Culture

The National Party Imploded Over The Weekend In NSW; Is It A Sign Of Things To Come?

The Shooters party could win its first seat ever in the lower house.

by Osman Faruqi  14 November 2016

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While most of the world was still coming to terms with the election of Donald Trump last week, NSW experienced it’s own spectacular political implosion.

In a by-election for the western NSW seat of Orange, held on Saturday, the National part saw its vote halve. The party’s vote collapsed from the 65 percent recorded at the last election to just under 32 percent. This is a seat the Nationals have held continuously for 70 years.

It now looks like the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party could pick up the seat due to a huge rise in their vote and the help of Labor preferences. The Shooters (Yeah I know, it’s hard to accept there’s a political party in Australia called ‘the Shooters’) have been around for a while but a victory in Orange would be the first time they’ve broken through in a lower house of parliament.

The shock result has led the Shooters to compare themselves to Donald Trump. The leader of the Nationals, Deputy Premier Troy Grant has resigned in the aftermath. So how significant was the election, and does it really herald a new era of Trumpism here in Australia?

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Was This A Trumpslide?

Since the Orange by-election occurred just a few days after the US election, it’s tempting to try and draw comparisons between the two. And there are definitely some features in common.

The election result in Orange shows how on the nose our major political parties are with the public. Not only did the Nationals suffer one of the biggest swings ever recorded in NSW political history, the Labor party went backwards as well. Between them the two major parties barely hit 50 percent of the vote.

In the lead up to the election polling showed a big rise in the vote for minor parties and independents, including One Nation. But One Nation didn’t get their shit together in time to run, so it looks like the Shooters have become the main beneficiary of that anti-major party vote.

But it’s clear that there was more going on than just a broad sense of “politicians are bad”. A number of recent state government decisions including council amalgamations, the greyhound racing ban, and cuts to education haven’t been well received in regional NSW.

The Shooters candidate also received the endorsement of talkback hosts Alan Jones and Ray Hadley, which boosted his campaign.

Just like Trump’s victory, it’s difficult, and fairly pointless, to try and ascribe the unprecedented events in Orange to one set of circumstances. But there are certainly strong warnings that voters no longer have the same loyalty to major political parties they once had and are willing to make that known at the ballot box.

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Politics As We Know It Is Over

Since Australia’s two party system stabilised after World War II politics has remained relatively simple to explain and understand. Conservatives, small business owners and the wealthy elite rallied behind the Liberal party, who governed in coalition with the rural based National party. Blue collar voters and middle-class progressives threw their support behind Labor.

But recently we’ve seen that model break down. Labor can no longer solidly depend on a constituency of unionised, blue collar workers and their progressive base is being eaten away by the Greens. The conservative side of politics is going through its own meltdown, as the Tony Abbott-Malcolm Turnbull rivalry continues to dominate the Liberal party.

It’s now clear that the Nationals are no longer immune to these challenges. For decades the party has dominated politics in regional Australia. It’s main challenges have tended to come from high-profile, former Nationals candidates like Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott.

But as the party has surrendered more and more of its identity, in a bid to keep its hands on the levers of power, it’s become more susceptible to attacks on both the left and the right. The Nationals embrace of coal seam gas mining has been credited with contributing to the Greens success on the north coast of NSW. In the 2015 state election the Greens won the seat of Ballina off the Nationals and came within 3 percent of winning Lismore.

And now in Orange we’re seeing blow-back to the Baird government’s agenda of gutting local democracy and under-investing in regional public services.

What’s most interesting is that it wasn’t Labor or the Greens, who both oppose those deeply unpopular policies (Labor even led the campaign against the greyhound racing ban, which no doubt also contributed to this result), who were beneficiaries of this backlash. Instead voters turned to independents and the Shooters (perhaps in lieu of One Nation).

We also know that this situation isn’t restricted to Orange. We saw it in South Australia with the success of the Nick Xenophon Team and right across the country with Pauline Hanson’s resurgence.

The lesson is pretty clear: political loyalties are breaking down and when politicians betray their base, they’re going to get punished. The worrying thing is that, at least for the moment, voters are tending to choose ultra-conservative parties to deal out the punishment.