About four days into a call-around for a Crikey article about the National Party, an anonymous email arrived — the equivalent of a cry for help, as though slipped under a hotel room door.
“There is a growing fury among the ranks of young Nats,” the email read. “They view the Nats as fossilised and out of touch, trapped in the ’50s. Their views on women, the environment, and lack of opportunity in regions lies at the core.”
The email joined the dots of recent media coverage:
- Gina Rinehart’s $10,000-a-plate bash in honour of Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce at her Noosa mansion
- The elevation of Ross Cadell — a former director of the New South Wales National Party — to number one on the National’s Senate ticket ahead of party elder John Anderson
- The appointment of Bridgette Joyce, Barnaby Joyce’s daughter, to a senior adviser’s job on the staff of NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro.
What emerged from the missive was an ugly picture of resentment against Joyce from the inside. There was “betrayal” and a feeling that “big coal” had set the party’s policy. There was a suggestion too that there was now no chance of repairing the Nats’ “fractured reputation” in respect of “women’s fundamental rights”.
This is what Edvard Munch’s The Scream might have looked like if he was a writer born in Tamworth, New South Wales.
If the National Party of Australia is in the grip of a moral and policy malaise, in the end it’s all about Barnaby. How an accountant schooled at Sydney’s expensive St Ignatius (Riverview) College managed to pass himself off as a knockabout cocky from the bush with the arse hanging out of his pants is just one of the party mysteries the public is asked to accept.
But selling the most extreme of positions as dead normal is Joyce’s peculiar talent — a skill which has seen him hailed as a great “retail politician”. It means that every fault line running through the party ends up at his feet and in his seat of New England.
Former NSW Young Nationals chairman Jessica Price-Purnell, who resigned from the party last year, says its culture is broken: “For a party that once marketed itself as a voice for the people of the bush, the party is now painting itself as a fringe right-wing organisation.”
Price-Purnell points to the role of gas exploration company Santos as “massive donors” to the party, and of the prevalence of mining interests in policy.
Elsewhere there is a hard core of anger within the party at the way sexual harassment allegations against Joyce have been handled. Western Australian farming leader Sue Middleton — a friend of complainant Catherine Marriott — has raised serious questions about the NSW branch office’s closed-shop investigation of the allegations.
“They only [questioned] two people [Marriott and Joyce], and they sought no evidence from any witnesses,” she said. “They weren’t qualified to run an investigation of this type and it should have been handled by external investigators.”
On climate change, too, Joyce is out of kilter with his own constituency. Earlier this month a survey conducted by Australian Community Media, to which more than 900 people responded, asked readers if they supported a 2050 target of zero net carbon emissions.
“More than 84% were in favour, 14% were against, while the difference were undecided,” rural newspaper The Land reported.
The survey findings are broadly in line with the position of the National Farmers’ Federation, the Victorian Nationals, the WA Nationals, the NSW Young Nationals, and a host of grassroots farming organisations. But if Joyce is so at odds with his own rural constituency on issues such as the environment and same-sex marriage, and if he is so repugnant to women inside and outside the party, how on earth does he get elected to lead the party?
The answer leads you inexorably to Tamworth. It’s not just Joyce’s electoral base; it and the region around it are the powerhouse of National Party politics in Australia.
The NSW Nationals, along with the NSW Liberals, can lay claim to being one of the most successful political organisations in the country. They have held power federally for the past eight years and have been in government in NSW for a decade. Four Nationals MPs in the NSW Parliament — two in the upper house and two in the lower — come from the area approximately covering Joyce’s federal seat of New England.
The party’s NSW chairman for the five years up to 2019 was Bede Burke, an egg farmer from Tamworth. Burke’s daughter Gil is chair of the NSW Nationals Women’s Council and occasional helper in Joyce’s electorate office.
In May 2021, National Party members in New England had a clear chance to toss Joyce aside in a preselection challenge. Joyce’s challenger, Alex Rubin, was everything Joyce is not. A long-serving member of the Australian Defence Force, Rubin ran on a platform which included greater accountability from government, acknowledging climate change, and addressing domestic violence, coercive control and discrimination.
