But what a show!

It has everything: love gone wrong, fear, loathing, revenge, Hollywood, an organic vegetable, even a hint of same-sex marriage.

The media have flooded into New England. There’s plenty of colour. Attack billboards carpet bomb the electorate. The main players deliver great lines in gentlemanly spite. The ABC’s Four Corners program spent a week dogging Windsor and being all but ignored by Joyce. Both claim to be the underdog. Q&A showed both as fighters.

It all came down in Dog Town, Nundle, when the pair turned up one Sunday last month to the “Great Nundle Dog Race” with their pets. Then, just when the running dog gag had run out of puff, another dog lover, the actor Johnny Depp, retooled Joyce for the international celeb circuit, saying he looked, not like his dogs (miniature sausage dogs) but rather a tomato.

Despite rudeness Hollywood-style, they’re not much kinder around New England, where the kids call him “Barmy Choice”. Joyce has perfected the Joh Bjelke-Petersen technique of letting the listener hear what they want in his pronouncements and Windsor is running hard on the shadow that falls between the Deputy Prime Minister/leader of the National Party’s words and actions.

Meanwhile the voters are left with the choice between a conservative .... and another conservative.

It’s often forgotten that it was the National Party that created the mean streak of independence that personified Tony Windsor. It was his loathing of squattocracy’s most amiable son, former National Party leader and deputy prime minister and local powerbroker John Anderson, who he believed dudded him in a preselection for the NSW state seat of Tamworth, that prompted Windsor to contest and win the seat as an independent. That was in 1991. A decade later he blackened the National’s other eye by pinching New England from them.

Windsor was immensely popular. Across Australia, people watched him in Canberra and spoke admiringly of him seeming to be one of the few principled MPs. But his backing Julia Gillard to form government after the 2010 election supposedly upset many conservatives back home.

“Which part of $1.5 billion didn’t they want?” Windsor asks those conservatives, referring Fairfax Media to the federally-funded projects that came New England’s way when he and fellow independent (and National turncoat) Rob Oakshott supported Labor minority governments.

Joyce, meanwhile, is doing his best to remind voters of Windsor’s “horrible history”.

Nationals billboards featuring huge photographs of Windsor and Julia Gillard, circa 2010, litter the electorate. They are pictured holding a document. Beneath, a friendly threat: “Not this time Tony”.

Windsor said it’s a joke. “Not least because the document Julia is holding happens to be a Last Dog on the Moon cartoon.”

Joyce has been pork-barrelling frantically.

He tells Fairfax Media he has announced maybe $500 million worth of projects – “NSW’s biggest wind farm (where are you Tony Abbott?) and the Chaffey Dam and the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (which he wants to move from Canberra to Armidale)” – and brutally puts it to Windsor.

“The reality of politics is that ministers make decisions,” Joyce says.

“The most powerful minister is the prime minister and after that the deputy prime minister ... [pause for effect].

“You’ve got to get yourself into a team and get yourself as close to the centre of power as possible to try and have effect.”

Joyce won in 2013 with a comfortable 14.5 per cent margin after he resigned his Queensland Senate seat to contest New England.

A redistribution has notionally edged Joyce’s margin to a safer 19.6 per cent, partly because the polo-set towns of Scone and Murrurundi have been added to the main centres such as Quirindi, Tamworth, Armidale, Glen Innes, Inverell and Tenterfield. But Windsor did not take the field last time, having resigned partly due to ill health, so comparisons are largely irrelevant. Some opinion polls suggest the pair are neck and neck.

New England’s high profile has brought out a herd of candidates. 

Ten candidates are contesting New England. 

Among them is Armidale solar business owner Rob Taber, who stood as an independent in 2013 and came second to Joyce. He is annoyed that Windsor has re-entered the fray, not least because he will be squeezed out. 

Further, Taber says, Joyce had approached him seeking his preferences: “That’s no way for an independent to behave.”

That’s politics.

Now 65, Windsor says there’s a large degree of distrust “in this electorate, every electorate really. The system’s gone cactus” and is hoping his personal popularity will carry the day.

Windsor says the voters of New England are concerned about NBN, Gonski and the funding of schools, the relationship between extractive industries and groundwater and agriculture, climate change, renewable energy and coal seam gas.

“People are confused about CSG. It’s supposedly been addressed by the Baird government, but there are still many questions and it’s not just CSG,” he says.

“There are massive licences across the Liverpool Plains, an area that has the largest groundwater system in the Murray Darling. There are two mega mines proposed, one (Shenhua has bought up 43 farms on the Liverpool Plains) owned by the Chinese government, the other by BHP, both within 10 or five kilometres of each other, and it’s little wonder these issues are quite significant, and it all feeds into the question of sustainable water usage.”

Joyce, now 49, seems to be ameliorating his stand on issues like climate change, but on CSG he blames Windsor and Labor.

“All these things ... the riddle of the Sphinx. You hear the end of the story but you’ve got to go to the start,” he says.

“Who gave the licences out? Was it the Nationals? The Liberals? The Labor Party? Who was the member when they were given out? The National? Or the independent?”

Nevertheless the recent revelation that Santos has submitted new plans to drill for CSG on the Liverpool Plains has damaged Joyce.

On other issues, Windsor says voters are mystified by Malcolm Turnbull’s failure to join the dots on job growth, innovation, education and the NBN.

“You can’t do that without Gonski in the schools and NBN everywhere. It just won’t work. We’ve gone from 30th to 60th in the world in terms of internet speed. How can Malcolm be saying the things he’s saying without this technology in place?

“My major opponent lives for the day or lives in the past, but I think we’ve got to engage with the future far more than we have been.”

Ever the bush pragmatist, Joyce says Windsor’s time has passed.

“There’s a group of people out there who pathologically dislike me,” he says.

“You’re never going to change them. There’s another group of people who love me, it wouldn’t matter if I robbed a bank, you’re never going to change them. There’s a group of people in the middle, their view is ‘yeah, we didn’t mind Tony, but we’ve moved on. It’s not personal, he’s retired, we’re going to roll with you because we think it’s probably a better prospect’.”

* This article first appeared in The SMH