Members of the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers (SFF) Party in NSW have said they have had enough and are threatening to leave if their leader does not resign.
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It comes two months after party leader Robert Borsak was accused of bullying former party member and now Independent Member for Murray Helen Dalton.
He is alleged to have said Mrs Dalton should be "clocked".
“I don't think he would have said that to a man. I was just a female,” Mrs Dalton said.
“You need to call it out. if I don't call this out then I'm not assisting any woman or anyone to come into this parliament.”
Mrs Dalton said she resigned from the SFF party earlier in the year because she did not feel respected as a woman and was “very unhappy with how the party was run”.
“I didn't feel supported. Well, I know the party wasn't supporting me,” she said.
“I didn't have much of a say.”
She described the culture within the SFF party as a “boys’ club” and “very autocratic”.
She was one of only three female members.
“Their culture is out of step with the times and they don't even understand that,” she said.
“I'd had enough and the decisions weren't discussed.
“It was basically Borsak or the highway.”
The calls for Mr Borsak to resign have come from Phil Donato, Roy Butler and Mark Banasiak.
While rejecting the assertion of a boys’ club, Mr Butler — who is the NSW Member for Barwon — said he was concerned about the direction of the party and the way the executive was structured.
“We don't want to leave the party, we want to fix some of the internal problems in the party,” he said.
Mr Butler and Mr Donato — the Member for Orange — have both said they will quit if SFF party leader Robert Borsak refuses to step down, which would result in the party being left without any lower house MPs.
“Robert hasn't recanted or withdrawn, he hasn't apologised, and I think that's not what the community would expect if someone was to make a comment like that,” Mr Butler said.
Mr Butler said Mr Borsak had initially denied making the comment until the audio was later released, which he described as “quite audible”.
Mrs Dalton said the “old-fashioned and sexist culture” within the party was “the reason why women will not enter parliament and do not want to take those leadership positions”.
“Because if I had two bob for everyone that said that to me, mostly women, ‘I don't know how you do it, I don't know how you put up with the rot, good on you, but I couldn't do what you do’ ...” she said.
She said the culture and behaviour would only improve if there was a more equal representation of women within the party.
“The balance is clearly very healthy if you can have 50 per cent (women),” she said.
“I've been on boards where the balance has been way out of whack.
“Women add a different dimension to the discussion. They should be in there and you can see the mix. The behaviour gets better when everyone's represented.”
According to Mr Butler, both he and Mr Donato had independently approached Borsak “without knowing that the other had done that”.
“(We) said, ‘Robert, that's not on, you can't do that’, but it was just shrugged off,” Mr Butler said.
“It wasn't taken seriously and that's part of the problem. It is serious and you can't just shrug something like that off.”
As the pressure continues to mount on Mr Borsak, Mrs Dalton predicted he would likely resign as party leader.
“For them to actually get to this point is a massive thing, because I think they would have tried to resolve it and they didn't make any headway,” she said.
Mr Butler said it was “ugly” to have something like that playing out publicly. It was meant to be dealt with “quietly and privately”.
“But this is a build up of things that happened over the last sort of four years,” he said.
“The catalyst for us deciding to go and have that very quiet, respectful conversation with Robert was some comments he made in the upper house about Helen Dalton.
“But Robert has essentially put it into the public domain by making allegations about us.”
Mr Butler said he was particularly concerned with the way the state executive was structured within the party and it needed to change.
“There's Robert's son, Robert's mate, and then a treasurer and a chair,” he said.
“But essentially, the way it's been going is that it tends to follow the lead of what Robert senior likes to do, and I don't think that's good for a party.
“We want to see a situation where the membership drives what the party does and we don't have a situation where one person is driving what the party does.”
If Mr Borsak were to resign, Mr Butler said he would consider stepping up as leader. But it was not something he would be sticking his hand up for in a rush.
Meanwhile, as the next state election in March 2023 draws closer, Mrs Dalton confirmed she would be running again for the hotly contested seat of Murray.
“I can see a glimmer, a big light at the end of the tunnel where I think it'll be a hung parliament and that I will have a great deal of influence,” she said.
“And I know I'm probably best placed in the state seat at the moment.
“We need to be all working together for the greater good. But it's all about politics.
“It's politics for the party, not politics for the people. And I'm about the people.”
Guardian Australia intern at the Deniliquin Pastoral Times