Former NSW minister Katrina Hodgkinson does not yet know if the National Party will endorse her, but over lunch in Ulladulla she already sounds like a candidate.
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“I don’t feel my time with community service is quite up,” she explains. Less than two years ago, she retired from state politics.
She had left after cooling her heels on the backbench. Her exile came after crossing the floor over the ill-fated greyhound racing ban. Even after the government backflipped and reversed its decision, she was overlooked for a return to cabinet and quit the NSW parliament.
Now, she’s eager to return to parliamentary politics, this time at the federal level. So why the turnaround after only two years in private life?
“I was a member of parliament for the state for 18-and-a-half years. Some would say that’s eight-and-a-half years too long but I just loved the work, loved helping people.”
She says years of redistribution had pushed her electorate further west, adding huge travel times from the family home in Berrima to the far flung areas of the 36,000 square kilometre electorate of Cootamundra.
“I was away for a week at a time, I was really lonely. I missed my husband, I missed my kids, and I just wanted to come home.”
Like fellow Coalition candidate Warren Mundine, she, too, says she has deep family ties to the electorate.
“Gilmore is natural home. My husband Jack was born at Sassafras. I’ve got relatives absolutely everywhere. This year we had family Christmas at Numbaa, we had 75 people camping at my sister-in-law’s place.”
She says she’s had a great rest and is keen to be back in the fight and fixing the Princes Highway is in her sights.
“There is so much left to do. I believe firmly that the Commonwealth should be involved in the funding for the Princes Highway in the same way it has for the New England Highway for the Pacific Highway and with other major roads around the country,” she says.
“It has to be the most dangerous road, per kilometre that I can think of, in NSW at least.
“This is where me being in the Nationals is of great value because the Nationals hold the roads portfolio. We would be making an extremely strong case here for the Commonwealth to have much more significant involvement in the Princes Highway.”
Another priority is mental health, an interest forged by personal experience.
Tears well and the trademark smile vanishes as she recalls that horrible day in 2005 when she found her father in a shed on the family farm near Yass.
He had been battling depression, made worse by the drought that necessitated daily slaughter of sheep to put them out of their misery.
On the day tests on his medication came back, he could not be raised on the farm. Ms Hodgkinson went to check on him and found his body in a holding pen in the shearing shed.
“I got to the shearing shed, parked, and his truck was there. The radio was going, his lunchbox was inside the truck. I thought, ‘This is odd, he hasn’t had his smoko at 11 o’clock.’”
She entered the shed and found him.
She reckons her years of experience in government will work in favour and lists the decentralisation of Fisheries NSW as one of her biggest achievements, which saw the licensing section moved to Nowra, despite stiff opposition from the union.
All this from a person who’s flagged the desire to run but won’t know whether she’s got the nod until this weekend.
“I’m getting out and about meeting people. I haven’t been preselected, I don’t even know if we’re running but I’m really enjoying being back in the community again and seeing what difference I can make.”
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