More Nats sliding under the waves

Crikey.com.au newsletter has a telling assessment of the future for the Queensland Nats.


What Barnaby Joyce is worried about
Charles Richardson writes:
To understand why Barnaby Joyce is making such a nuisance of himself within the Coalition, it's important to appreciate his electoral position. The National Party has senators from three states, but in New South Wales and Victoria they are elected on joint tickets with the Liberals, so their fate rests on the performance of the Coalition as awhole. In Queensland, however, the Coalition partners run separate tickets, so National Party fortunes depend on their own efforts. Before 1980, the National Party (and before it the Country Party) ran on a joint ticket in Queensland as well; they always got one of the three winnable positions, while the Liberals took the other two. But in that year they insisted on running a separate ticket, headed by Flo Bjelke-Petersen, wife of premier Joh. Sure enough, they outvoted the Liberals, and in 1983, with Joh at the height of his powers, they crushed them. Since then, however, it has been downhill all the way for the Queensland Nationals. In 1983 they beat the Liberal Party 2 to 1; ten years later, those positions were reversed, and by 2004 the Liberals were outvoting them 6 to 1. The following table shows the figures (available at the U.W.A. Politics database, here).Election CP/NP share of Coalition vote:
1980 53.7%
1983 66.0%
1984 62.4%
1987 61.5%
1990 31.7%
1993 31.6%
1996 29.8%
1998 25.1%
2001 20.8%
2004 14.7%

Joyce only just scraped in last year with One Nation preferences; if this precipitous trend continues he's got Buckley's chance of re-election in 2010. That helps to explain why he's doing everything he can to get himself a high profile in Queensland – regardless of what his colleagues in Canberra think.






You have to love that picture in the Sydney Morning Herald of my friend Senator Bill Heffernan 'communicating' with Barnaby Joyce. Described by one Liberal similar to the old bulls pulling the new young bulls into line.