Liberal MP and wealthy sheep farmer Nick McBride crossed the floor to take a stand against his party and has no regrets
Nick McBride crossed the floor of Parliament to defy his boss and there’s no love lost between the MP and his own party. The Liberals spent 16 years in opposition – “and now I see why”, he tells SA Weekend.
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On a breezy, blustery Saturday night in the chic seaside town of Robe, as the heat of a warm day leaches out of the air, an enormous white marquee sits on the foreshore, just to the left of the town’s famous Caledonian Hotel.
Inside, around 400 people have gathered to celebrate the 50th birthday of Nick McBride, state Liberal MP and part of one of the largest pastoral companies in Australia.
By one estimate, the broader McBride family is the 18th largest landholder in Australia with its vast properties covering around 1.1 million hectares.
After all, you need a lot of land when you need somewhere to put 375,000 sheep.
Yet to label McBride as a member of the landed gentry or the bush aristocracy would be unfair. Even if the idea of hosting a shindig in Robe for hundreds of people suggests a liking for opulence and flashiness.
McBride is many things – one of his parliamentary colleagues reckons he is worth more than the other 46 members of the state’s House of Assembly combined – but he’s not flash.
At the party he somewhat – sheepishly? – says this is the first time he has done something like this. McBride’s life is full of apparent contradictions.
The first four years of his working life, still his favourite time, were spent as a boilermaker/welder in the shipyards at Port Adelaide.
He’s a conservative politician but an atheist. As a businessman he’s naturally keen on lower taxes, but he’s liberal on many other social issues.
He will vote to legalise euthanasia and abortion.
At the birthday bash in Robe on the October long weekend, the speeches were done in McBride style. Short, sharp, to the point. There was a recurring theme from his sister Georgie, and children Annabel and Phillip.
That McBride is a bloke who likes to speak his mind. The phrase “no filter” was used more than once.
In his defence, McBride says it’s something of a family trait.
“We actually speak our mind without recognising, maybe, that we might hurt you or offend you,” he says. “It’s almost like there is no filter to recognise that might be quite impersonal or offensive and I have to work at it. I do have to work at it.”
There is a straightforward earnestness about McBride.
Ask him a question and the chances are he’ll answer it. Not a quality you find in many politicians.
In the early days of a political career that only started last year when he was elected to represent the South-East seat of MacKillop, he still has an attachment to his own world view and principles, even when they clash with the official party line.
The most obvious example of the McBride method was last year when he and three of his Liberal colleagues – Fraser Ellis, Steve Murray and Dan Cregan – crossed the floor to vote with the Labor Party to delay debate on legislation that would grant more access to farming land for mining companies.
The quartet again crossed the floor in July, but the mining legislation was eventually passed with Labor’s support.
Sitting in the kitchen of his elegant house on his Conmurra property 40km out of Kingston, McBride says he crossed the floor to support Ellis, another first-term MP who represents the Yorke Peninsula seat of Narrunga.
McBride says he was appalled at how the party leadership had dealt with the concerns of Ellis about the Bill, which was opposed by many farmers in his electorate.
McBride also previously felt that he had been “hung out to dry” when the party appeared to go cold for a while on its promise to ban fracking in the South-East.
He was also peeved, given his obvious experience, that he wasn’t asked for an opinion on new biosecurity legislation the government was introducing.
“I saw the way he (Ellis) was treated. He was promised consultation. He was promised to be involved in the Mining Bill and it never happened. Sitting in the party room committee, I thought, ‘This is not right, this is not how it’s meant to be’.”
It didn’t go down well with his colleagues. Some avoided him. Some wouldn’t talk to him unless he spoke first.
“We were seen as black sheep in the party,” he says. “They were caught out and embarrassed, because of that embarrassment when we adjourned the Mining Bill … they found that quite a difficult pill to swallow. That’s the nicest way to put it.”
Perhaps that was reflected at his 50th, which attracted just as many state Labor MPs as mates from the state Liberal Party.
Not that he regrets it.
