ON Thursday, NSW Nationals leader Andrew Stoner met the party's state organisational chairman Christine Ferguson and state director Ben Franklin to agree on a radical US-style primary trial ahead of the March 2011 state election.
Under the scheme the party will pick a winnable seat not held by a Nationals MP (potentially Dubbo, Port Macquarie or Tamworth, the three most marginal electorates) and conduct an open primary contest in which any person eligible to vote in the chosen electorate can do so to select the party's candidate for the general election. This would be instead of the usual internal party preselection.
If the trial for the state election in 2011 is successful, the NSW Nationals will move to widen the primary process to every seat not held by an incumbent for the 2015 election.
The significance of this proposed reform should not be underestimated. If successfully endorsed as party policy it will be the most radical reform in the Nationals' 90-year history and it could force other Nationals divisions as well as the main parties to consider also moving to primaries.
Political parties in countries such as Britain and Italy have increasingly embraced primary contests, more often than not with electoral success to follow. Britain's Conservative Party won the mayoralty of London for the first time in 2008 after Boris Johnson won a primary to be its candidate. The US presidential primaries are well known and long established. But in Australia despite occasional hairy-chested debates, the main parties have shied away from introducing open primary contests, citing concerns over implementation and costs as barriers to proceeding with the concept.
In 2006 two academics, John Carey and John Polga-Hecimovich, wrote an article for The Journal of Politics examining whether candidates selected by primary contests in Latin American countries had an advantage at general elections. They found a candidate who had undergone a primary contest fared 4 per cent to 6 per cent better at general elections than a candidate who had not.
The Nationals will be hoping these findings are reflected in Australia.
The move to a primaries system is the sort of reform that has the potential to stop or even reverse the slow rot that Nationals at state and federal levels have experienced in recent years.
A once proud party, the Nationals have seen their parliamentary representation fall away significantly. The federal House of Representatives has only nine Nationals MPs, 6 per cent of the 150-member chamber. State Nationals aren't doing much better.
If Stoner's idea catches on, Nationals divisions around the country could also move to adopt primaries, forcing the main parties to seriously consider doing so as well.
Primary contests reduce party discipline, giving MPs the confidence to cross the floor and vote in favour of, or against, legislation as their local community would expect them to. That has been the American experience.
Such a shift in Australian party politics would cause headaches for the Nationals' Coalition partner, the Liberals. But Nationals should be more concerned about the rise of rural independents than the sensitivities of their Coalition partner. Stoner's support for a primaries trial suggest he falls into that category. After all, the party's survival is on the line.
In NSW, rural independents hold four seats that were previously safe Nationals enclaves. Winning back community support in these electorates requires convincing the voters that the Nationals candidate is not the product of factional deals or party headquarters decision-making. The electorate wants to believe they are getting an MP who cares more about the local community than the party they are a member of, or the leadership team they are answerable to.
Primaries solve both of these concerns. They also make it less likely a defeated candidate would turn around and run against the endorsed Nationals candidate at the general election. That happens regularly following preselection stoushes. Federal independent MP Tony Windsor ran for state and then federal parliament after initially being defeated at Nationals preselection.
With his local popularity it is unlikely Windsor would have lost a primary for the Nationals in the first place. Even if he did, he would not have been able to mount an argument to the electorate at the general election that he was shut out by party apparatchiks at the preselection.
Australia is one of the few nations in the world to have a viable rural party. In other parts of the world such rurally based parties have either merged with city parties or died a natural death. But here in Australia they are undeniably in steady decline. Such electoral difficulties require the Nationals to consider radical approaches such as implementing primaries.
The most valuable aspect to the NSW Nationals primaries initiative is the broad support it has received from the three key areas of the party: the parliamentary leader, the organisational chairman and the state director. By agreeing to proceed with the trial as a triumvirate they have put the party's state executive and central council on notice to approve the plan or embarrass all arms of the leadership team.
However the trial still has a number of issues it needs to overcome before it could be implemented more widely. For example, if it was expanded to include sitting MPs, would they be required to face a primary at every election? And what about ministers? They would be susceptible to local scare campaigns if required to make unpopular decisions in their portfolio area. If sitting MPs continued to be shielded from a primary process as they are during the trial, would they still be subjected to an old- fashioned party preselection process? Or would they face a primary after, say, three terms?
These are difficult questions to answer, hence the Nationals are starting slowly with a trial in one electorate. But they have pledged to target a winnable seat, indicating they are taking the process seriously. The Nationals should be congratulated for having the courage to take the first step towards a more democratic preselection system which is inclusive of a public increasingly cynical about their elected representatives. It will be interesting to see where it leads.
Peter van Onselen is an associate professor of politics and government at Edith Cowan University.