Wagging the dog: Do the Nationals need to dump the lifeless Liberals?

History suggests the Nationals ought to be careful about demanding an economic portfolio, especially finance, as part of any new Coalition deal.

It was Tony Abbott who, in an act both deeply foolish and profoundly irritating to his Liberal colleagues, handed Barnaby Joyce the shadow finance portfolio in late 2009. Joyce lasted barely three months in the job: he confused millions and billions in his first Press Club appearance, claimed Australia could default on its debt (debt that, under subsequent Coalition governments would increase massively, with nary a peep from him), confused private and public debt, and earned a rebuke from the governor of the Reserve Bank for undermining confidence in Australia’s finances.

Few Nationals are quite as innumerate as Joyce, it’s true. And in context, perhaps Joyce didn’t do a much worse job than Liberal Jane “Chinese spies” Hume, who signed off not merely on policy garbage like the business long lunch subsidy or the the working from home disaster, but on the Liberals going to the election as a party of both higher taxes and higher deficits.

But elevating a Nationals MP to a major economic portfolio would be unlikely to help with the recovery of the Liberals’ economic credentials, as business is aware that the Nationals have a decidedly more sceptical view of corporate Australia than the Liberals do. In the last term of parliament, it was the Nationals who succeeded in pushing divestiture powers for big retailers into Coalition policy, including infrastructure shadow Bridget McKenzie’s crazy-brave push for that to be extended to Qantas.

That all owes a debt to Joyce, who forced the Howard government, in its death throes, to ban predatory pricing via the “Birdsville amendment” in 2007, and who amid his apocalyptic warnings that Australia was about to have the furniture taken away by bailiffs in 2010, called for divestiture powers on the big banks.

With the Nats wielding greater influence in the joint partyroom courtesy of the Liberal collapse, will divestiture become a more established part of Coalition policy? Unusually, they’d be on the side of the angels economically. Divestment powers have been good enough for the Americans since the late 19th century. They’re good enough for the Europeans. Yet in one of the most concentrated developed economies in the world, they’re anathema.

Competition policy, obviously, isn’t the only or even the biggest tension between the Nats and the free marketeers in the Liberals. The Nats love nuclear power, which not only gets them off scot-free from having to bother about all that climate crisis nonsense, but is a big-government regional project of exactly the kind they love — at hundreds of billions of dollars over decades, it would be the ultimate regional rort.

Unfortunately for the Liberals, voters hated the idea, and Dutton virtually abandoned it even before the election campaign began, preferring another Nationals-style policy: a gas reservation proposal that sent even the Coalition’s fossil fuel friends running for cover.

The focus now on Liberal-National relations is how the former can hope to recover the metropolitan seats necessary to regain power while shackled to a rural rump that doesn’t believe in climate science, wants to waste vast sums of money on a monstrously expensive power source we don’t need (using a workforce we’d have to fully import from overseas) and has cultural values deeply at odds with most urban voters.

But flip it around: the Nationals have now held 9 or 10 seats for several elections in a row. The slow erosion of seats — to Liberals or independents — that marked the post-One Nation period in the early 2000s ended about a decade ago. Seats still come and go (Andrew Gee now looks like he has a lock on Calare), but the Nationals continue to hold their own, while the last time the Liberals performed strongly was in 2013.

The Coalition looks unlikely to be back in power until the 2030s (although “remember 1998” should be the Labor war cry from here). What value does being linked to the Liberals have for the Nationals, given the one thing the Liberals are good for — getting them into power — is off the agenda for the time being?

From this point of view, there’s real value in the Nationals going their own way, at least for a while, unshackled by the free marketeers of the Liberals. They can expand their interventionist instincts on competition policy. They can make their case for the fantasy of nuclear power. They can push agricultural interests — to the extent the Nationals are any longer about farmers, rather than fossil fuels — in trade policy. And they can make their own deals with Labor in the Senate, potentially giving them more legislative influence. They can demonstrate to their constituents that they can deliver even without being linked to the Liberals.

And if, as some Liberal doomsayers say, the Liberals now face a kind of existential crisis that means the very future of the party in the 21st century — a century the Liberal Party’s aggrieved, affluent baby boomer base fiercely hates living in — is in question, it might be a practice run for the future. What role do the Nationals, as a deliberately sectional party that will forever be confined to minor status, play if they can’t reliably access power via the Liberals anymore?

A cold, hard look at those questions might be in order before another Coalition deal — which, remember, will be carefully kept secret from voters — is inked between Sussan Ley and David Littleproud.