By Shane Rodgers
In Australian politics, an occasional big spat between the Liberals and the National Party seems as inevitable as taxes, floods and a Barnaby Joyce controversy.
When this happens, as it has with the exodus of the National Party members from the shadow ministry over the past 48 hours, it is always depicted as a crisis.
“Disunity is death,” somebody will earnestly declare. But is it really?
Frankly, a national conservative coalition, particularly in Opposition, doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
The Nationals have a very distinct constituency, based in the heart of rural and regional Australia, who will often have very different views from the city-centric Liberals.
This is not a problem to be solved. This “second Australia” in the bush deserves a voice and the whole system is designed around full geographical representation in Canberra.
When I worked in the Canberra Press Galley for five years, 30-odd years ago, the major parties seemed like a much “broader church” (to use former Prime Minister John Howard’s language) than they are now.
The Nats had quite a few members who were well to the right and would sit comfortably in some of the more right-wing parties and political groupings of 2026.
Back then, these few “rogue” Nats giving extreme views were a media curiosity, and part of the national dialogue. But it could be accommodated within the Liberal-National coalition paradigm. You could argue that it allowed much deeper and broader public debate.
The same was true for the Labor Party, which dominated government during that period. The Labor members from the Labor Left were well known and the party mores seemed to be able to accommodate their views without this being a government crisis.
Today the people who might have been the Labor Left in the 1980s and 1990s are more likely to be in the Greens.
There was also something of the same dynamic back then with the Liberal “Wets” who often went a bit rogue to pull the party back from welfare and industrial relations agendas they regarded as too extreme.
Today the Wets are outside of the party and known as Teals.
My point is, I think parties in general overreact to the way traditional media has covered “crises of unity.”
Everyone in a party (or in a Coalition) does not have to agree on everything. All that does is bunch everyone into an indistinguishable middle and create massive political ground for players at the far left and right.
Our parliaments seem to be moving towards an European-style scenario where many governments are coalitions of lots of political groups who have to cobble complex alliances to form government.
Some would argue that this move away from dominant large parties would be a good thing for democracy. But it is very different to the government style we are accustomed to, and it means election mandates become fuzzy, and every piece of legislation is an even bigger lottery than it is now.
Polling released this week had the major parties at their lowest point in history and One Nation, on paper at least, moving ahead of the Coalition in popular support.
This only happens because the major parties (or party blocs in the case of the Coalition) have stopped being broad enough to accommodate genuine contemporary debate and seem ridiculously obsessed with forcing members into uncomfortable scenarios.
Frankly, there should be a lot more conscience votes (where MPs are unrestrained on how they vote) so Parliamentarians can truly represent the people that elect them.
There are a few non-negotiables, like the need to pass budget bills and stay true to major election mandates but, on many issues, including the recent anti-hate legislation, there is no compelling need for forced unity and a very strong argument for individual views on such an emotional issue.
It is quite telling that Barnaby Joyce, who has a decent following within a certain, fairly large, group of Australians, has left the Nats so he can be unshackled.
I feel a bit sorry for Nationals Leader David Littleproud, who I have always found to be a decent, dedicated bloke, that he always seems to be trying to keep the bush happy while tied to a party wrapped in city blue ribbon.
And, bit by bit, the political zone for the Nats seems to get smaller and the bush seat cards are being reshuffled across multiple political blocs who don’t seem to like each other, even though they all represent rural and regional Australians.
If Australians want to keep big party governments (and I’m sure many young people would say that is a big “if”) now is a time for deep reflection on our political system:
- The National Party base is fractured
- The Greens have taken over the far left
- The Teals have won a wad of city seats that would once have been safe Liberal
- Independents often seem like the only true, objective and unencumbered voice
- Australians are telling the big parties that they are out of kilter with our country’s contemporary aspirations
Is the Coalition fracture a crisis or the inevitable line-in-the-sand the Nationals had to draw before they slipped out of relevance and got trapped in a shrinking philosophical zone?
Politics has changed. Australia has changed. We need to spend a lot more time talking about the type of democracy we want to be.
Shane Rodgers is Managing Editor of Newsreel. He worked for 5 years in the Canberra Press Gallery in the 1980s and 1990s as a national chief of staff and a reporter covering politics, economic and industrial relations.
