The Nats are plagued by scandal, vested with bullies and riddled with incompetence. The one thing they were supposed to be good at were looking after farmers and they have failed at that.
Given the Coalition’s momentous split — which has left conservative parties even further from government than they already were, which is really saying something at the moment — it’s probably not that surprising that the above is the view of a senior Liberal.
Except this isn’t a very recent quote. This is Wagga Liberal branch president Colin Taggart, back in 2019. Yes, the Nationals have been a very loud and public pain in the arse for the Liberals for quite some time now. Announcing their plan to ditch the pact with the Libs entirely (with unseemly haste given what new Liberal leader Sussan Ley has been going through this week) is only the most recent in years of public strops from the drama queens of Australian politics.
Barnaby Joyce
We can start nowhere else but with Barnaby Joyce, the Ariadne’s thread leading us to pretty much every calamity the Nats have inflicted on the Liberals (and the nation) over recent years, a man who has been causing headaches for his colleagues as reliably as for, well, himself.
We could start earlier, but time constraints mean we have to kick off with his defining scandal, the revelation of his extramarital affair with then-staffer Vikki Campion in early 2018 (going on while he was deputy prime minister and warning of the dangers of marriage equality), which led to a fight with then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.
Joyce called Turnbull’s public criticism of his behaviour and invitation to consider stepping down “inept” and “unnecessary”, and the government had to take time out from anything remotely important to craft a much-derided “bonk ban” policy. With Joyce surrounded by scandals like the birds dancing around the head of a concussion victim in a cartoon, it was eventually an allegation of sexual harassment against him (never resolved and always denied by Joyce) that triggered a National Party leadership spill and booted him.
For a bit. It only took a matter of months for rumours to bubble that Joyce was soon to return to the top job. And in February 2020 came his first attempt to topple his replacement, Michael McCormack. To really reinforce the Nationals’ focus on the country’s interest, Joyce’s supporters chose a day dedicated to victims of the recent bushfires as the one to pounce.
He failed that time, but by June 2021, he was ready for yet another crack, and this time was successful. But having acted as Louise to Scott Morrison’s Thelma as the pair drove the Coalition into an electoral chasm in 2022, Joyce was later replaced by David Littleproud, which of course finally put a stop to all this nonsensical speculation about him being leader again — sorry, I’m just being handed a note…
John Gunararo
Joyce’s only realistic competition for sustained and focused wrecking comes from long-time New South Wales leader John Barilaro, the last Nationals leader to threaten to dissolve its coalition with the Libs. Janine Perrett once argued in these pages that Barilaro might look “like just another bloated, narcissistic, disloyal, self-indulgent, hypocritical, self-absorbed and egotistical National Party leader”, but he actually managed to be so much less than that.
Again, time and word count force us to focus on the biggest hits. As the nation was in the midst of the coronavirus crisis in September 2020, Barilaro was incensed at the insufficient leeway granted to farmers to kill off koalas and threatened to dissolve the coalition with NSW Libs.
He was stared down by then NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian with humiliating ease. This didn’t stop him though from doing a bunch of tough guy posturing a week later, telling his critics in the Liberal Party to “put up or shut up”, having so recently and spectacularly failed to do either.
“It’s simple: if you don’t like it, you know where the door is,” the Nationals leader said, after then police minister David Elliott — and voice of reason for literally the only time in his career — suggested Barilaro should consider his position.
But he managed to damage the Liberals in ways not even Joyce has so far managed, continuing the job from outside parliament. Roughly a year after his resignation, he rose from his own political coffin to get to work on one for his former colleagues when the scandal over his appointment as a US trade commissioner bloomed into view.
Andrew Broad
And finally, we can’t leave out former Nationals MP Andrew Broad. Or, should we say, James Bond? New Idea magazine was briefly the envy of the Canberra press gallery in December 2018 when it revealed Broad had, while on official business in Hong Kong, used a sugar daddy website to meet a woman called “Sweet Sophia Rose” (20 years his junior, of course).
Because you can set your watch to these things, Broad had not only called on Joyce to resign over his own indiscretions, but had been a, shall we say, “fierce advocate” against marriage equality (charmingly saying at one point you couldn’t call a same-sex relationship a marriage because “relationships can have different names … I can put the rams in a paddock and they might mount one another, but no lambs will come out”).
The scandal added: “I pull you close, run my strong hands down your back, softly kiss your neck and whisper ‘G’day mate’” to an unwilling public’s erotic imaginations.
The details ranged from the farcical to the faintly heartbreaking. A few days after Malcolm Turnbull was rolled, Broad sent a text, apparently unanswered, saying, “Hey I just got a big promotion at work”.
Broad resigned his assistant ministry and didn’t run in the last election, but not before the world was told he apparently spent all his time on his date with “Sophia Rose” complaining about how much everything cost, just like James Bond would.
What are the Nationals’ other greatest hits?
We want to hear from you. Write to us at letters@crikey.com.au to be published in Crikey. Please include your full name. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.