To help you get to know them, we've asked some key questions - including why they're standing, what they believe are the biggest issues in need of attention, and what their key policies are.

One Nation candidate Richard Orchard, 52, says the major parties have abandoned the days when ordinary people had a chance for preselection.

Mr Orchard stressed the need for Australia to manufacture its own critical supplies, and wants a royal commission into how Australia lost so many freedoms during the pandemic.

Between Goulburn and Wagga. My partner is from Wagga and I'm from Goulburn and we have been together now for 12 years.

Fifty per cent is how much I live [in the Riverina] and that is on a week-to-week basis. It's not as if I'm an out-of-towner.

Unfortunately, not being one of those elite career politicians, I have to work and most of the work comes out of Canberra.

From being partially wedded to the Riverina, I've been here 12 years. I was Alby Schultz's electorate officer for some time back in the early 2010s and he was member for Hume.

The Cootamundra region, Cowra, Young; that was all part of the Hume electorate.

I, like a lot of people, am disillusioned with major parties and this idea that there is only these two voices with a leaders' debate between Albo and ScoMo.

About 35 to 40 per cent of people would say 'a pox on both their houses' at the moment as they are not going to vote for them as their primary vote.

I'm one of those people who does not want anything to do with the major parties.

Having belonged to one, being the Liberal Party, when I was Alby's assistant, it has since become a circus for non-democratic appointment of candidates and non-democratic running of branches.

Grassroots politics in the Liberal Party has nothing to do with who gets to stand and who gets to be in Parliament; they parachute people in, they will just get someone who is a member of the club and give them the baton.

The Labor Party does the same thing: pretty much if you are not a union staffer, you are finished.

Only 16 per cent of the workforce are in a union; Labor represents 16 per cent of Australians and that's the candidates that they put up.

It's a club and you and I are not in the club and neither is anyone else in the Riverina except for maybe one or two who have been in positions of power in those major parties.

It's been a life-long interest and certainly having worked with Alby I guess I have been through the whole gamut of being a young person who was an activist and interested in different things.

It took a long time to mature into [my] political viewpoint, as everyone does, around their mid-30s.

I worked for Alby in my early 40s for a while and saw what a good, local, humble member could do. Certainly, he wasn't one of the club. He became a Liberal member but he actually had been a union organiser for the meatworks industry in his early career. He didn't show any interest in being a minister and being taken out of his electorate.

He didn't have delusions of grandeur in power and he served the electorate for a long time and that's pretty much what I can see myself following: a balanced approach, trying to represent all the people in the electorate including the ones who did not vote for me and the ones who would vehemently hate me based on perceptions from the other club, which is the national mainstream media.

[The mainstream media] has colluded with the other two clubs to keep us out of the game, but I think people are prepared to include us in that game of representing them no matter what voices have joined together to say One Nation are horrible people.

Pauline [Hanson], absolutely. This is a person who was given the award of Mother of the Year [this week]. She's a mother of four did a lot of raising of those kids singlehandedly and she has also been a businesswomen. She got elected the first time around in the early 1990s and they she staged a comeback in the last 10 to 12 years, she stood for election a couple of times and finally got elected to the Senate in Queensland. She has been locked up; imprisoned by the club who did not want her playing on her turf.

My other political heroes are [Sir Robert] Menzies, who wanted to create a government that didn't interfere with people too much. That was Menzies' founding principle of the Liberal Party, to have a small government that doesn't get in the face of people and imprison them for two years in their houses and not allow them to go overseas. From Labor, it would probably be [John] Curtin, who was the Prime Minister during World War II, mainly because he survived it. He was certainly an interesting man.

I think the biggest things are energy security and the price. The issue of security is that we are tied to a global market for oil that doesn't necessarily benefit us and we are absolutely not self-sufficient in oil and oil products. The entire political horsepower is devoted to climate change; one side says vote for us we'll fix climate change and the other side says 'don't vote for him, vote for me, I'll fix climate change'.

It's an utter lie as Australia does not control just about any of the emissions of the world. 99 per cent of the emissions are not able to be controlled by Michael McCormack or Anthony Albanese. Don't talk to me about climate change as it's a propaganda tool when you look at every bit of evidence from 'experts', there's something on the other side that can cancel it out.

I'm interested in security of supply of fuel, foods, products, medicine and that's from a national security perspective.

There might be 1000 people with type-1 diabetes in the Riverina but has anyone ever risk-assessed the supply line for their medicine? Which hostile country can just blockade us?

The biggest thing is the bloody fuel price. If you ask the farmers, the business input costs of being a primary producer of the things we need to eat are starting to now become prohibitive in terms of fuel and fertiliser.

The other thing is to be left alone by government policies. [COVID-19 close contact isolation rules] have had an amazing effect across all industries. One of my friends runs a big car workshop and they had times when they only had one or two people there out of a team of 10 because the COVID lockdowns kept happening.

It's a disgusting situation that the governing parties in Australia are basically no better than the Chinese Communist Party; human rights abuses and stopping people from crossing the border.

There are rusted-on people who will vote for a party no matter what. The Nationals have never faced serious competition.

Every community has local issues and the job for any local member who's worth his salt is to talk to councils, talk to community organisations about what their priorities are and represent them to funding bodies.

On the other hand, we do have those national issues and there are those human rights abuses that need to be addressed: forcing people to take vaccines and locking people in their homes for a couple of years. There needs to be a royal commission into how things went so badly wrong. There are also these massive cost-of-living issues.

Riverina is a conservative stronghold and I would put it to the voter that the Nationals are not conservatives. They are in a Coalition so they may as well be the Liberal Party. Everything that you get when you vote for the Nationals is a compromise. When you vote One Nation, you actually get a conservative.

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