Between A Shock And A Hard, Hard Place

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday April 3, 1999

Margo Kingston

The National Party was being squeezed even before last Saturday's NSW election. Margo Kingston gauges the pressure.

LAST Saturday night some of Dubbo's most prominent Liberal, Labor and ex-National Party identities gathered at the local Macquarie Inn to toast the victory of an Independent, Tony McGrane.

It was a telling sign of the breakdown of party loyalties in the regions as a dynamic competition for the regional vote - offering radically different policy and tactical prescriptions - begins to take shape.

Dubbo was the National Party's safest seat, State or Federal. But through persisting in mediocre candidates, an arrogant disregard for grassroots campaigning and an eerie dearth of vision, the Nationals keep getting slapped where it hurts, in their heartland.

The National Party's identity crisis and the collapse of belief in the quality of its representation see it squeezed between two serious threats to its powerbase in country Australia. One Nation continues to poll well in the bush, wreaking havoc on the Nationals' vote. In Dubbo, One Nation directed voters not to preference anyone, and its 19 per cent vote brought the Nationals' Richard Mutton to his knees, although he has firmed in late counting.

One Nation hopes its spoiling tactics will see the Nationals eventually agree to swap preferences, and the retired former member for Dubbo, Mr Gerry Peacocke, recommended just that after the Dubbo debacle. But this would give One Nation a shot at Lower House seats and create intolerable tensions within the Coaliton. More broadly, it would choke city-based sympathy at a time when the bush is asking Australians to make rejuvenation of the regions a top priority.

Now, the Country Summit Alliance poses a potentially more powerful threat. If One Nation was the big bang for the Nationals' core support base, the summit is the fallout. It comprises a loose alliance of tough, seasoned independent mayors and prominent local identities of substance who eschew One Nation's racism but keep much of its anti- economic rationalist rhetoric.

Tony McGrane is the Mayor of Dubbo, which has found a way to survive and thrive in the new economic environment. The summit strives to overcome chronic inter- regional jealousies to become a powerful new non-partisan ginger group. Tony Windsor, a conservative founding member who was re-elected with a whopping 86 per cent of the two-party preferred vote in Tamworth, says the summit is "a rational response to neglect".

"We're trying a very different form of politics. One Nation is about division. We're the opposite. We want to overcome the party differences which keep country Australia in the dark ages politically and unite the country vote to give it enormous political power. We want to be able and willing to trade with Labor or Liberal governments."

Windsor and possibly McGrane will be joined by the Labor-leaning Armidale Mayor, Richard Torbay, in Northern Tablelands, who at his first tilt at the seat won 60 per cent of the two-party preferred vote after a 25 per cent swing against the Nationals. Windsor will not rule out standing for the Federal National seat of New England, comprising the State seats of Tamworth and Northern Tablelands, which now looks decidedly shaky.

If that is not enough to scare the life out of the Nationals, NSW and Federal Labor is also putting much greater resources and energy into wooing the newly volatile bush vote through its "Country Labor" structure. NSW Country Labor pressure won a new ministry of regional development after the last election, and Labor's regional champion, Harry Woods, now looks like retaining Clarence, a traditional National Party seat, with a swing of more than 8 per cent.

Labor has thrown its weight behind the summit independents in the regions, running dead in Northern Tablelands and lending members to man McGrane's booths and scrutineer the count. It was Labor who persuaded McGrane into standing at the last minute.

At an end-of-session drinks party for the Federal Nationals on Wednesday night, they solemnly congratulated each other on doing a good job in NSW, in the circumstances. Yet behind the bluster, the NSW result will see the Federal Nationals become more fractious and demanding of the Liberals.

The high One Nation regional vote has also changed the odds on who will become the next National Party leader. The deputy, John Anderson, an introverted and serious man with the best intellect in the party, was the frontrunner. But now, the earthy, grassroots-oriented Mark Vaile has stormed into serious contention amid fears that Anderson is not the salesman who can inspire voters to return to the fold.

If Vaile becomes a serious threat to Anderson, the leader, Tim Fischer, could postpone his perceived plans to retire during this term until he can be sure of Anderson's succession.

The competing visions for the National Party in the 21st century will emerge this year through the lense of the competition for leadership. The choice the party makes could determine if the Nationals become yet another casualty of world economic imperatives. Anderson, an economic rationalist who with the National Farmers Federation in the 1980s embraced free markets as the saviour of the regions, has been left stranded by its devastating effects on the party's constituency. While wealthy and entrepreneurial farmers got bigger and more efficient, slashing jobs in the process, small farmers, the backbone of the bush, went broke. Some dying rural towns are now simply chronically deprived welfare enclaves.

Anderson's answer was an extraordinary mea culpa, a speech to the National Press Club this year he called "Two Nations". He warned that growing despair in country towns, desperately clinging to their sense of community in the face of a collapse in basic services and jobs, could destabilise the stability of Australian society and thus its future wealth, unless something was done.

Anderson admits that the Nationals must be reinvented. "What this party has to do is make itself the party of innovation, vision and energy, the party that sets out new ways of reinvigorating the regions.

"We must develop very rapidly an accurate diagnosis and work up solutions that will work." He will convene a rural summit in October to bring in the best ideas from around the world on regional development.

But to do that, he needs to somehow inspire voters with this new vision against the forces which he says "are tripping down memory lane".

"You can't reinvent a society, no matter how attractive. It has gone forever, and to pretend that it hasn't is a cruel hoax."