Peter Nixon, the Nationals frontbencher admired by political friends and foes

During more than two decades in Canberra, Peter Nixon was rewarded with ministerial appointments under five prime ministers. He has died aged 97.

Peter Nixon, right, when chairman of the former Southern Cross Broadcasting in 1995. Picture: Rebekah Thompson

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Across the 1960s, Peter Nixon rose through the ranks of what became the Nationals to join the lions on its frontline.

They were led by the hardest politician Australia has seen, John McEwen, who embodied Australia’s hardscrabble farmers – unyielding, steadfast, resolute, sometimes obstinate.

McEwen, who by the age of seven lost had lost both parents, started as a World War I soldier settler on scrappy, unirrigated land, building it up to 1200ha carrying 1800 head of beef and dairy cattle. Dairy farmers’ work, like politics, is unrelenting. Only the tough survive.

Doug Anthony was also a dairy farmer: staunch, trustworthy and unassuming, a man who when acting prime minister ran the country from a caravan in Murwillumbah in NSW’s Northern Rivers region.

Ian Sinclair served in the RAAF while completing a law degree at the University of Sydney but followed his heart to develop a New England grazing property.

Nixon was a fourth generation dairy farmer who, aged 10, sheltered with his family in the Snowy River as the 1939 Black Saturday bushfires tore through Gippsland. Bushfire remains an annual threat.

These men were treasured by their electorates as representatives who shared their fortunes. And they were respected by their Liberal colleagues in Canberra whose fate they helped shape.

For many years, until the unruly interim of the Whitlam government, the Coalition was favoured by Australian voters.

Nixon died five days out from this year’s federal election – and weeks before the unthinkable, bewildering fallout between the Nationals and the Liberals. The Nationals needed a lion; instead they have a former National Australia Bank and Suncorp banker who intends to “work through” the nuclear issue.

Nixon was a more decisive man than that and his ability to negotiate was second to none. No one understood the party and its aims as well – nor understood how it could help lead even as its primary producer constituency retreated.

Peter Nixon with then Liberal prime minister John Gorton in 1970. Picture: News Corp Australia

He won the seat of Gippsland – the party has held it since their formation – after the incumbent, George Bowden, retired in 1961. Bowden had been one of the party’s first members. Nixon saw three Country Party (as it was then known) leaders become prime ministers: Earle Page, Arthur Fadden and McEwen. He was in parliament when, in December 1975, the party won 18 per cent of the nationwide vote and 23 seats.

In his maiden speech on February 20, 1962, the new member spoke of his region’s strengths being “natural resources of timber and brown coal”. He lived to see the Hazelwood Power Station close and death sentences issued for Yallourn, Loy Yang A and Loy Yang B plants as Australia went from having the equal cheapest power in the world to almost the most expensive. Native forest logging was banned last year.

Across more than two decades in Canberra, Nixon’s appointments under five prime ministers included minister for the interior, shipping and transport, and primary industry, and he was postmaster general in 1975. He retired in 1983.

He worked hard to keep the Nationals on course during the preposterous 1987 push by Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen to parachute into Canberra as prime minister. Bjelke-Petersen forced the Nationals to separate from the Coalition, which was smashed at the 1987 federal election.

After it, the Nationals commissioned Nixon to comprehensively review their structures and rules. He made 68 recommendations including a revised constitution and improved co-ordination between the federal and state branches.

The changes were adopted and many believed he had helped save the party. Nixon suggested the Nationals’ role exclusively dedicated to rural communities was in decline and they might consider amalgamating with the Liberals. Former leader Anthony described this as a “realistic” course.

In retirement he chaired Southern Cross Broadcasting and served as one of the original AFL commissioners, helping transform the sport as it set up teams across the nation. His team was Richmond and as a former commissioner he happily attended its three recent grand final victories.

Former prime minister John Howard said Nixon “possessed one of the finest political minds I have encountered in my years of public life”. He said Nixon was a trusted person of complete integrity admired by both sides of the house.

“He was so trusted that he often helped resolve difficult issues involving personalities within the Liberal Party,” Howard said, adding that he appreciated the advice he received from Nixon at the start of his own ministerial career.

“Peter Nixon had a great sense of humour and a capacity for self-deprecation. Although he often described himself as ‘a simple farmer’, he was all of that and a lot more.”

Peter James Nixon. Politician and farmer. Born Orbost, Victoria, March 22, 1928; died Melbourne, May 1, aged 97.