Littleproud in the box seat with Joyce still on the nose

Michael McCormack won’t survive, but Barnaby Joyce no longer has the skills and finesse he once possessed.

Illustration: Tom Jellett

Predictions are always fraught with difficulties, as many commentators (me included) well know after predicting Bill Shorten would win last year’s election, only to watch him lose despite every opinion poll for two years putting Labor in front. It may be a cliche that the only poll that counts is on election day, but Scott Morrison must be glad it rings true.

Here is another prediction (proving I haven’t learned my lesson): Michael McCormack won’t survive as Nationals leader for too much longer. The reasons are simple: he has not embraced a conciliatory approach towards his detractors within the parliamentary Nationals. He isn’t a great media performer, and he hasn’t stood up to the Nationals’ senior Coalition partner in a way that would earn the respect of his party­room colleagues.

Instead McCormack rewarded those who stood with him against the spill motion and punished those he knew stood against him. The vote was a lot closer than the Deputy Prime Minister has been led to believe or his office has tried to spin to journalists, which is a sign of just how deep the divisions go within the party and how isolated McCormack is, even from some of his (albeit soft) supporters.

To say the Deputy Prime Minister is living in a political bunker is an understatement.

But predicting McCormack’s downfall doesn’t automatically mean Barnaby Joyce is coming back as Nationals leader. That remains highly unlikely. The man Tony Abbott once described as Australia’s best retail politician (which he was) no longer has the skills and finesse he once possessed. While Joyce has more to offer than your average maverick backbencher, he is unlikely to reach the lofty office he once held.

Those Nationals crying out for a Joyce return remind me of football fans — hoping to relive the glory days of a career that can never return to what it once was — who want their hero to go around for one more season despite three knee operations restricting their star’s ability.

Joyce has been through a lot, personally and professionally, diminishing his potency as a political force. He isn’t quite analogous to a footballer who should give the game away but a team can’t be built around his performance any more.

The Joyce comeback that is more likely to materialise — as part of McCormack’s looming downfall — is to the frontbench, not the leadership team.

Joyce, knowingly or otherwise, played the role of political stalking horse on that first parliamentary sitting day of the year.

David Littleproud as the new deputy Nationals leader is the heir apparent and the biggest winner from the shady decision-making attached to the sports rorts scandal that precipitated Bridget McKenzie’s resignation, thus freeing up the party’s deputy position and allowing Littleproud to be promoted, all the while pledging loyalty to McCormack.

The script couldn’t have been better written for Littleproud. He is now perfectly placed to take over from McCormack once enough of the incumbent’s colleagues realise his leadership is terminal — which it already is, frankly. A voting bloc of such real­ists alongside Joyce supporters would bring an end to McCormack’s tenure.

Once in the top job, Littleproud can do what McCormack should have done and extend an olive branch to some of Joyce’s supporters, and indeed to Joyce. These deals will be made before any showdown.

Littleproud emerging as the compromise candidate would be a replay of Morrison’s rise into the top job in August 2018. Peter Dutton sought to blast Malcolm Turnbull out — as Joyce did with McCormack last week — but was too polarising a figure to succeed. With Liberals’ realisation that the status quo was unsustainable given the damage the initial challenge did to Turnbull as leader, Morrison became the candidate both sides could live with and eventually the new Prime Minister extended an olive branch to some of the anti-Turnbull camp.

Similarly, both sides of the Nationals divide can live with Littleproud, a Queenslander but not one as mad as a cut snake like some of his more colourful colleagues up north.

The challenge for Littleproud will be not to become a pale imitation of the Nationals leader he wants to be, and therefore pander to the Liberals in government the way McCormack has done.

The Nationals are and should be their own political entity. Even the merger of the parties in Queensland under the Liberal National Party banner turned into a reverse takeover, empowering Nationals, not Liberals, in the Sunshine State. Littleproud is a clean-cut political figure, like past Nationals leaders who have been too much under the thumb of Liberal prime ministers; think McCormack and John Anderson. But to succeed he needs to act like the greats of the past, in the spirit of Black Jack McEwen.

While Joyce may not be back as leader, his return to cabinet, assuming that happens, will be interesting enough. It won’t impress an already unimpressed Morrison, who apparently is bouncing off the walls in frustration at the carry-on inside the Nationals. Dealing with the former deputy prime minister around the cabinet table won’t be a pushover. You get the impression Joyce 2.0 won’t be as compliant as he was with Turnbull, especially knowing (as Joyce does) that Morrison was the loudest voice pushing Turnbull to dump him in the first place as part of the unfortunately named “bonking ban”, when Joyce’s personal indiscretion came to public attention.

The Prime Minister is frustrated by the mess the Nationals are making of themselves to start the parliamentary new year. Not that he is in a position to complain, having butchered the government’s momentum over the summer courtesy of his Hawaii adventure, his mishandling of the bushfires and the divisions in his party on climate change.

The instability within the Nationals isn’t over and may take time to percolate into the outcome I’ve foreshadowed. Nevertheless, that’s where it appears to be inevitably heading.

Peter van Onselen is political editor for the Ten Network and professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.