In his Naracoorte electorate office hangs a cartoon by The Advertiser’s Jos Valdman of McBride and his three musketeers hanging in the pelican mouth of Dan van Holst Pellekaan, the minister who introduced the Bill.
McBride spoke to premier Steven Marshall after “a while” and treasurer Rob Lucas about the lack of consultation in the party and was told essentially this was as good as it gets.
“The biggest shock to me is the lack of engagement between decision making of our party and the influence I would have,” he says.
“That has been the biggest shock. Apparently it’s normal. Apparently it’s very normal. Even the Labor Party will tell you when they were in government the Labor backbenchers are just totally ignored.”
Fellow rebel Steve Murray, who was emcee at the 50th, says McBride in some ways is a little out of place in parliament and brings up the 1949 film A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
The film starred Bing Crosby playing an American mechanic who bangs his head and wakes up in the court of King Arthur.
“He is the complete antithesis of the stereotypical politician,” Murray says. “He is as honest as the day is long, sometimes to his detriment.”
It’s easy enough to sense McBride’s frustration with North Tce. McBride is the meticulous sort. He likes method. He sees himself as “outcome driven”. He references “benchmarking” frequently when talking about his own business.
That’s the process of comparing your own business to those in your field who are considered leaders, to see what you do well and what you do badly, and learn ways to improve.
There’s not a lot of that in politics. Politics is more driven by day-to-day considerations. McBride never really expected to find himself a politician, even though his family has some form in the field. His great-grandfather was Sir Philip McBride, a scion of the Liberal Party and a confidant of Australia’s longest-serving prime minister Sir Robert Menzies.
McBride was a senator for seven years and in the House of Representatives for 18, at various times representing Grey and Wakefield.
He was also Defence Minister for much of the 1950s.
“I suppose there was a culture within the family that they knew a lot of political key players,” he says. “I still remember Christmases with my grandparents, politics would come up for discussions around the table.”
As he says this he points to the dining room next door to the kitchen. “In that room.” This house used to be his grandparents. He moved here, to the “original McBride settlement in the South-East”, the 4000ha Conmurra station, when he was about 10, from another property north of Kingston.
It was a hardworking kind of childhood. Lots of chores on the farm. Schoolwork was a secondary consideration.
“Homework was always second priority, not first, not that I minded,” he says.
Sheep farming has always been the family business.
The first McBrides landed in South Australia from Ireland in 1855 and started in the sheep business at Burra in the state’s north. There are two McBride outfits he is involved with. The first is Conmurra which runs around 30,000 sheep. But he is also a director of the larger AJ & PA McBride, which has around 80 family shareholders and started in 1920. This is the business with the 375,000 sheep. Last year it made a profit of around $20 million and paid more than $70 million for the 50,000ha Telopea Downs in western Victoria. It’s one of the largest agricultural companies in Australia.
McBride went to primary school in Kingston before following family tradition and heading to Adelaide to attend Prince Alfred College.
McBride’s son, Philip, is the sixth generation to go the up-market school. The school’s new boarding school even has a McBride wing. By his own admission he wasn’t a great student.
“God, when I was being taught something like physics and chemistry it was like talking to me in Chinese or Japanese, it was just foreign,” he says.
On the other hand he won a prize for technical studies. After school he returned to the farm for a year. He was unsure what he wanted to do. The farm was there, but he decided to do a welding course at the old Panorama TAFE.
Welders were in demand and he was offered a job at Adelaide Ship Construction as an apprentice welder/boilermaker. He must have stood out a bit from the other workers.
“They used to call me the country bumpkin or the sheep farmer. It never worried me, that’s all I was,” he says.
“One of the things I have never been is what you would call a polished worker. So I can mix and talk and associate with all levels. I can work and get along with shearers, crutchers and farm hands.”
He would have certainly been the only one who was a card-carrying member of the Liberal Party, which he joined after he left school. But then again he also had to join the Metalworkers Union, although he is happy to report the yard owner had to pay his dues.
McBride laughs a lot when talking about his time building ships.
