Our say | Fight for Bathurst is now a battle of the sixes

For the first time in 28 years, not a single woman will be in ballot for the seat of Bathurst.

And while there is a danger in reading too much into a single occurrence (after all, three of the five candidates for Bathurst in 2015 were women), there does appear to be an overwhelming trend at play here.

Women represent just two of the nine councillors currently on Bathurst Regional Council and while there are just two candidates confirmed for the federal election in May (the Nationals’ Andrew Gee and Labor’s Jess Jennings), they, too, are both men.

So a lack of female candidates in our region is being repeated at each level government, meaning we have to ask why.

Certainly, the political parties have a major role to play in evening the balance of gender representation.

As the incumbent, Paul Toole was always go to be the Nationals’ candidate while we don’t imagine minor parties like Sustainable Australia and Keep Sydney Open had a long list of candidate wannabes jockeying for a spot on the Bathurst ballot.

The Greens have the longest history of running female candidates in Bathurst (every state election from 1995-2015) so they can probably be spared criticism on this occasion.

In any case, David Harvey was as reluctant a candidate as you could hope to find so we suspect he would have happily stepped aside if one of his female colleagues had indicated a desire to run.

But we understand it was quite a different story for Labor.

This newspaper and our stablemate the Lithgow Mercury have both heard rumblings of dissatisfaction from local Labor members over the choice of Beau Riley ahead of the party's 2015 candidate, Cassandra Coleman.

Of course, that's nothing new - any candidate's supporters would be upset to see another person's name appear on the ballot.

But Ms Coleman's supporters could point to her profile as a current Lithgow councillor and also the argument that Lithgow remains the Labor heartland of the Bathurst electorate as reasons she might have deserved a second chance.

The fact she is a woman should not come into it, but it would not have hurt either.