Hard rocker-turned-Nationals hopeful Angry Anderson says he will change his name but not his nature in pursuit of the seat of Throsby.
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The 65-year-old former Rose Tattoo frontman has vowed to compromise "as little as possible" for the sake of party politics, although he will appear as Gary Anderson on the ballot paper at the September 14 federal election.
"They don't take nicknames as I understand it, which is fine by me," he said.
"It's that young people are starting to call me 'mister' or 'sir' that's a bit concerning."
Anderson, who lives on Sydney's northern beaches, freely admits he was preselected for Throsby after struggling to get a foothold in electorates elsewhere in NSW.
"We talked to the local committees and in every case they didn't want a fly-in, they didn't want - not my words - a show pony - coming in from the city, because some of them were quite rural," he said.
He shook off suggestions his outsider status was a problem, saying he would spend as much time as he could in the electorate, and already felt he understood the region's people.
"We understand one another as Australians," he said.
"I care about those people down there who are working hard, who don't want to take handouts, who want to keep working and pay fair taxes.
"They have been taken for granted [by Labor]. They might not be ready to vote Liberal, and that's where I come in. That's where the Nationals come in."
Anderson is 65; a 1.56-metre-tall father of four with a spiritual streak. He has no particular faith but when life gets tough he spends an hour in a Baha'i temple near his home.
He said his divorce had helped him become "poor as a church mouse" and though he had visited Bowral frequently of late - as part of efforts to get to know the area - he couldn't afford to live there.
Anderson was raised in a Labor-voting household but said he hadn't voted for a Labor politician since Bob Hawke, believing the party had since turned its back on the working class.
He said he supported gay marriage - "yeah, I don't have a problem with it" - and wanted to take on the "horrific suicide rates" among farmers.
He argues for greater resources towards redeeming young offenders, changes to "the left education that we've all suffered under for so long" and a loosening of the regulations governing small business.
Anderson has been criticised for his views on Muslim immigration but has said since that his visit to Kabul, during filming for the SBS series Go Back to Where You Came From, had given him greater empathy for people in desperate circumstances.
But he told the Mercury there was "too much focus these days on asylum-seeking immigration. There's other forms of immigration that we can encourage" and he remained wary of open borders.
He said political rivals would have difficulty finding any skeletons in his closet because he had revealed them all himself during decades in the public spotlight, including his time on The Midday Show in the mid-1980s.
"It coincided with the birth of my daughter. I wasn't going to let her grow up with a dysfunctional father. I did and it didn't do me any good.
"Most of the things that I've battled with - the drugs and alcohol and bad behaviour - most of my life's been pretty much an open book."
Throsby is held by Labor's Stephen Jones, who has yet to be re-endorsed as the party's candidate at the September 14 election.
Party officials are expected to decide Labor's candidate on Friday.
Political staffer Larissa Mallinson has been preselected for the Liberals.
Mr Jones, who holds the seat by a margin of 12.1 per cent, said he had never met Mr Anderson.
"I think it's interesting that Tony Abbott has picked somebody who lives on the northern beaches of Sydney to run as a candidate in the Illawarra," he said.
"It's over 150 kilometres away and, by his own admission, he's a guy who has little detailed knowledge of the area.
"People deserve a representative who is able to develop and articulate a clear vision for the region and the country and be able to argue it in Canberra. It's not about slogans. It's about doing the hard, detailed policy work," Mr Jones said.