Who is Bridget Archer, the new federal member for Bass?

In an in-depth interview with The Examiner, the newly minted MP admitted she questioned whether she was the right candidate for the party, even during the election campaign.

"I'm not a very self-confident person," Ms Archer said. "So I actually do find it a bit challenging to have [a] front-facing sort of role."

"Obviously I've got to get a bit more used to it over time.

"But it's a bit daunting and it's not natural for me."

The 44-year-old Ms Archer was elected last week, beating Labor incumbent Ross Hart by just 563 votes - which gives her a precariously slim margin of just 0.4 per cent.

The former George Town mayor was elected to council in 2009, became deputy mayor in 2011 and later mayor in 2014.

She lives on a farm outside of George Town with her husband Winston and their five children James, Molly, Edith, Lauren and Luke.

Ms Archer was born in Hobart and spent the early years of her life in the state capital. She moved to Ravenswood when she was eight-years-old, following the death of her father.

"[I remember] my dad a little bit," she said. "Not as much as I'd like, obviously."

The young Ms Archer went to Ravenswood Primary School upon coming North.

"Mum was a stay-at-home mum when we were quite young," she said. "But then she re-married after we moved to Launceston."

"[She] worked for a while for the Australian Maritime College, ran the student shop out there.

"And my step-dad worked ... at Allgoods, actually."

In a very Tasmanian case of coincidence, one of the windows in Ms Archer's new electorate office on St John Street - which Mr Hart occupied up until recently - looks out onto the exterior of the Elizabeth Street Allgoods store, the store her step-dad used to work at when she was growing up.

After graduating from Launceston Church Grammar School, Ms Archer returned to Hobart to commence an arts-law degree at the University of Tasmania.

"I ... ended up ... [dropping] out of uni and did a few other jobs," she said.

One of these was a curating gig at the Tasmanian Herbarium in Hobart, part of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

There, she curated the collection of plants and collected new specimens and added them to the database.

After a couple of years, Ms Archer moved to Sydney, right at the time of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Working in hospitality, she eventually decided to return to Tasmania, where she went back to uni and got an arts degree and a graduate certificate in international politics, about the same time she had her first child Luke.

That was when Ms Archer moved to George Town.

"After I had my second child, the local government elections came up and Winston said, 'You should run ... because it'd be a good way to meet people'," she said. "I got elected which was a bit unexpected."

But Ms Archer said she never really aspired to a career in politics.

"I don't think I really thought about a career in politics - not in a front-facing role, if you like," she said.

"[I was] thinking about it more from [the] point-of-view [of] a policy space."

She joined the Liberal Party about 2013.

"I guess I ... felt that [theirs] were values I identified with," she said. "So I decided to take a more keen interest from that point-of-view."

At the 2018 state election, Ms Archer was one of five Liberal candidates for Bass.

While she didn't win a seat, she did better than she expected to do, attracting 1803 primary votes. She said this made her consider a run at the federal seat of Bass.

"Making that decision to stand for federal politics is a very big [one]" she said.

"Because unlike a state campaign when you're going in as one member of a five-member team ... with a federal campaign, you're it.

"It's very intense."

Although she admits her lack of self-confidence can sometimes be an issue for her, Ms Archer said she had "fairly good interpersonal skills".

"I enjoy hearing what people's views are, having those conversations with people about the things that are important to them," she said.

The Liberals' campaign in Bass and Braddon centred on an attack on Labor's funding pledges for Tasmania's bid for a team in the AFL, as well as an expansion of MONA.

The ALP committed $25 million and $50 million to the projects, respectively.

The Liberals' argument was that this money should have been going to the state's health system instead - and it was an argument the two Northern electorates seemed to endorse.

Ms Archer denied the Liberals had stoked Tasmania's historical parochialism by running ads claiming AFL and MONA funding would only benefit Hobart.

"I don't believe ... that there was a deliberate North-South divide created [by the Liberals]," she said. "I think there is still, and has been for a long time, a bit of parochialism in Tasmania."

"I don't think it would be a barrier to having a team but I do think it's something we need to bear in mind, that it's not something we created. "

While Ms Archer said she was "not unsupportive" of the idea of a state AFL team, she added that the deal with Hawthorn Football Club, which sees a number of games played at the University of Tasmania Stadium each year, was of "enormous" benefit to the North.

It was revealed in budget estimates last week that Premier Will Hodgman and Treasurer Peter Gutwein had urged MONA to seek federal funding for its proposed hotel development - that's despite the federal Liberals campaigning against federal assistance for the museum.

Ms Archer said her state Liberal colleagues were not misguided in providing such advice to MONA.

"But I do think it's equally appropriate for the federal Liberal Party in the course of an election campaign to say, 'Well, that, in terms of this campaign, is not where our priority lies'," she said.

She's still in the process of setting up her electorate office, but Ms Archer is also thinking about what she wants to achieve in her first few months in Canberra.

Her first order of business will be to ensure the funding commitments made in the the campaign are honoured "as quickly as possible".

"I'm keen to have some more in-depth conversations with people around some of the issues that they raised ... during the campaign, and to get a sense of those issues ... that are impacting on people and what we can do to address them," she said.

"[I want to] talk to people ... about the future of Northern Tasmania and how we get there now and over the next three years."

Ms Archer says she's in it for the long haul and is determined not to join Bass' long line of one-term wonders.

"I find it so frustrating that every three years there's a change of direction [in Bass]," she said. "It's not good for Northern Tasmania."

But only time will tell if Ms Archer is able to buck the trend of Bass treating its incumbents unkindly at the ballot box.