If you talk to most people, the idea of anyone other than Labor winning a federal seat in the Illawarra is just not possible.
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Even the man who actually managed to do it didn't think it could happen.
This year is the 20th anniversary of the 2002 Cunningham by-election, where Greens candidate Michael Organ took the seat from Labor.
To date it is still the only time in the seat's 73-year history that the sitting member wasn't from the Labor party.
Mr Organ, running for the Greens in the seat of Riverina at this election, hadn't believed he could win the seat.
In fact, he had prepared two speeches - one if the Greens lost big and a second if they reduced Labor's margin. There was no thought of writing a victory speech.
"It was only about nine o'clock on the night of election day, someone tapped me on the shoulder and they said 'looks like you've won this, Michael'," Mr Organ said.
"And I thought 'f..k', what am I going to do now?'. That night around me people were going crazy. They were so happy, there was so much excitement.
"It was quite an amazing night but I'm standing in the middle of this amazing turmoil and I'm going 'okay, what do I do next?'."
What he did next was decide to treat it like a job. One day he was working at the University of Wollongong library and then on Monday he had a new job - the MP for Cunningham.
It was a sudden rise for someone who had only joined the Greens a few months earlier.
Through serving on the council's environmental heritage committee and being involved in community efforts like the campaign to save Wollongong's Regent Cinema, Mr Organ had developed a local profile.
That led to local bookstore owner and Green Elizabeth Perey getting in his ear in the middle of 2002.
"She asked me if she would run for the Greens as Lord Mayor," he said.
"And I said, 'oh well, can you show me what their policies are?'. So I had a bit of a look and I thought I was a pretty good fit so I ran for Lord Mayor.
"That was completed in September and we got about 20 per cent, which was quite an amazing vote. And a month later they said 'well, you can run for Cunningham as well'."
The seat had become vacant after sitting Labor member Stephen Martin decided to step down, citing burn-out and an inability to continue to give "150 per cent" effort in representing the electorate.
Other factors fell in Mr Organ's favour; the Liberal Party chose not to put up a candidate and there was tension in the Labor ranks, which was exacerbated by the party's decision not to allow rank and file members to choose a candidate through a pre-selection process.
Instead, the party called an N40 - where senior branch members and administrative committee members pick the Labor candidate, which turned out to be former Shellharbour councillor Sharon Bird.
"The left in Wollongong, the labour movement, were becoming very disenchanted with the way the ALP was going, especially in the Illawarra," Mr Organ said.
"The ALP in the Illawarra around that time, it was very right and the electorate was very disenchanted with it."
At the same time, Mr Organ said former Greens leader Bob Brown had raised the national profile of the party in the years leading into the Cunningham by-election on October 19, 2002.
The by-election ended up on the national stage, with Mr Organ and Ms Bird appearing on national TV being interviewed by Laurie Oakes, in what the Greens candidate called " a really surreal experience".
It was a congested field, with 13 candidates on the ticket. That large number helped Mr Organ's final vote, with many rivals choosing to send their preferences his way.
Ms Bird was well out in front on first preference votes, 25,671 to Mr Organ's 15,505. But then those preferences kicked in.
By the time they were counted, Mr Organ's vote had more than doubled to 35,160, giving him the seat by a margin of 2996 votes over Ms Bird.
Mr Organ said the result was significant locally, but also sent out a message nationally.
"It had a lot of local elements but it also had resonance around Australia," he said, "because it showed that people can affect change by the way they voted in the ballot box.
"The voters show they could affect real change. And hopefully this is going to happen this year as well."
As a newcomer to politics, Mr Organ didn't quite know his way around the landscape, though he had people in his corner giving helpful advice.
"I wasn't a political animal - I wasn't one of these people who had been part of a party all my life," he said.
"I was more of a community activist but there were people around me who knew about preferences, who knew about the way politics worked, the way the votes were going to go, what to do, what to say.
"So I was able to get a lot of good advice along the way."
He was sworn in a month after the election and then, in December had to deal with questions about his eligibility for parliament.
The Section 44 rules - which have ended other politicians' careers due to dual citizenship - also prevented people "holding an office of profit under the Crown" from being an MP.
With Mr Organ still employed by the university but on unpaid leave, there were whispers about his eligibility. But nothing came of it and Labor didn't want to make it an issue.
The party had done that previously when it lost a seat, only to lose it again to the same candidate by a larger margin when the election was held again.
The job of a federal MP is a busy one; Mr Organ found it easier to break the days into 30-minute sections. He'd focus on what he was doing for the next half-hour before moving onto something else.
He remembered throwing a spotlight on issues that had been neglected federally.
"We raised issues on the floor of parliament that weren't being addressed," he said.
"We raised things about Aboriginal issues and climate change and all these things the major parties weren't addressing."
Mr Organ lost re-election in 2004 and, after a few more years he decided it was time to step back and let younger people take over because "a lot of old people running the country" isn't necessarily the best thing.
He moved to the Riverina two years ago and was asked by the Greens to run in this election.
"I thought I can help the Greens with my experience, so that's why I'm running," he said.
"But I would much prefer to see younger people, more diverse people, and women running for parliament. In the current state of the Riverina, it's all elderly men running for the seat and I think that's bad for democracy, frankly."
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Glen Humphries
I'm an award-winning senior journalist with the Illawarra Mercury and have well over two decades' worth of experience in newspapers. I cover the three local councils in the Illawarra for the Mercury, state and federal politics, as well as writing for the TV guide. If I'm not writing, I'm reading.
I'm an award-winning senior journalist with the Illawarra Mercury and have well over two decades' worth of experience in newspapers. I cover the three local councils in the Illawarra for the Mercury, state and federal politics, as well as writing for the TV guide. If I'm not writing, I'm reading.
