The Liberal-National coalition, the opposition group in the Australia Parliament, has split up over the Liberals’ support for the government’s new hate speech laws, introduced after the Bondi Bay shooting.
The split was announced on the National Day of Mourning for the shootings.
Terrible timimg aside, is this a one-off, or does it presage a long-term split?
The Nationals are the political lobby for the mining industry, rather than the rural industries as they were originally formed to represent. Big on subsidies notwithstanding otherwise tinder dry economics.
They have been a waning force, and an increasingly disfunctional rabble for decades.
Being from a regional farming family, they are my political heritage. At our local polling booth at the one room primary school, it was typical that only one vote, (some times unanimous) out of about 150 ballots not to be cast for the Country Party/National Party). We always had suspicions that the school teacher had leftist tendencies.
Then the mining lobby, especially coal became the major funder and benefactor. The regional farming populations have fallen precipitously and regional electorates became town based where the Liberals and Labor perform better. Once the Nationals lose an electorate they rarely get it back.
The Nationals power base is Queensland (Australia’s Florida) where concern of white shoes, rednecks and gerrymander fuel the factional warlords intrays. The “Joh for Canberra” movement in ‘87 fractured the coalition and condemned them to four consecutive terms in opposition and a coushy run for Bob Hawke. The relationship has barely been functional since. The Pauline Hansen One Nation infatuation chips away at their conservative economic/conservative social base. Are now naturally antipathetic to the global warming movement, though their residual farming based constituency has crossed over to thinking it might be a good idea, The Nationals think in terms of “dig it, ship it, burn it”. Continually agitate to weaken the national gun laws. Some of Australia’s most deadly reptiles live in the National Party caucus.
That the Libs are currently lead by a woman (Susan Ley) doesn’t help, even if she has an intractably small needle eye to fit. She can’t hold them together. Doubt there’s anybody who could. Waiting in the wings for a comeback is Josh Freudenburg, whose political rise was skewered by the Teals. The Libs will struggle to be a coherent opposition until that environmental rift (on their left) is healed and that will further repel the Nationals.
The current spat notionally over hate speech … the Nationals want to be able to scream racist abuse back at the imams … is a pretext. They are the antipodean MAGA or UKIP. But structurally they will never have the electoral support to be anything other than a minority spoiler.
A split coalition means continual electoral success for Labor. But even when in government they were nowt but a ginger group minority and essentially feral.
Fuck ‘em.