Rebekha Sharkie doesn’t have a media adviser. That may explain why we hear so little about the member for Mayo, the longest-serving woman on the House of Representatives crossbench — and the last person standing from former South Australian senator Nick Xenophon’s federal experiment.
“I’m not a crossbench person who spends a lot of time pushing to grow my media profile,” Sharkie tells me. “I just work on the issues that I think are important.”
Sharkie, a former Liberal staffer, first ran for Liberal-held Mayo in 2016 as the Nick Xenophon Team (NXT) candidate, defeating her former boss, Jamie Briggs. She’s won every election since, building up a solid 12% margin, even as her party’s Senate vote collapsed. While she continues to run on Centre Alliance, as the NXT became known, Sharkie is essentially an independent, with no-one else involved in the ticket.
The formerly blue-ribbon seat of Mayo, which covers the wealthy Adelaide Hills and the more rural areas southeast of the capital, is likely hers for as long as she stands. South Australia, birthplace of the Democrats, has long had a centrist independent streak. Redgum lead singer John Schumann came close to winning Mayo off Alexander Downer in 1998, while Liberal-turned-independent MP Dan Cregan now holds the overlapping state seat.
But for someone who’s been on the crossbench for eight years, Sharkie’s politics often feel undefined. Unlike her fellow crossbenchers’, her website is largely free of policies (priorities such as climate and housing are mentioned on the “About” page, but there’s no mention of set positions). She’s perhaps best known for her anti-gambling advocacy, which was also the original Xenophon platform — ageing Australians are another key focus, with Mayo residents among the oldest in the country.
Sharkie recently told the AFR she would be inclined to negotiate with Peter Dutton first in the event of a hung parliament, in line with what her traditionally Liberal electorate would want (Bob Katter, Dai Le, Helen Haines and Allegra Spender are considered Dutton’s other choices). But is that really the case? What do people who vote independent expect their representatives to do?
When I ask Sharkie where she sits politically, she cites “the sensible centre”, saying she could be described as a small-l liberal: fiscally conservative and socially “relaxed”. But she is adamant she’s not a “teal”, preferring to compare herself to former Indi MP Cathy McGowan, who also won a large rural seat off the Libs. Analysis shows Sharkie votes most like her fellow independents, though she’s among the more LNP-leaning of the bunch.
“I try not to look at anything from an ideological point of view,” she says, adding that she’s open to working with anyone. “I try to always look on the evidence, and really take an evidence-based approach to every piece of legislation.”
Sharkie left the Liberal Party in the early 2010s, singling out Tony Abbott’s “shocking” 2013 austerity budget as why she got back into politics; she expresses a clear preference for the old moderate SA Liberals she used to work for. She’s reluctant, however, to criticise today’s party, despite it looking a lot like Abbott’s. The Liberals recently preselected Alex Antic-backed conservative Zane Basic for Mayo, amid a factional war that has seen Antic replace frontbencher Anne Ruston at the top of the SA Senate ticket.
“Generally, I don’t talk about candidates,” Sharkie says carefully when asked about her new opponent, though she does note the far-right has been doing well in preselections across the state. “And the Liberal Party today, look, I mean, you know, I haven’t been part of the Liberal Party for more than 12 years, so it’s probably a little bit difficult for me to talk about them.”
Dutton has “always been very respectful towards me”, she adds, reiterating that she is open to working with anyone (the Liberals have repeatedly tried to recruit her). Which brings us back to the idea that Sharkie would negotiate with Dutton first in the event of a hung parliament — a sentiment she confirmed in our conversation, noting it would only be a starting point and acknowledging lessons learned from Andrew Wilkie’s 2010 experience.
“I think my community expects that from me,” she says. “If you look at the history of my seat, it’s traditionally been a blue-ribbon seat … it’s never been a Labor seat.”
“And these aren’t necessarily people who vote for me,” she adds. “But this is, you know, where I think the majority of the community would sit.”
I question whether the fact that Mayo now leans Labor on a two-party-preferred basis (51.59–48.41) makes a difference to this calculation. Sharkie denies this is the case, noting the 2022 count came down to her and the Liberal candidate.
What follows is a bizarre three minutes, in which Sharkie rejects the idea of a notional 2PP count, pointing to the fact that the ALP got less than 20% of first preference votes in Mayo, dismissing Wikipedia as a source, and questioning where such a count would even come from.
As election analyst Ben Raue explains, the Australian Electoral Commission performs a major party count in every seat, even those where Labor and the Coalition are not the top two candidates. Raue published a blog post on the 2022 count, noting it was unusual for Mayo, a formerly safe Liberal seat, to prefer Labor over the Coalition, with a roughly 4% swing towards the ALP — 60.24% of Sharkie’s primary votes preferenced Labor over Liberal.
I eventually give up trying to convince Sharkie that the notional 2PP is a real thing, that slightly fewer Mayo voters wanted the Liberals than Labor; either she doesn’t understand or she doesn’t want to, and we’re running out of time. Would a swing away from the Libs at the next election play into her thinking?
“Oh, look, sure,” she says. “I mean, if the Liberals only received, say, 20% of the first-preference vote like Labor did, well, naturally I would have to rethink what I assume my community will want me to do. I’m only one person out of 138,000.”
Indeed, she is. But hopefully someone can explain to Sharkie before then how the votes are actually falling in Mayo, a seat that seems to adore Sharkie but appears increasingly disenchanted with the Liberal Party as it stands.
