Why does Australia’s media take a fringe grouping like the National Party so seriously? Unrepresentative and undemocratic, it gets lathered up with the self-indulgence of the lovable rogue, white-washed with a romantic nostalgia. The Nationals feed it, crafting the mythology of the bush into provocative 21st century grabs for television and Facebook.
Barnaby Joyce is the expert at trolling the city-based media: on COVID (“we look at Melbourne and go, we can almost smell the burning flesh from here”) or on climate action (a menu of “sauteed gherkins and sashimi tadpoles”).
Yet strip off the carefully cultivated Akubra-and-moleskin knock-about appropriations and it’s clear what the National Party is: just one of a handful of small untethered groupings competing for the declining (and aging) pool of conservative voters in regional Australia.
For Australia’s national and metropolitan media, the inertia of history makes the party the easy go-to voice of regional Australia. But on the ground, the Nationals are scrabbling for the fragmented conservative vote in the declining 30% of Australia’s population who live outside capital cities.
They’re caught up in an intra-mural spat with One Nation, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers, and community independents all eating away at them. Their core promise is that only they can anchor the Liberals. Their core promise to the Liberals is that only they can deliver the regional right.
Doesn’t look like it’s working. Their collapsed vote totals are hidden behind candidates who either run unopposed by (or in joint tickets with) the Liberal Party. Looking at election-by-election figures, best guess would put their own support at about 6% in NSW and Queensland, maybe 4.5% nationally.
By comparison, in 2019, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers scored about 5.5% in NSW’s state-wide Legislative Council vote. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation averaged about the same across Australia in the Senate elections.
Its representatives have to work harder at the charade. That’s why “no cut-through” Michael McCormack had to make way for Barnaby Joyce, “the best retail politician in Australia” (according to the leading wholesaler of right-wing politics, Gina Rinehart.)
Maybe a bit too much cut-through: looks like he’s costing the conservatives votes they need in the city. Instead, he’s retailing grab-for-grab with Pauline Hanson, pitching to Abbott’s townie tradies, and leveraging opposition to climate action with miners.
It wasn’t always so. Formed in the 1920s out of the farmers’ organisations, the Nationals were a genuine community force for regional communities. Credit where credit’s due — it forced through two of the core components of Australia’s democratic compact: compulsory and preferential voting.
Then, the 1983 float of the dollar deprived the party of its role in ensuring the the export needs of the agricultural sector were prioritised in exchange devaluation bun-fights. The following decade of “economic rationalism” gutted the subsidy and regulatory framework the old Country Party had delivered to socialise the losses and privatise the gains of the rural economy.
Political discretionary sports grants and commuter car parks are proving a poor substitute. Unmoored from their traditional rural and regional supporter base, the party has turned to the more transactional generosity of the mining and fossil-fuel industries.
The party has suffered, too, as city-dominated governments have stripped away the rural weightings and gerrymanders that had propped up National Party representation. Right now, they’re digging in to defend the last rural weighting, in Western Australia’s Legislative Council threatened by this year’s COVID lockdown Labor landslide.
The National Party has also been impacted by the collapse of regional media. Once controlled by local National-voting grandees, they were sold off and linked-up in corporate-owned chains whose political alignment was determined by the parent company’s big city concerns.
In television, the Nationals fell to an own-goal: in 1987, when Labor allowed companies to own stations reaching up to 75% of the population, the Nationals broke with the Liberals to allow their local supporters to cash in their licences (previously awarded as political gifts) by selling to national networks.
Now, whether it’s old media in transition, new media start-ups, or the extensive ABC regional network, local voices have no loyalty to the old National Party. Even the return of Sky to 17 regional markets this week could hurt as it opens the audience to new conservative voices in the inter-party fights on the right.
The Nationals with half the national vote of the Greens get 10 seats to the Greens solitary one seat!
Something wrong here!
No different to being back on the farm …. hand-feeding grain off the back of a truck – watch the sheep come streaming in, they “know” what’s happening …
Great analogy and so apt; the handouts always a vote catcher for Nat and conservative voters.
Surely slightly different?
The sheep are a lot smarter than the average Nat voter because at least they get something worthwhile, grain instead of parched, hard scrabble, out of the relationship before being shipped off to be slaughtered.
The voter just has their gullible stupidity rubbed in their face before the coup de grâce.
always staggers me why the farmers keep voting for them . . . ..
You need to live among them and then you will understand.
I live in a National Party seat – it is effectively a one party State here because the ALP doesn’t even bother campaigning. Most people seem to be seduced by the moleskins and Akubra hat imagery, even though they mostly live in big regional cities where the big issues are actually pretty metro. From what I see, there is no particular love for the Nats, who just win by walkover – though this a safe Victorian seat which gets no pork barrelling because the local member is not part of the Qld and NSW elite.
“Said Hanrahan” – for some background?
The sooner the well dries up for this bunch of fossil fuel grifters the better.
I have another angle, the Nats became compromised, especially post Tim Fischer, when the centre of gravity of the LNP and NewsCorp moved north to Sydney and further; adopting white Christian nationalist values joined up with radical right libertarian ideology imported from the US (also helps to keep the Libs in check too).