So, tell me a bit about yourself.

I was born in Holbrook. I came in to Lavington with my parents when I was probably three or four.

I was in Albury until 1987. I had spent 14 months in Canberra. I was on my way to Sydney. I was going to live in Sydney for a couple of years to see what that was like, but Canberra was enough. I hightailed it back to Albury again.

I stayed there, met my wife Kylie there. We have three children. We came here in 1987. We both work in a financial planning practice.

You're running as the Labor candidate. What came first, the Labor interest or the political?

I've always watched politics fairly closely. I've only been a member of the Labor party for probably three or four years, or something like that.

Probably over the last five years or so, I've started to get intensely interested in it because as I've watched it over a long period of time, starting with Paul Keating's government, we've been in a period of economic growth.

I'm a capitalist, but I do think we have an obligation to distribute the wealth we generate according to what people are putting into the economy and whether someone's working on a Sunday night over at Woolworths or the 27th floor up in Sydney somewhere, they're all putting in, but not everyone's getting the benefit.

That's what probably encouraged me to put my hand up when they were talking about pre-selection last year.

I believe the Labor Party has a view that the economy's there to serve the people who contribute to it, not the other way around.

At the moment, a lot of people serve the economy because they're not really getting the benefit from it.

When I started work, I went into a full-time job. The only people who had casual or part-time jobs were the people who wanted one.

There's all sorts of reasons people are in the workforce part-time, but if you want to work full-time, you should be able to work full-time and that's become decreasingly likely for younger people, and that's not fair.

You're not just running in any seat, you're taking on the Deputy Prime Minister.

It's my first tilt at office. I don't want to move up to Sydney and run against Scott Morrison, so Michael was the next best thing.

Can you see a time Labor will claim Riverina?

Yes. My light on the hill is John Howard in Bennelong back in 2007. He has said there is no such thing as a safe seat in Australia.

That's my mantra: There's no such thing as a safe seat.

I've been around the electorate quite a bit. The main criticism I have heard is that Michael is not seen in the place very often and that's a concern through the electorate. I guess the perception people have is that he is fighting his biggest battles in the party room, not in the electorate.

What are the issues? What are people telling you?

They are telling me that the services are no good. People don't always make the connection between where they've got the lowest tax rates in history, we've never put more money into schools and hospitals, all those sorts of things that you hear all the time. Taxes have to be as low as they can possibly be because you don;'t want too much of people's incentive being taken away by being burdened by taxes. When John Howard was the treasurer and left office, the highest tax rate was 60 per cent and that's a lot. It leads to different things like exotic tax schemes because people are trying to get their tax rate down a bit.

We have to recognise that every time we cut a tax, we have to cut a service as well, because that's a but less money coming in.

The government has stated over the last five or six years that when you cut taxes people work a bit harder. I don't think that's true. I think people work hard because people work hard.

If you were elected, what is the first thing that needs to change?

Our first order of business as an incoming government is to get the money back into schools and hospitals.

Hospitals have been a real problem in the regional areas. Here is Wagga we have a fantastic hospital and terrific staff. The staff that are there are working long, long shifts. We have rules about when truck drivers can drive and when they can't, to try to stop them being fatigued, but there are people walking around hospitals whacked from doing a long, long shift, taking a couple of hours off and then coming back.

Our infrastructure program is probably our most ambitious program. Infrastructure is critical, especially for the regions.

What's the one thing you would say to voters, about all else, going into the election?

An economy should serve the people who put into it. They should be able to get something out of it other than an occasion job, other than part-time work, other than a job that they can't use to get into their own home and have trouble paying rent. It's not fair that you put into an economy and don't get enough out of it to live reasonably.