There have been three deaths so far from the first fires of the 2019-20 bushfire season. There will be many more to come. Will the political future of the National Party be among them?
There is every sign that the Nationals themselves believe that this is yet another threat to their hold on the Bush. Drought and structural unemployment have been wearing away at them for some time. Now, the whole of eastern Australia is set to go up in what is now that most Australian of things: the once-in-a-century fire happening for the third time in 10 years.
These fires are happening with such frequency now that they are beginning to wear down the resistant scepticism of large areas of rural Australia. For three decades now, a great deal of rural identity has been based on counterposing concrete knowledge and experience to abstract science. “Their” city knowledge tells us structural climate change is occurring; we know that extreme weather comes and goes, bushfire and drought test you, and so on.
Except now the “extremes” have come and they aren’t going away again. The frequency is wearing down the distinct sense of Bush being and time that underpinned a politics of what one might call “folk denialism”.
It had already begun to collapse among younger rural people and women farmers and community leaders — those less invested in the bush myth for their own personal meanings. Now it appears to be hardening into a final resistance in some parts before cracking absolutely.
Desperate to regain the appearance of leadership, the Nationals have turned their fire on the Greens, branding any mention of climate change as “political” at a time of national unity etc.
This too is an old populist move. Fighting current bushfires is tied to the first colonisation of a harsh, alien land, of the wars then fought in its name — all the moments when we were allegedly united, a pre-political founding. They’ve even managed to tie the Greens to a primitivist “other”: alleged “greenie” policies on bush fuel, back-burning etc.
Apparently six years of federal government, and years of Liberal and anti-green governments in NSW and Queensland, haven’t been enough time to attend to these matters. Desperate stuff, made all the more so by the substantial separation between the Nats and the people they continue to represent through the anti-democratic magic of exhaustive preferences.
Once, the Country Party represented (somewhat partially) a constituency with distinctive interests, and, crucially, a way of life. They represented farming communities above all, and in the eastern states, communities of local production circuits, and a degree of production-for-use, and communal non-waged labour (harvests, housebuilding etc).
After decades, representation hardened into heredity and elite networks. Even so that would have been politically sustainable if successive resources booms had not occurred as white rural Australia began its long decline to status as a periphery to capital cities, with agriculture now near labour-free.
The Country Party was never much concerned with mining, since areas where it was concentrated were politically left. It became first an advocate of it, then a political client — getting the Bush’s share — then its representative. Now it is near identical with it.
Former party leader John Anderson became chairman of Eastern Star Gas. His successor in the Nationals, Mark Vaile, now sits on the board at Whitehaven Coal, against which farmers in the Liverpool Plains have staged hundreds of days of blockades. Party scion Larry Anthony was a lobbyist for the Shenhua Watermark mine. And on it goes.
This is something more than the network of influence and lobbying over the Coalition as a whole, documented in the excellent Greenpeace/Simon West report. It is a conveyer belt between the legislative role and direct ownership. It marked the moment the Nats, as an organisation, lost interest in representing their community.
That already produced one disaster: our give-away gas “export” business, which has cost us billions and raised power prices. Now it gives National Party MPs a powerful incentive to fail to represent their communities in advocating around the immediate and mid-term future effects of climate change.
For the viability of rural Australia, the time is now: for Australia to lend its voice to advocating sharp emission reductions by 2030, in the hope that warming can be kept to 2.5 degrees or thereabouts.
Thousands of excess deaths, many by burning, are already a tale foretold over the coming decades. But the possibility that there will be anything left of northern rural Australia now hangs in the balance.
That was once the Country Party’s bag. Now, the National Party has made itself the enemy of rural Australia’s survival. And it has done so by invoking the myths and traditions that make that survival meaningful.
The party’s betrayal of its people should be shouted from the burning rooftops, because, finally, people across the country are starting to understand what’s been done to them.
If the Nats will be a casualty, it will be the only one deserved.
And then there’s Canavan’s admission that he wasn’t regulating the mining industry when he was Minister, rather representing it:
https://www.facebook.com/SenatorCanavan/posts/it-has-been-such-an-honour-to-represent-the-australian-mining-sector-over-the-pa/1540954232593314/
You’ve hit the bullseye here, Rundle.
But are enough rural voters waking up to the Nationals’ sham? I fear the penny may drop when it’s too late….as it may already be.
How lucky are the voters of New England they`ve all got 2 arsholes , the one they were born with and Barnaby Joyce.
The national party consistently betrays Australia’s rural families, sucking up to international corporations in agribusiness, environment buggering, theft of water, poxing and plaguing and polluting, all because that is the career politicians’ seduction by ongoing political perversion. The country party was bad enough, keeping us and our practices in dark and dismal ages of ignorance. Who will rid us of filth like Joyce, Mc Cormack, the young idiots coming up with twisted and shrivelled brain fragments?? They are liars, fellatio friendly to donors, our economic oppressors. They are enemies of not just rural Australia, but the whole populace, the culture, the planet and they should be fought, exposed, denounced, spotlighted and shamed for what garbage they are.
Wow. Kudos to you for calling it what it is!! Now, what’s the next step?
It’s a funny thing with rural folk. Lots have long been unhappy with one or more major NP policy directions, but they keep voting for them regardless.
It’s not surprising. Lots of country towns are dominated by a few families as are their surrounding landholdings and have been so for generations. All the locals are well aware of this in a direct way you don’t get in cities. They see it as just the normal way of things. Voting ALP is unthinkable and independents can be represented as troublemakers or NP gripers unless they can cut through to get a purely personal following not based on policy.
After all what are the alternatives ? Collectivisation, state farms? Co-ops maybe but they’ve been broken up (processors, storage/transport etc) and flogged off for short term one off gain years ago.
Plenty of people vote along class lines, as this is usually how representative democracy works. You can’t replace them with an urban party, especially the party of professionals like the Greens, unless a big enough bloc of those voters are in the electorate.
A bunch of these seats fit that criteria and some have jumped to the ALP in the past, but not all of them.
If anything, I’d yell at the Nats voting idiots near me for not splitting from the Nats into a new rural party, or at least an indie. But at this point in time a lot of the electorate should be reforming their representation in parliament, not unique to them.
Well done, Guy. You’ve hit the nail on the head, something Bernard failed to do in his article today. He’s still talking about the NATs representing the farming communities – giving them handouts – when, as you say, it’s the mining industry and the huge cotton and rice plantations who get the real favours; the rural electorates still vote for the NATs but it’s those industries whom the elected NAT politicians represent. How much longer, eh?