Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce survived a challenge by the popular former independent MP Tony Windsor in the high profile and bitter battle for the northern NSW seat of New England. 
He retained the seat on a projected two party preferred vote of 57.3 per cent. The result was little comfort to the National Party leader who suffered a 7.2 per cent swing against him despite an electoral redistribution that notionally gave Mr Joyce a margin approaching 20 per cent.
But as his supporters at Tamworth West Leagues Club sang the campaigning fighting song "We're the Balmy Army" Mr Joyce, 49, was happy to take the win.
"This victory is not so much mine but yours," he told supporters after entering the Nationals celebration with his wife Natasha and their daughters. He congratulated the nine other candidates who contested New England, "to the vast majority, well fought and [in] the right spirit".
He said the National Party had gained an extra seat and the first items on his agenda were to help dairy farmers in Victoria and start a rural investment corporation.
During the campaign, Mr Windsor, who came out of retirement to try to win back his old seat, was the target of intensely personal attacks that included billboards highlighting his support for Julia Gillard's Labor government and allegations he had bullied schoolmates nearly 50 years ago.
It culminated on Saturday night when a sign banning a News Limited journalist was posted outside Mr Windsor's Tamworth campaign headquarters.
More than 50 per cent of New England voters are over 50 and many were on holidays. Pre-polls topped 32 per cent. They, along with 3000 postal votes, were the last counted.
Mr Joyce won in 2013 with a comfortable 14.5 per cent margin after he resigned his Queensland Senate seat to contest New England and an electoral redistribution had notionally edged his margin to a safer 19.6 per cent.
National Party in-fighting created Mr Windsor as an independent. He was dudded in a 1991 preselection by local National Party warlord John Anderson and he went on to win the seat of Tamworth as an independent before taking New England in 2001.
Now 65, Mr Windsor said this was the in the eighth election campaign he had fought and he would not retire from public life.
He said the issues he had re-entered politics for - ground water, the NBN and climate change - were still out there and he envisaged being involved, which prompted speculation he may stand for state parliament.
"Now I'll probably go home and give my wife a kiss," Mr Windsor said.
Mr Joyce said he would attend Mass and spend Sunday with his family.
He was clearly upset at the attacks on him from sections of the media.
"That's what The Australian [newspaper] does. That's how they do things. My kids saw how they operated on my mother during the hung Parliament. That's their modus operandi. Anything goes," he said.
"We copped worse than that during the hung Parliament. A lot of it never became public.
"But in terms of a political campaign, this one's probably been the worst that I've taken part in."