Despite being wiped out in the New South Wales lower house, preference distribution in the upper house has delivered the Shooters Fishers and Farmers party a second and highly-influential seat in the parliament.
Robert Borsak was returned to Legislative Council in the 20th position after the NSW Electoral Commission computer churned through the final preferences to fill the 21 vacancies on Wednesday.
The party failed to secure a full quota.
"I'm not normally an anxious person but I must admit I have had a few sleepless nights thinking about the numbers and where they would fall," Mr Borsak said.
The anxiety may now be born by the Minns Labor government, with an even split in numbers between his party and the Coalition in the upper house meaning it will need to do deals with both left and right to pass laws.
Mr Borsak said the result could leave the Shooters in the "driver's seat".
"I think it possibly does, if they are not going to talk to One Nation … what are they going to do? Can they take the Greens for granted upstairs? I don't know.
"It is going to be an interesting time and interesting ride."
Latham vow increases Shooters' influence
At the beginning of the April, Mr Minns vowed not to work with NSW One Nation leader Mark Latham, after he posted a graphic and homophobic reply on Twitter to independent MP Alex Greenwich.
Mr Borsak shares a strong working relationship with Mr Latham and said the Premier's decision was "foolish".
"I think they should rethink that and see whether they can talk to him and come up with some position where they can support him," he said.
"They shouldn't just grab something inopportune of the things he said ... to assuage Mr Greenwich — Mr Greenwich is not that important, there are other people in the lower house."
'Not annihilated' in lower house
When parliament resumes, Mr Borsak will join Mark Banasiak — the only other Shooters member left in government — in the upper house, after the party's three lower house MPs quit to run as independents.
All three retained their seats, covering a large swathe of the state's far west.
Mr Borsak denied the party was wiped out in the lower house.
"We were not annihilated — we always knew those three people downstairs would get re-elected," he said.
In December, Barwon MP Roy Butler and Orange MP Phil Donato quit the Shooters after a failed leadership challenge — and in relation to comments Mr Borsak made about Murray MP, Helen Dalton.
Ms Dalton had already quit the party in March 2022 to run as an independent.
Private comments
In September, Mr Borsak's voice was picked up on the audio-visual feed of the chamber, suggesting Ms Dalton should have been "clocked" for her behaviour, while watching a debate from the president's gallery in the upper house.
Mr Borsak said the comments were made in a private conservation with Mr Latham and not in the chamber.
"I made private comments, they were picked up by the Liberal dirt unit and then they used all of that to game those two [Butler and Donato] downstairs," he said.
"I'm not going to be pinned down by that sort of stuff, the reality is … what is said privately stays privately, I would no longer do that than fly to the moon.
"This was clearly an exercise of 'get Borsak', I know that."
Mending bridges
But Mr Borsak did not rule out working with the former Shooters in the lower house.
"Our ex-members may have issues they want to prosecute with the government, and we would look at what they were and see how they would help them out," he said.
He also acknowledged the Shooters' former members, now elected as independents, "might get some stuff" from Labor in the next term of parliament, in an effort by Labor to keep the Nationals out of the three key regional seats.
"If the government needs them, I am sure they will be doing stuff with them — but they are certainly not going to be as well-off [as they would have been] if they remained in our party structure, because then we could have done some real deals."