And yet he was crushed.
New England’s preselectors voted by a margin of about 110 to 10 in favour of Joyce. Rubin declined to comment for this story. It meant that about 120 citizens from a rural NSW town delivered, in Joyce, a wildly unrepresentative politician who wields disproportionate power.
The NSW Nationals insist they are the most democratic of all political parties, with its preselection processes. But that, in the view of Price-Purnell, is garbage.
“One of the biggest issues with the Nationals is that there are people who are doing preselections who are not your average voter,” she said.
“People who join political parties in general are different. But with the National Party it’s really moved to the fringes. The Young Nationals caters to people up to the age of 35. Then there is a huge gap, with a whole lot of [main party] members over 60.”
She says the changing face of membership has led to a party which is inward-looking and self-focused.
The party refuses to disclose how many members it has. Nor will it discuss demographics.
Ultimately Joyce has become his own self-fulfilling prophecy. As a political celebrity he gains votes on name recognition alone, from an electorate that is prepared to stick with the devil it knows.
They need to swap the Akubra for a hard hat, and call themselves the Miners party.
It might require them to make an emergency dash to the local costume store, or they could pop in to Matt Canavan’s and see if he has any spares in his dress ups room.
The akubra uniform enables us to immediately recognize another prize idiot.
Former government gave conditional approval to mine after New Hope and its parent company donated about $900,000 to the federal Liberal party
…a Newman government minister involved in the government’s handling of the project had taken a $2,000 donation from a New Hope director and his daughter took a job at the company.
A Queensland mining company paid its workers to attend a protest against state water licensing reforms, directing farmers on its staff to don checked shirts and Akubras to illustrate the spread of community support for the company.
New Hope Group ran its New Acland coal operation with a skeleton crew while transporting the rest of its rostered workforce by bus to the rally outside parliament in Brisbane on 1 November.
Labor, with the support of independent MPs, voted down amendments sought by the Liberal National opposition to shield New Acland from a court challenge to its licence.
Take, take take. It’s all those people ever do.
“The NSW Nationals, along with the NSW Liberals, can lay claim to being one of the most successful political organisations in the country” because their masters at NewsCorp are happy to support the illusion
And because without them the Liberals would never gain power, and without the Liberals neither would the tiny vote catching Nationals. And the success is a result of Murdoch for sure, along with rat cunning and an innate deviousness of all members and their voters.
Barnaby, like Rupert, knows that what’s true is irrelevant, and what people want to believe is what counts. This explains a lot about current politics.
This is presumably not the daughter rumoured to have hijacked a campaign vehicle before the 2016 election and driven round Tamworth with a megaphone pleading with electors to NOT vote for her dad.
Incidentally, as social media posts from the recent anti-lockdown protests showed, the only apparent thing that misspelling or making up names confers upon your child is a special kind of stupid.
She’s working for Mr Barilaro? I’d call that a job with a dead end.
Well she is probably teaching “Porky Barilaro” how her dear old dad does somethings.
Chip off the old block that one.
And maybe it is! There is a thing called reconciliation.
Yes, Barnaby the farmer is about as genuine as Matt Canavan the miner. I thought country people were good at seeing through BS. A friend who has held a senior Nationals organisation position federally despairs of what has become of her former party. She terminated her membership a couple of years ago.
“I thought country people were good at seeing through BS.”
Nah, country people, like city people, are stupid too, and love to back positions that suit their selfish desires. Political confirmation bias.
Ending, or seriously capping, political donations would help. The Nats, Liberals and Labor are all in thrall to their mining and gambling etc puppet masters. These are the industries/corporates that have hijacked our democracy. Until the system is completely overhauled the rorts will continue, our public services will be gutted, and the ABC will be forced off-air. The upcoming election will be crucial in ensuring the Morrison mob is voted out and preferably we end up with the Greens and some sensible Independents with balance of power. We may then be able to crawl out of the pit Morrison has dug and in which he – and his cronies – deserve to be buried in.