The Liberal-National Party - a new model party?
The amalgamation of Queensland's Liberal and National Party's over the weekend is a historic move for Queensland. However, it is a merger driven by the history of conservative politics in Queensland, and its applicability to other states cannot be assumed.
Moves to amalgamate the two parties emerged before the 2006 state election and were driven by the needs of Queensland state politics. They were stymied at the time by a Howard government alarmed that state amalgamation would interfere with the running of a Federal Coalition.
Now the Federal Coalition's self-interest is backing the Queensland merger and there are suggestions the model should be repeated in Canberra. But can this Federal support for amalgamation in one state be extended to amalgamation across Australia?
A 'national' party?
Despite its name, the National Party is the least 'national' of Australia's political parties. It has neither the centralised constitution of the Labor Party nor the strong Federal executive of the Liberal Party. The federal National Party is essentially a super-structure perched atop the largely independent state branches. The Party does not even exist in Tasmania and the ACT, and has not existed as a separate entity in the Northern Territory since 1990.
In South Australia, merger is made more difficult because the state's sole National Party MP, Karlene Maywald, currently holds office as a Minister in the Rann Labor Government. This poisons relations between the state Liberal and National parties.
In Western Australia, while the National Party has avoided making common cause with the socialist enemy, its relations with the Liberal Party are frosty. The National Party governed in coalition with Richard Court's Liberals between 1993 and 2001, but the coalition agreement has lapsed in opposition. At the looming state election, the introduction of one-vote, one-value electoral boundaries has pitted the two parties into a life and death struggle in rural seats. The Nationals have ruled out any chance of a merger.
In Victoria, the National Party formed part of the Kennett coalition government between 1992 and 1999, but had been out of office since 1952, when the Country Party governed as a minority administration with Labor support. In the Liberal Party's long years in government between 1955 and 1982, it governed with a Lower House majority in its own right, and grudgingly put up with short periods of Country Party balance of power in the Legislative Council. The defeat of the Kennett government in 1999 brought an end to the coalition agreement, and the National Party under new leader Peter Ryan has since steered an independent and successful course through two state elections. It is Ryan's revival of the state Nationals that can be credited with the party's recent good performance in the Gippsland by-election. While a new coalition agreement has recently been signed, the Nationals have little interest in merger.
The Coalition in New South Wales has been existence since 1927 and has a longer continuous history than the Federal Coalition or similar agreements in other state. As with the Federal Coalition, in NSW it has always been clear that the Liberal Party is the senior and the National Party the junior partner. The periodic conflicts that have split coalitions in Queensland and Victoria have rarely occurred in NSW.
Much of the strength of the NSW Coalition has been built on relations between the leaders of the two parties. However, the National Party has suffered at the hands of Independents in recent years, and the growing urbanisation of National heartland on the state's North Coast is creating tensions between the two party's branches and organisations. Jockeying over whether the Liberals will contest the Lyne by-election is a sign of this tension.
That the merger is proceeding in Queensland before any other state is not surprising. Queensland is the only state where the National Party has been the senior partner in coalition, but the Liberal Party has long chaffed against the arrangement. Merger is a long delayed acknowledgment by the National Party that its position as senior partner is at risk, but also an acknowledgment by the Liberal Party that its party organisation is too weak to assume the mantle of seniority.
Merger avoids another battle over Coalition seniority that could only assist the Queensland Labor Party. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the Labor Party was unelectable, the two parties were free to engage in their internecine conflicts. But in 2008, after three landslide state election victories for Labor, both Coalition partners have finally accepted that the path back to government requires a merger that allows the focus to be on defeating Labor.
The Nationals' rise in the 1970s
Like some Greek or Shakespearian tragedy, the seeds of the Coalition's current plight lie in the earlier success for the National Party. Policy and leadership differentiation in the 1970s transformed the rural Country Party into a National Party able to win seats in the state's urban south-east corner. This created the climate in which the National Party achieved government in its own right after the end of the Coalition in 1983. But when the tide turned in Labor's favour from the late 1980s, the National Party now found itself unable to regain government because of the poor state of the Liberal Party, a state for which the Nationals had only themselves to blame.
Until 1974, the peculiarities of Queensland's geography meant that while the Liberal Party outpolled the Country Party at state elections, the Country Party always won more seats. This was because for decades the drawing of electoral boundaries gave extra representation to rural areas over Brisbane, and also because the Liberal Party wasted its votes running in Labor's safe urban seats.
