For the Liberals to survive, the Nationals need to get tealed

Sometimes, all’s not well that ends well. Having rushed up to the electoral abyss and been struck by its unrelenting darkness, the Liberals and Nationals have thought better of oblivion and struck a deal to remain in coalition. But their reunification does little to obscure the abyss that still exists between – and even within – each of these parties.

Let one fact suffice: both had members who refused to accept more senior positions so they could remain on the backbench, from which they are free to throw grenades.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

That’s because this crisis is not a moment. It is not the pangs of one terrible night four weeks ago. It is the culmination of decades; the inevitable expression of the contradictory forces that have been tearing away at conservative politics since late last century. In short, these are the forces of liberalism – with its love of individual freedom, globalisation and small government – clashing with the more nationalist flavour of the right-wing politics – keen to pick a fight over cultural values, suspicious of immigration and free trade, unimpressed with diversity.

For a time, conservative parties held this together with a mix of liberal economics and carefully chosen culture wars – the high watermark of which in Australia was John Howard. But this past decade, the tension got too much, and the seams finally ripped apart.

By 2015, Malcolm Turnbull could only become prime minister by foregoing much of what he believed on climate and energy policy. A decade on, and Peter Dutton had given the Nationals most of what they wanted, which is a major reason he went to the election with a deeply illiberal policy for the government – not the private sector – to build seven nuclear power plants.

In short, the Nationals have increasingly held the whip hand in the Coalition, with one very obvious electoral consequence: the Nats keep winning their seats, and the Liberals keep losing theirs. This is the depth of the Coalition’s crisis. Their differences are irreconcilable, and their commonalities make them unelectable.

The trouble is, the Coalition is being torn apart by a changing Australia. Most simply, the rural/city divide is becoming more pronounced in political terms. Look at a federal map and you’ll see a montage of red cities and blue countryside. It’s not happenstance: it reflects that fact that these are two quite different Australias. Our urban centres are becoming more and more diverse, our regions older and whiter. About two-thirds of Sydney, for instance, has at least one parent born overseas. More than half of Australians born overseas live in Sydney and Melbourne. As George Megalogenis observed in a Quarterly Essay last year, the children of migrants grew in number by 1.2 million between 2011 and 2021, which was “double the number added to the Old Australian population – those who have parents and grandparents born here”.

The result is the regions are becoming less representative of – and more alienated from – Australia as a whole. That frees the Nationals to perfect a kind of grievance politics that entrenches a divide between city and country, even within the Coalition. The Liberals have no way to bridge this gap, so they end up conceding more and more ground and making the contradictions of contemporary conservative politics only more pronounced, surrendering their traditional constituencies along the way.

There has been nothing to disrupt this because each party has either chosen, or found itself, living a relatively sheltered existence. For the Liberals, that has meant a media strategy of speaking mostly to those it considers friendly outlets: receiving pats on the head from Sky News, while having periodic bouts of railing against, and even boycotting mainstream media it doesn’t like – most enduringly the ABC. That eschews the process of having one’s ideas tested. Of learning to defend them. In short, of learning to persuade. Policy is never sharpened, and wild ideas are not recognised as such until it is far too late – whether in the form of nuclear energy or banning public servants from working from home if indeed they aren’t sacked in the first place.

For the Nationals, it involves the luxury of presiding over seats that, on current arrangements, it can never really lose. Alone among Australian political parties, the Nationals have no natural predators. The bulk of their constituents will never vote Labor – a disposition that goes back as far as the shearers’ strikes in the 1890s – and “Greens” might as well be a swear word. Occasionally, as we saw in the 2019 NSW state election, they might lose to outsider parties like the Shooters and Fishers, but not federally.

That means the Nationals can behave with near electoral impunity. They are not compelled to find ways of winning the centre, where elections are won. They need not reckon with the changing Australia confronting the Liberals. And the lack of competition means they routinely return strong electoral performances, which allows them to make ever more strident demands of the Liberal Party, who are frequently coming off a disappointing result.

This year’s election has shown the dangers of all this protection. Once exposed to the full glare of the campaign, where the press pack insist on asking impertinent questions, Dutton found himself out of practice. The Nationals, meanwhile, saw one instructive shot across the bow, when Andrew Gee, who resigned from the party over its position on the Voice, romped home as an independent in the seat of Calare. Here we can discern perhaps the only threat for which the Nationals may not be prepared: concerted, locally focused, grassroots campaigns from independents who can trade on the idea the Nationals are taking them for granted. Imagine, for instance, a campaign built in the image of “Voices for Indi”, targeting voters worried about the prospect of nuclear energy coming to their area. In that way, the Nats could get tealed.

That sort of thing might be a blessing in disguise, helping to focus wandering minds, forcing the Coalition to broaden its offer. Because the truth is a Coalition agreement, while essential, is actually where the problems begin. The question isn’t whether the parties can sign one. It’s whether they can ever be properly reconciled.

Waleed Aly is a regular columnist.

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