He tells stories of the bloke who came to him and asked him if he needed anything electronic. It was the weekend of the Adelaide Show and his workmate was planning to break into a few empty houses. Or the time he was offered some new tools very cheap.
A tempting thought for an apprentice who was paid $3.50 an hour, but politely declined when, after asking their provenance, was bluntly told: “You know that ram-raid in Magill?”
But, despite all that, he genuinely loved the work.
He helped build tug boats, prawn trawlers, tuna boats. He worked on the repair of the Island Seaway ferry that went to Kangaroo Island.
“That sort of reward for building something and looking back, ‘Yeah, I built that’, that is probably more gratifying than anything I got from agriculture.”
He left with his trade after four years when the shipyard was struggling financially. He applied for a job at Roxby Downs but Western Mining wasn’t hiring so he headed back to Kingston and the farm.
It wasn’t a great time for the wool industry in the early and mid-1990s. In 1991, the government-owned Australian Wool Corporation had removed the floor price and had a stockpile of 4.6 million bales of wool. The following destruction of the wool industry as prices crashed and farmers left the industry was described by academic Charles Massy as “the biggest corporate disaster in Australian history”.
It would be two decades before the industry recovered. Sheep numbers fell from around 170 million in 1989 to around 65 million this year.
“I’m driven by money and returns,” McBride says. “I want to work hard and I want to achieve but at the end of the day it has to be based on money/returns and there was very little gratification in those 20 years.”
By 1996, the family was looking at alternatives. Aquaculture, flowers, swimming pools. McBride decided to have a last go. After all, he had a fallback option. He could pick up the welding tools again.
“I could cast a confident, decisive eye over it because I wasn’t tied to the land or my career in farming,” he says. “If it didn’t stack up and I couldn’t make it work, why do it? I wasn’t trapped. I wasn’t having to be a sheep farmer.”
He brought in consultants, he looked at other sheep farmers. He decided the business wasn’t being well run. He needed to be more efficient. He needed to cut costs. He learned about “iron disease”, meaning he had too much machinery that sat around unused for much of the year.
“It’s not about tractors and mowers and seed drills and harvesters, and all these other lovely toys that people love to play with,” he says.
In 2004 he moved to NSW and another property. In 2006 he joined the board of the larger family company. It was the time of the millennial drought and it wasn’t until 2011 that the industry started to turn. There’s a sense of pride he survived.
“Well, everyone makes money in the good times. Only the really good operators make good money in the bad times.”
McBride’s involvement in the Liberal Party started when left school. At various times he has filled the roles of treasurer, secretary and president of his local branch and helped out during elections. But when whispers started that long-serving local member Mitch Williams was retiring he started thinking about putting his hand up.
There was also the thought of making a run for federal politics but his wife Katherine made the point: “As a business we have suffered more from bad policy from state government than we have from federal government.”
Not that he thought he had much chance.
There were six other candidates including a local mayor in Peter Gandolfi, former Williams’ staffer Kristie McTernan and Tom Dawkins, son of Upper House Liberal MP John Dawkins.
He thought he would be doing well to come in third.
But, for a man who has a thing about attention to-detail, his approach to the day when Liberal members would vote in the Naracoorte Town Hall for their next candidate was surprisingly relaxed.
The night before the preselection meeting McBride was at a 21st, dressed as a pirate, until 1.30am. He was jumping in the driver’s seat to take himself and Katherine to Naracoorte when his wife asked him about his speech.
“And then he says,” according to Katherine, “I haven’t actually written it, it’s all up here (in his head). And I’m like, ‘Oh my God, you’ve got to be joking’.’’
Katherine, who is as forthright as her husband, bundled him into the passenger seat and instructed him to use the hour’s drive to Naracoorte to put down a few dot points. The way Nick McBride tells it now, it was all part of a master plan. That he knew the others would have well-written, over-rehearsed speeches.
“I thought, ‘I’m not going to be like that. I can’t be like that. I’m going to stand by my convictions. I am going to stand up and tell them what I think and what I believe’,” he says.
Each candidate was given five minutes.