The big change in relations came in the early 1970s. Under its new leader Joh Bjelke-Petersen and state director Robert Sparkes, the party embarked on dramatic experiments in public policy. This first came to notice when his government introduced a state of emergency to control protesters against the 1971 Springbok rugby union tour. Bjelke-Petersen's dogged opposition to new Prime Minister Gough Whitlam further built his profile. At the 1974 state election, the Country party was renamed the National Party, and Bjelke-Petersen led the Coalition to a thumping victory, Labor reduced to a 'cricket team' of just 11 MPs. For the first time, the Nationals won seats in urban parts of the south-east.
With Labor irrelevant, the National Party set out to entrench its dominance over the Liberal Party. Two key policy changes can be pointed to in this period. The first was another law and order initiative with the banning of street marches. It was a policy that played well in the National heartland but proved more divisive to Brisbane Liberals.
The second was the decision to abolish death duties. This was opposed by Liberal leader and state treasurer Gordon Chalk. Bjelke-Petersen got his way and Queensland became the retirement haven of choice, even after other states followed the Queensland lead and abolished their own death duties. The waves of 'Mexicans' moving from south of the border drove urban development in the state's south-east, and the National Party took every opportunity to remind new arrivals who had abolished death duties, and to remind developers which party was responsible for their growing property portfolios.
At the 1977 state election, the Nationals outpolled the Liberals for the first time. Bitterness flowed over into federal politics in 1980 with the end of joint Senate tickets. This led to the election of Bjelke-Petersen's wife Flo to the Senate, and also cost the Fraser government its control of the Senate.
The final breech in the state Coalition came in 1983. A Liberal leadership change and a stand on a matter of parliamentary principle saw the Nationals form government in their own right ahead of a smashing election victory. The Nationals finished just short of a majority, but the whiff of ministerial leather lured two Liberals into the National Party. The Liberals were reduced to an irrelevant minor party of opposition.
An even greater success was achieved in 1986, when following a re-jig of the state's infamous zonal electoral system, the Nationals won re-election in their own right. What should have been Bjelke-Petersen's crowning glory and a suitable point for retirement instead became a starting point for the crazy 'Joh for PM' campaign. This flight of fancy was in large part responsible for preventing John Howard becoming Prime Minister in 1987. It was also ironic that on the day the election was called, Bjelke-Petersen happened to be visiting Disneyland in California.
More importantly, while Bjelke-Petersen was pursuing his conservative mirage, Acting premier Bill Gunn appointed Tony Fitzgerald to investigate allegations of corruption against the Queensland police. The findings of that commission were to rock the government, bring an end to Bjelke-Petersen's political career and send the former premier to a controversial trial.
The success of Joh Bjelke-Petersen and the National Party in the 1980s was spectacular, but also detached from reality. The wealth generated by the rapid growth of the south-east corner undermined the justification for an electoral system that maintained in power the ageing leadership of a still predominantly rural party. The successes of the National Party in 1983 and 1986 put Brisbane MPs in marginal seats in the National party room, not in the easy to ignore Liberal caucus. As the Bjelke-Petersen era imploded, the Nationals first tried to save its new urban base with the urbane Mike Ahern as the new premier. As the National Party base vote collapsed in 1989, Ahern was dumped for a 'mini-Joh' in new premier Russell Cooper, trying to ensure that the Nationals retained there dominance of the Liberals.
Struggle in Opposition
After Labor led by Wayne Goss assumed office in 1989, the zonal electoral system was abolished, replaced by one-vote, one-value electoral boundaries. The number of safe National seats in rural areas was cut, and the party's future dominance over the Liberals required head-to-head competition on the Gold and Sunshine Coasts. As the 1990s dawned, the Nationals still outpolled the Liberals and still won more seats, but the National Party needed to hold its urban toeholds to retain seniority.
A ticking time bomb introduced in 1992 was optional preferential voting. This made it harder for the Liberals and Nationals to compete against each other in three-cornered contests with Labor. When first used in 1992, Labor won several seats due to exhaustion and leakage of preferences. The two parties have since indulged in ever more complex arraignments to determine which party would have the right to contest each seat. The full implications of optional preferential voting were not to become evident until the 2001 election.
