The National Party is a sick joke
If Malcolm Turnbull’s Liberals had any sense, they’d ditch these country bumpkins once and for all
AT the 2016 federal election, the National Party won 4.6% of the popular vote in the House of Representatives, and 0.25% in the Senate, and ended up with 21 seats in both houses of Parliament. The Greens won 10.2% in the House and 8.7% in the Senate, but ended up with just 10 seats.
How is it then that a party that has the backing of only one Australian out of every 20 voters holds such sway on Canberra?
The Nationals are the greatest fraud in Australian politics. They are a party that purports to be the voice of battling country Australians but are in Parliament to represent the vested interests of the landed gentry, clad in the accoutrements of the squattocracy — Moleksins, Akubras and RM Williams boots — and populated by in-bred halfwits like George Christensen.
The people of rural and regional Australia have been shortchanged for decades by their supposed political representatives in Canberra, a bunch of opportunistic populists who preach family values while conducting affairs behind their wives’ backs, who sell-out hardworking people at every opportunity and stand for nothing but their own self-interest.
Virtually since their inception, the Nationals have been a public embarassment, stumbling around the national and state political stages like a crude country cousin gatecrashing a sophisticated city soiree. They became a laughing stock last year when they lost both their leader and their deputy leader in the citizenship fiasco.
Yet, the Press Gallery has watched their antics with benign tolerance and stifled amusement, and has been willing to ignore the regular stuff-ups, the lies and low-level corruption. But then along came Barnaby Joyce carrying on like Les Patterson and finally, it seems, the game is up.
FROM the moment he arrived in Canberra as a Queensland Senator in 2005, Barnaby Joyce had that rare mix of incompetence and buffoonery that seems intrinsic to a successful National Party politician, combined with rat cunning and ruthless ambition. But he made good copy so for a long time, he got away with it. He was always quotable, so the Press Gallery played along with his “straight-talkin’ Barnaby from Tamworth” schtick, building the myth of “authenticity” of “the best retail politician in the country”*.
It almost defies belief that this buffoon has been able to rise so high.
But every misstep or lie — remember the warnings about how pricing carbon pollution would lead to $100 lamb roasts or his questionable friendship with Gina Rinehart or his decision to relocate a major agricultural bureaucracy within his own electorate, against all sensible advice — was glossed over even as Joyce changed states and chambers of parliament in his relentless pursuit of the Nationals’ leadership.
Barnaby was — according to the Press Gallery gospel — just the latest in a long line of “colourful” Nationals MPs, a continuation of the party’s jolly traditions of bigotry, homophobia and blatant feathernesting. Harmless fun, except if you happen to be Aboriginal, or gay, or standing between a National and a pot of money.
But finally, the 21st century caught up with Barnaby, and hopefully with the Nationals themselves.
The facts of what is now known as “Barnababy” are these: sometime about a year ago, the Deputy Prime Minister began banging his press secretary, who happened to be 15 years his junior, then when the heat became too much, arranged for her to be found a high-paying, taxpayer funded job working for another National MP, got her up the duff, and ultimately has been thrown out of the family home.
It wasn’t only the hypocrisy of a so-called “family values” politician enjoying his bit on the side while the long-suffering wife got trotted out for picture opportunities when he needed her. But Joyce’s behaviour exposed a serial rorter with a breathtaking sense of self-entitlement.
As Barnaby discovered, life is good when you’re a Nationals MP in Canberra hundreds or thousands of kilometres from home. Canberra has all the ornaments of sophisticated city life, fine food and wine, young women (or men) you can dally with well away from the glare and scrutiny of your community. Meanwhile back home is the dutiful wife, left to run the farm and the family who you pull out as a prop for re-election every three years or so.
Who would willingly give up this double life, or the $200,000-plus that a backbencher earns? Barnaby Joyce is the reason why people have lost faith in all politicians — turns out the supposedly authentic, “best retail politician in the country”** is only it for himself.
Yet Joyce is still clinging to his job, refusing to step down even as two-thirds of Australians say he should, even as the Prime Minister condemns him for his behaviour and all but declares him unfit for office. Instead, Joyce hits back at the PM as “inept” and digs in, staring down any other National MP who might suggest it’s time to go.
