The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party plans to resurrect its Wagga branch this month with the aim of improving its votes from the byelection.
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Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party Wagga candidate Seb McDonagh said the party had more time to prepare for the March general election and planned to focus more on policies.
“We have had a lot of people express interest, but of course it depends on how many turn up (to the branch start-up meeting) on the night,” he said.
“We are contacting all previous members as we did have a branch here in 2014.
“We are looking forward to it and we’ll see how we go.”
Mr McDonagh said Wagga used to have the second largest Shooters party branch in the state.
“We have a strong shooting community down here and we felt we needed to have some decent representation,” he said.
“We felt it was an ideal place for us to have a branch. I stood in the last election and now we’re getting on with it and preparing for the next one, and the branch is part of that.”
The Shooters won 9.92 per cent of the primary votes in September’s byelection, which was called soon after former Wagga MP Daryl Maguire quit parliament.
The result placed the party 5th highest for primary votes, just behind independent candidate and Wagga City councillor Paul Funnell on 10.65 per cent.
Mr McDonagh said the Shooters could build on the previous result as the byelection campaign was “a bit rushed”.
“It was pretty much ‘hit the ground running' and the issues brought up by a lot of people were generally local government issues,” he said.
“We tried to change the conversation to a state level and we did find a lot of issues there.
“We are going to dig into these issues now and come forward with a comprehensive set of policies.”
Mr McDonagh and his Wagga byelection campaign featured in an episode of ‘4 Corners’ last month that examined how the Australian civilian firearms industry was using its funds to influence politics.
Mr McDonagh accused the ABC’s flagship current affairs TV program of “pathetic journalism” for what he claimed was an attempt to link the Shooters party with Katters Australian Party and its dealings with NIOA, a firearms and military ordinance supplier.
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