“I gave this speech with passion, conviction from the heart, what I’d learned in 30 years in all my discussions with the members. And they all loved it. That was it. That’s how it happened.”
McBride says there was one more important difference between him and his opponents. The preselection took place a year before the 2018 state election and a question was asked to all candidates about how soon they could start campaigning.
McBride was the only one with enough financial security to walk away immediately from his job. He spent a year campaigning in what is a very safe seat. Still, it took him to places that didn’t normally vote Liberal, such as areas of Millicent with high levels of social housing.
Katherine was a help when doorknocking. A nurse, she works extensively in Millicent. Katherine says there was a common response. “I don’t know about you but if you are married to her I will vote for you.”
One-on-one, you wouldn’t peg Nick McBride as being the shy type. He’s engaging and enjoys a chat. But he says the hardest part of becoming a politician was approaching strangers. He says part of that is upbringing.
“Certainly came through great-grandparents to grandparents to my father was children should be seen and not heard, and I heard that on many occasions. So you become a little bit subdued,” he says.
“Going and doing this, I would have to say it was a great benefit to me to go and get my training wheels.”
McBride says he entered politics because the South-East gets a raw deal from both major parties. When Labor is in power it doesn’t want to waste money on a safe Liberal seat. But the same applies for Liberal governments.
McBride says there are people in his electorate who would secede to Victoria. They reckon Melbourne would give them a better deal than Adelaide.
“Why would people say that? Because it’s all about Adelaide. It’s always all about Adelaide. We have been ignored in this region. I think it highlights how much this region thinks it has missed out. You have the sense from a regional perspective that Adelaide is this iconic city that requires the attention of all to hold itself up to the detriment of all other regional areas.”
He believes, for example, the hundreds of millions spent propping up the ultimately doomed car industry would have been better spent if it had been lavished on the South-East’s forestry industry.
McBride talks about the poor state of roads in the region. And of the immediate feedback he receives “with every bad decision we make in Adelaide” such as raising speeding fines.
“Doesn’t ring well around this whole electorate,” he says.
“It’s not what we would describe as a good Liberal policy. My electorate can see through the bullshit.”
Some have speculated that McBride’s unhappiness with the Adelaide-centric nature of politics could see him split from the Liberal Party and run next time as an independent.
After all, his immediate predecessor in the seat, Mitch Williams, was first elected as an independent liberal. McBride talks down leaving the party as an option.
“The idea has been floated and suggested in small talk but I kid you not it’s so unpalatable. It would be very, very difficult.”
While before the 2018 election he was confident the Steven Marshall-led Liberals would regain government for the first time since 2002, he was also exposed to some other realities.
“I will say this in as nice a possible way, and I don’t know how you are going to write it, but I got a sense of this, too. They spent 16 years in opposition and now I see why.”
Perhaps it’s the footy umpire in him.
He’s happy making unpopular decisions as long as he’s convinced he’s right. McBride still regularly officiates in the local footy league and says it the most “relaxing” part of his week.
“It’s the best two hours of my week. It used to be when I was in farming before I was even in politics.”
McBride is keen for lower taxes in a general sense. “To get politicians out of people’s pockets.”
He believes money going into government revenue is money people are not spending elsewhere in the economy.
“I also then believe you should allow people to go about their daily lives making their daily choices as long as it doesn’t impinge on others.” A philosophy that he maintains on social issues such as prostitution and euthanasia.
Not that he believes government should entirely retreat from people’s lives.
One radical proposal he has is to have lifeskills-based training centres, which people must attend as part of the social welfare system. He envisages training in everything from buying food well, to cooking and cleaning and hygiene. The aim being to make people ready for the workforce. He sees it as a “carrot and stick” approach.
“It comes back to the fact that I think they find themselves incarcerated in their own choices because they don’t belong to any meaningful life in society,” he says. “That’s what I would change.”
Not that he is expecting his party to embrace his view.
“One of the things I have learnt is that I have to find a new level of patience,” he says. “The parliament, the political process, is a big turning wheel. It turns slowly and it’s also hard to turn around.”