pre-selection had been a decisive factor.
"We did tremendously well in Cooma," she said.
"People were coming back to me saying I was virtually the only candidate they had seen and they were expressing to me that if they hadn't seen candidates before the election, they couldn't trust that they would be seeing them after it."
She said that the outcome vindicated the NSW Department of Education's decision to press ahead with the contentious centre-town location for the Bungendore high school and moving ahead rapidly with this project would be a key election promise she would aim to fulfil.
"I worked really hard in Bungendore and spent a lot of time visiting people there and what I was hearing was ... not just from those who were for and against the high school location, but were strongly in favour of the new infrastructure program which will flow from this proposal, including a new library, community centre and swimming pool," she said.