The government of the nation has been thrown into turmoil — with the two most senior Liberals overseas this week and Joyce taking what we are told is a much-needed week of leave, we are left with Mathias Cormann as acting Prime Minister. With his refusal to concede his errors — even when two-thirds of voters say he should go — Barnaby Joyce is prepared to bring down the government through his own hubris. And all because Joyce insists this is a “private matter”.
Meanwhile, we are treated to the spectacle of a gun-toting redneck Queensland National Senator inciting violence against environmentalists.
UNTIL I lived in the country, I regarded the Nationals as I suspect most of urban Australia does: a mostly harmless joke, these ruddy-faced men (and until recently, they were always men), with their old-fashioned Bible-bashing morality and quaint agrarian socialism.
But living in the country and seeing them up close, I learnt just how venal and damaging they are to the rest of Australia. The Nationals ran the town in which I lived: political seats were passed around like family heirlooms, all the important jobs in local government or business were decided by a small cabal. If you weren’t part of their political clique, you didn’t get a look in.
Most people in the country would never want to think of themselves as working class, but that’s what they are: hard-working, salt of the earth folk. Yet the people they send to Canberra or Spring Street, year in, year out, couldn’t be more different.
Their Nationals MPs spout they type of populist bullshit which cons the average voter into thinking they are one of them, but every time they’ll sell working country people down the river.
Their hypocrisy is not only moral, but extends to most other spheres as well.
The reality is that the National Party is a haven to the squattocracy, the property owning class who first made their wealth by stealing the land off their original owners, and grew it over the decades by backing policies which further entrenched rural disadvantage and poverty.
They preach small government, but spend most of their time in Canberra working out ways to pork barrell their own electorates. They demonise people on welfare, yet constantly have their hands out for more taxpayer largesse.
They will vote every time to cut welfare, to punish the unemployed, to deny opportunity to Indigenous Australians, and to strip their own constitutents of public services and infrastructure.
Whenever the Nationals are given a choice between the national interest and self-interest, the latter will always prevail. They are past masters at making a big noise about standing up for the country, but they will sell-out their constituents every time.
It sometimes makes you wonder if country voters are stupid — or, as is more likely the case, just lacking a real alternative?
That period living in the country convinced me that working rural and regional Australians needed their own political party with relatively conservative social values, but genuine Labor economic policies, a Country Labor Party, so to speak.
THROUGHOUT most of their history, the Nationals have thrived on a parasitic relationship between the Nationals and their senior coalition partners, the Liberals.
In the end, the tail always wags the dog and it is the Nationals, this group of country bumpkins who would be unrecognisable in a police line-up, who call the shots to the detriment of the entire nation.
If Malcolm Turnbull had any spine at all, he would call the Nationals’ bluff and put the coalition agreement on the line over the sheer incompetence and personal corruption in the Nationals’ leadership . . . but of course, Turnbull is a jellyback so nothing will change.
The parasitic relationship between the Nationals and the Liberals is defined by this simple calculation: the Liberals rely on the Nationals for the extra seats that give them government; the Nationals rely on the Liberals for the prestige that comes with sitting on the government benches.
Yet the Nationals only retain their political influence through a combination of a rural gerrymander and preference flows from urban Liberal voters. Even the Australian Sex Party received more first preference votes in the Senate than the Nationals in 2016. One wonders how the millions of city dwellers who voted Liberal felt about their preferences electing some redneck from the country.
But nothing will ever change until the Liberals are prepared to take on the Nationals, and until they do, they will always remain at the mercy of the Nationals.
Barnaby Joyce is hanging onto the Nationals’ leadership because there are so few alternatives in his party room. Last week, Buzzfeed ran a quiz challenging readers to identify Nationals MPs by their photos. And really, apart from Joyce, and maybe Christensen, you wouldn’t recognise any of them if you bumped into them in the street.
This should be the moment when the Libs cut the Nats adrift once and for all, but they won’t because without them it would be curtains for Turnbull. So whether Barnaby Joyce survives this affair or not, this joke of a political party will live to fight another day.
*Patent pending
**What does that even mean? That he’s a good seller of bullshit?
