Having been a political backwater for many years, Gilmore is having a truckload of attention heaped on it. On Monday, we had the fourth visit from the Prime Minister this year.
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Not too long ago, there would be a flutter of excitement from the local electorate office if the assistant minister for paperclips graced us with their presence. Extremely rare was a prime ministerial visit. That changed in May last year when then PM Malcolm Turnbull turned up with then Treasurer Scott Morrison to pledge $155 million to the new Nowra bridge.
It was as if they'd just twigged the seat the Coalition had held for two decades was at serious risk of falling to Labor. Just why it took them so long to work that out is a mystery - from one of the safest Liberal seats, Gilmore became the most marginal in NSW in 2016, held by a razor-thin 0.7 per cent.
Since that first prime ministerial visit, Scott Morrison has become a regular visitor, spruiking for his captain's call candidate Warren Mundine. He was back again on Monday, pitching his support for Aussie manufacturing (yep, there is still such a thing, although greatly diminished).
Like a swag of other closely contested electorates, Gilmore is now firmly in the national spotlight and this has leveraged some substantial election pledges from both - $500 million for the Princes Highway, $35 million for a dedicated mental health unit at Shoalhaven Hospital, additional funding for surf lifesaving, the list goes on.
The deluge of money reflects an iron law of politics: if you want stuff done in your electorate, make it marginal. Safe seats tend to be overlooked because they're too easily taken for granted. Nothing focuses a politician's mind quite like the prospect of losing or winning a seat. And nothing infuriates an electorate quite like being ignored simply because there's no contest.
With a week and a half left in the campaign, we can expect even more pledges dropped into the electorate but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact these are promises whose only value lies in their actual delivery. Should the seat miraculously become safe - unlikely with such a large field of candidates - the danger is it will once again be taken for granted and those promises put on the backburner.
The safest way to see election pledges delivered is to remain an unsafe seat. The surefire way to ensure you're not cast into the margins of federal funding is to remain marginal.
