In a particularly quiet week in politics, you can always rely on Barnaby Joyce for a juicy quote. Out came Barnaby today to declare that the Nationals should run a separate campaign from the Liberals to maximise their vote.
The Nationals, it is clear, are not going gently into that good night. They’re going with a racket, kicking and screaming, clawing at everyone and everything around them. But they’re going anyway. They have little choice. The only possible future the Nationals have is as a rump of a Coalition with the Liberals. A small, not particularly relevant and faintly embarrassing rump.
That’s the least worst option they face.
The alternatives are to merge with the Liberals, which would amount to the end of the party outside Queensland, or to separate, as Barnaby Joyce is now proposing, which would mean a relatively quick death at the hands of the electorate. What they have at the moment is, dismal as it seems, as good as it gets.
As Antony Green explained in an excellent piece on the decline of the Nats, the Nationals are not merely up against demography and the decline of rural populations, they’re up against everyone else in politics. Of the 16 House of Representatives seats they’ve lost since 1977 to other parties, eight went to the Liberals, five to the ALP and three to Independents. The Nationals’ greatest political enemy is their Coalition partner.
What the Nationals have never been able to explain is why, when candidates leave the National Party and set up as independents, their vote skyrockets and they become invulnerable in what were once safe National seats. Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott and Bob Katter all have margins that most MPs can only dream about. There is clearly something toxic about the Nationals brand that makes this keep happening. Only Oakeshott occupies a regional seat of the type that the Nationals have struggled to hold in recent years against Labor. Windsor and Katter hold traditional National seats — Windsor’s was Ian Sinclair’s fiefdom for a generation; Katter’s father held Kennedy for 24 years.
Despite what Joyce believes, the Nationals’ problem has nothing to do with how close they are to the Liberals. They’ve been separate from the Liberals in Queensland for most of the past two decades and longer, and it did them no good whatsoever. Voters don’t reject Nationals candidates because of the Liberals, they reject them because they’re Nationals. The problem is that the Nationals are unique in Australian politics in being sectorally based. They are the representatives of a specific industry, agriculture, and are thus hostage to structural changes in that industry. Agriculture has become far more efficient, corporatised and capital-intensive over the past 100 years, leaving the Nationals to represent a backwards-looking vision of Australia.
Moreover, the traditional electoral strategy of the Nationals, to funnel public money to bush electorates as a demonstration of the benefits of voting for what would otherwise be a minor party, doesn’t work as well electorally when there’s fewer voters to pork barrel, other parties and independents can do exactly the same and regional communities, particularly along the coast, are becoming as diverse and as dependent on the state of the wider Australian economy as urban Australians.
While the Nationals remain a party structured around a specific industry, they’ll be stranded, protecting an ever-smaller base against their Coalition partners, Labor and independents, fighting to hold a seat every time a member retires, unable to think about growing even back to the levels of support of a decade ago.
You might have noticed Nats-hater Alby Schultz is in full agreement with Joyce: he wants them to go their own way. Schultz understands that once that happens, all deals will be off and the Liberals will be able to take on the Nats wherever they want. As Green’s figures show, the Liberals are the biggest threat to the Nationals — an existential threat in a way Labor can never be. Once the Nats leave the protection of the Coalition, they’ll be on their way to oblivion.
The only problem for the Schultz strategy is that until that oblivion comes, the conservative side of politics will be stuck looking disunited and internally focused, and that virtually guarantees continuing defeat. That’s why the status quo is the best option for both sides, regardless of how bad it seems now.
Spot on! When the Nationals represent all people in regional Australia instead of the traditional Cockeys and Big Ag, when they stop slandering ordinary country workers, pandering to the Liberal Party, when they face up to the damage being caused to the country by the people in the Melbourne and Sydney to the country environment and when they face up to climate change will I vote for them.
I reckon a lot of other country people who don’t plough paddocks, milk cows or sell tractors would as well.
Isn’t Barnyard a member of a party – the QLD Liberal-National Party (LNP) that is Federally affiliated to the Liberal Party? He won’t be standing the next election as a National anyway if he stands in QLD. He’s opposing his own party! Or is he proposing the LNP disaffiliate?
Actually I think a deconstruction of the Nats funding sources will indicate a strong base in the extractive industries, which include so called “timber” industry where in reality most product by volume is not timber but woodchips, and thus more akin to a mining operation. Mining of green carbon in fact into soon discarded paper in Japan or similar.
But also extractive industries as generally understood – the mining sector.
I think your thesis, and that of Antony Green, is probably right but with that important qualification. Indeed I may be wrong but I understood that was the underlying rationale behind the name change from Country Party to National Party to expand beyond the traditional rural industry.
What I think you have identified here is that mechanisation has seen the agglomeration of family farms into big Agri, depopulating the regions, with climate chasing that demographic this last 10 years also regarding sustained reduced rainfall. And because politics like nature abhors a vacuum both Liberals and Labor and Independents have increasingly hunted the Nats for a meal.
The trouble for the Nats is that unless they green up (!) because they do understand land use and resource management, if only to exploit it, they can’t claim exclusivity on the mining sector like they could on rural industry. Demographics is indeed destiny. Methinks they better get their biosequestration skates on, and start promoting protection of old growth forests – because conversion of these in particular to dry schlerophyll is wildfire madness.
Really.
The interesting point you make Tom is the Nats have never shown the same interest in the environment that the Greens have. Yet they purport to be the party of the land, well whats left of them do. I cannot recall when I last heard B Joyce make a serious contribution
to the restoration of logged land, or the invasion of the cane toad in his home state, or the protection of native birds and plants, or the disaster that is a river system in decay. Mind you it is difficult to recall Joyce making a serious contribution on anything. He and Sen Fielding should be locked in a room for 24 hours, they would bore each other into a permanent state of rigormortis. It is not going to do the Nats cause any favours when he eventually takes over the leadership as must surely happen. Hopefully for the sake of sane debate in the Senate and the media, his lot will have either shrunk to non influential numbers and he is merely a dumb arse filling a seat. He wont lack for company.
The next half-senate election has Brandis in top spot and Joyce in second. He will be running as a QLD LNP candidate and not a National. How he can become leader of the Nationals escapes me, unless he migrates to NSW and stands for the Nationals there.