From 1990, the Liberal Party returned to being the preferred Queensland party at federal elections. On John Howard's election to office in 1996, it was the Liberals rather than the Nationals that won the extra seats. Despite being the larger party in state politics, the Nationals are now clearly the junior partner at federal elections in Queensland. At the 2007 federal election, the National Party protected itself by resuming joint Senate ticket arrangements.
The 1995 Queensland election slashed the Goss government's majority, Labor winning a bare majority with 45 seats. The key seat was Mundingburra, retained by Labor, but with a majority of only 12 votes. After the courts overturned this result, a February 1996 by-election delivered the seat to the Liberal Party and government to the Coalition. National Party leader Rob Borbidge became premier. Earlier than anticipated, the National Party returned to the government, for the first time since 1983 in Coalition with the Liberal Party.
The Rise of One Nation
A month after Borbidge assumed office, disendorsed Liberal candidate Pauline Hanson was elected to the House of Representatives. By the time of the 1998 Queensland election, she had founded Pauline Hanson's One Nation. The new party polled 22.7 per cent of the vote at its first outing, more than either the Liberals or Nationals. The Nationals won 23 seats, the Liberals nine and One Nation 11. Labor won 44 seats, one short of a majority, but formed government under Peter Beattie with support from Independents.
What followed at the 2001 election was a disaster for conservatives in Queensland and was the starting point for today's merger. The Beattie government had been forced to call an early election to avoid relying on MPs who had been sacked from the Labor Party over electoral rorts. Instead of Labor being under pressure, the Coalition campaign disintegrated.
While One Nation had split into two warring parties, its supporters still haunted National Party heartland. Many sitting National MPs defied their Leader's ban on doing preference deals with One Nation. Labor took the opportunity to change its preference strategy and loudly encouraged voters to take the 'Just vote 1' option allowed under optional preferential voting. Many Coalition and One Nation voters took the message to heart, hopelessly splitting the conservative vote and delivering some surprising electorate victories to Labor.
It was clear at the 2001 election that the only alternative to a Labor government was a ramshackle coalition that might have been forced to rely on the quarrelling factions of One Nation. After two terms of a hung Parliament, this allowed Labor to play the stability in government card. The spectre of One Nation in government had little appeal to voters in the state's south-east, and for the first time in the state's history, the Labor Party won a majority of seats on the Gold and Sunshine Coasts. Labor has maintained this position at subsequent landslide victories in 2004 and 2006.
By the end of 2001, the National Party held only one seat on the Gold and Sunshine Coasts. With the Liberal Party holding all federal seats in the same area, the National Party had lost its justification to run as the sole Coalition candidate in these seats.
In Opposition, the National Party would always remain the dominant partner. In 2006, Nationals Leader Lawrence Springborg led his side of politics into his second campaign. But the Liberal Party changed leader suddenly before the 2006 election and exposed the one question the Coalition could not resolve.
With the disappearance of the Nationals on the Gold and Sunshine Coasts, any swing against Labor was going to deliver flocks of new Liberal MPs into Parliament. The question arising from this was simple: which Party Leader would be Premier in the next Coalition government if the Liberal Party finished with more seats? New Liberal leader Dr Bruce Flegg failed to adequately answer the question and Labor again won in a landslide, retaining all of its seats on the Gold Coast.
And the Future?
The merger of the Queensland National and Liberal Parties creates a single conservative party to oppose Labor. It should end the disputes over pre-selection and reserved seats by party in the state's south-east, and removes the difficult problem over which party would provide the premier in any future government.
But the new party still faces problems. If the Liberal-National Party (LNP) just becomes a new forum for the factionalism that has dogged the Liberal Party in recent years, nothing will have been achieved. The merged party will have the greater resources of the National Party to apply to contests in the south-east, but the new party will still rely on parts of the old Liberal Party to provide decent candidates.
For the National Party, one risk of the Liberal-National Party structure is that it will force greater campaign focus to be on urban seats. This may dismay many former National members in rural areas, who will find that their old/new party is applying a new focus to issues.
The merged Liberal-National Party has the opportunity to complete the process of modernisation that the National Party failed to do in the 1980s. Having transformed itself under Joh Bjelke-Petersen into the dominant party of state politics, the Nationals of the 1980s missed the boat in modernising its leadership, platform and party structure.
The new Liberal-National Party has the opportunity to transform conservative politics in Queensland. But it is a merger that has been formed by Queensland political history and so seems unlikely to be adopted in other states without significant modification.