To understand why Barnaby Joyce
is making such a nuisance of himself within the Coalition, it’s important to
appreciate his electoral position. The National Party has senators from three
states, but in New South Wales and Victoria they are elected on joint tickets
with the Liberals, so their fate rests on the performance of the Coalition as
awhole. In Queensland, however, the Coalition partners run
separate tickets, so National Party fortunes depend on their own
efforts.

Before 1980, the National Party (and before it the Country
Party) ran on a joint ticket in Queensland as well; they always got one of
the three winnable positions, while the Liberals took the other two. But
in that year they insisted on running a separate ticket, headed by
Flo Bjelke-Petersen, wife of premier Joh. Sure enough, they outvoted
theLiberals, and in 1983, with Joh at the height of his powers,
they crushed them.

Since then, however, it has been downhill all the
way for the Queensland Nationals. In 1983 they beat the Liberal Party 2 to
1; ten years later, those positions were reversed, and by 2004 the
Liberals were outvoting them 6 to 1. The following table shows the
figures (available at the U.W.A. Politics database, here).

Election CP/NP share of Coalition vote:

1980
53.7%

1983 66.0%

1984 62.4%

1987
61.5%

1990 31.7%

1993 31.6%

1996
29.8%

1998 25.1%

2001 20.8%

2004
14.7%

Joyce only just scraped in last year with One Nation
preferences; if this precipitous trend continues he’s got Buckley’s chance
of re-election in 2010. That helps to explain why he’s doing everything
he can to get himself a high profile in Queensland – regardless of what
his colleagues in Canberra think.