John Anderson to make comeback with Nationals

John Anderson thinks our politics is broken and the former deputy PM is determined to fix it. That’s why he is once again for standing preselection for the Nationals.

Former deputy prime minister John Anderson would like to see a different tone in federal politics. Picture: Antony Hands

John Anderson thinks our politics is broken and he is determined to fix it.

That’s why he has taken the extraordinary step of standing once again for preselection for the Nationals, this time in the Senate, at the age of 64.

It’s an oddity of the Nationals that a senator can be the leader of the party — and yet the former deputy prime minister insists he does not want to return as the party’s head.

“As one who knows from personal experience the rigours and extraordinary demands of leadership, I know that I could not return at my stage of life to those sorts of roles,” Mr Anderson told The Australian.

“This is not a lifestyle choice for me or Julia (his wife). We are a team and we always have been. We just feel that at this time you ask not what you’d like to do but what you can do.”

Mr Anderson is putting his name forward to run as the Nationals’ lead Senate candidate in NSW.

The party is believed to be on the brink of announcing the Senate preselection process, which is likely to take place in June.

Mr Anderson was leader of the Nationals and deputy prime minister under John Howard. He stepped down as deputy PM in 2005 and left parliament in 2007.

Mr Anderson would like to see a different tone in federal politics: “We are deeply divided by the poison of identity politics, which so powerfully pits us against one another, and so denigrates our past that we feel unworthy and unable to defend the benefits and values that our forebears fought so hard to secure for us.”

When he told his adult children he was intending to stand again, they had one reservation. “Dad, are you sure you can cope with the twitterati?” they asked. “I told them we’re going to have to learn to cope with it anyway,” Mr Anderson said. “If people are scared off (politics) by social media, we’re in a bad way.”

Mr Anderson has decided he won’t be scared off by social media or anything else.

He expresses great confidence in the future of his old party: “The National Party is the natural home of a sensible, mainstream outlook, of a bush pragmatism which is rooted in traditional Australian values.

“The party should be proud and confident in its assertion of these values.”

On Monday, he rang Nationals leader and Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack to inform him of his preselection run.

The Nationals have just one senator from NSW, Perin Davey. She is not up for re-election this time. It is believed likely the Liberals and Nationals will agree on a joint Senate ticket at the next federal election with the Nationals likely to get the highly winnable number two position.

Mr Anderson was approached by leading Nationals initially to consider whether he would succeed Larry Anthony as party president. That didn’t appeal but he said he would consider all the other possibilities. “From then on, I was besieged by people asking me to stand,” he says.

For the past three years Mr Anderson has run a popular website on which he interviews leading conservative thinkers from around the world. He has conducted about 70 such interviews, which have attracted more than 15 million YouTube downloads as well as a vast following on Facebook and as podcasts.

Some of his most popular interviews have been with Canadian writer Jordan Peterson, conservative historian Niall Ferguson and former prime minister Mr Howard, with whom Mr Anderson remains a close friend.

He wants to lead cultural change as well as policy initiatives: “I’m deeply concerned by the way we’re tearing ourselves apart. We have to learn the good and bad in our history, but without our history we are adrift.

“There is a concerted effort to delegitimise our past and make it a thing that people would certainly never celebrate.”

Mr Anderson wants to rehabilitate Australian history and nominates a raft of policy issues he would seek to contribute on.

“There are several agricultural issues which concern me, among them securing our supply lines,” he said.

Mr Anderson also believes Australian agriculture can make money from its ability to absorb carbon. He nominates former army general Jim Molan, now a Liberal senator from NSW, as an inspiration to him and identifies with Senator Molan’s defence policy priorities: “Being defence-ready in an increasingly unstable world will cost more money.”

He is a vocal supporter of fuel security and securing Australian supply lines generally in strategic goods.

He strongly backs the Morrison government’s handling of the COVID pandemic, but also sounds this warning: “Coming out of COVID, we have to exercise some fiscal discipline, so we can put some shots back in the locker. We had shots in the locker to use because of past fiscal management.”