, the division's namesake The division was proclaimed in 1900, and was one of the
original 65 divisions to be contested at the
first federal election. It is named after the
New England region in northern New South Wales. From
1922 to
2001, New England was usually regarded as a comfortably safe seat for the
National Party, formerly the Country Party. Only one
Labor candidate has ever won the seat –
Frank Foster at the
1906 election and again at the
1910 election, both times on
small margins. Since then, the closest Labor has come to winning the seat was in the
1943 landslide, when the Country majority was pared back to an extremely marginal 1.1 percent. It was a marginal seat for most of the 1980s, but since the 1990s Labor has been lucky to get 40 percent of the two-party vote, and has frequently been pushed into third place. The seat's best-known member was
Ian Sinclair, leader of the National Party from 1984 to 1989, a minister in the
Menzies,
Holt,
McEwen,
Gorton,
McMahon and
Fraser governments and
Speaker of the Australian House of Representatives for a few months in 1998. He was succeeded by Stuart St. Clair in the 1998 election. St. Clair was then defeated in the
2001 by
independent Tony Windsor, who held it until his retirement in
2013. The member since the
2013 federal election has been former Queensland Senator
Barnaby Joyce, who served as
Deputy Prime Minister of Australia and leader of the National Party from 2016 to 2018. Amid the
2017–18 Australian parliamentary eligibility crisis, the seat was declared vacant on 27 October 2017 by the
High Court of Australia arising from Joyce's dual citizenship. Joyce had renounced his dual citizenship effective from August to become a sole citizen of Australia and was thus eligible to run for federal parliament. Joyce regained the seat at
a by-election on 2 December. On 18 October 2025, Joyce announced he would not recontest the seat at the next federal election. On 27 November Joyce announced that he would leave the Nationals, and sit on the crossbench as an Independent. He subsequently joined
One Nation on 8 December 2025. ==Boundaries==