Senior Liberals have everything crossed that Barnaby Joyce will be heading back to Canberra after Saturday’s byelection in New England – if only to restore some order within the Coalition.
To say the Nationals have been off the long run in Joyce’s absence would be a gross understatement. It would also be an understatement to characterise the Nationals-led rebellion against Malcolm Turnbull on the banking royal commission as merely audacious.
Audacious really doesn’t get us there. Let’s consider what happened.
A group of National MPs ran down the executive in full public view, and they ran down the prime minister and senior economic ministers at a time when the febrile political and media conversation has become consumed with a public seminar, fanned by the usual suspects in the rightwing media rantosphere, about whether Turnbull should still be the prime minister.
Now, that’s some game of chicken: Nationals declaring open season on a Liberal prime minister.
That’s a phenomenon I’ve not witnessed in two decades covering federal politics, and it’s one that pitches the governing Coalition into deeply challenging territory.
But while the Liberals will be looking to Joyce to calm the whole show down in the event he is not taken out on Saturday night in some epic upset (upsets in politics being the new normal) – I’m not convinced the Nationals leader has a magic wand at his disposal.
To understand this, we have to consider the fundamentals.
The political order in Australia is disrupted. The Nationals are playing up, not because they are at a loose end, or a bit bored, but because they are under pressure in their heartland. The Queensland election shows us that voters in regional areas are again on the hunt for alternatives to the major parties.
What the Queensland election also shows us, though, is that what works in the regions doesn’t work in metropolitan Australia. As Tim Colebatch points out in a blog for Inside Story, Brisbane is where the Coalition (which runs as the LNP in the state) lost the election. “Ignore that reality, and they’ll keep losing,” he said.
So that’s the difficulty the Turnbull government faces – Australia appears to be pulling progressive in the cities, but conservative in some regional areas – and trying to marry the two, and speak to all audiences, is very difficult.
You tend to trip on your own contradictions.
The challenge of the split constituency is exacerbated by the obvious inclination of some disaffected voters to park a protest vote with One Nation, which fuels the outbreak of populism from the Nationals we’ve seen recently in Canberra.
And on it goes, Mars and Venus. What resonates in one place costs you support in another.
Basic logic suggests the Liberal and National parties will have to walk different roads to manage the various undercurrents in the electorate and better represent their constituencies, and in theory, this is no bad thing.
I’ve advocated that the structural separation on the right should also extend to liberals and conservatives, given the broad church of the Liberal party these days is reduced to a factionalised, feuding congregation, with parishioners pushing one another over for the collection plate and the hymn sheet.
Given these folks can’t get along, or compromise without bitching and finger-pointing and pointless revisionism, and given pretty much everything disintegrates into winner-takes-all, why not break apart and reform as a coalition with distinct but overlapping interests?
I suspect the right in Australia would be stronger, and better represented as a consequence, and there would be more viable options for governing coalitions in the political centre than currently exist.
But that’s not the current reality, and given everything is so fractious, given the resting pulse of the Turnbull government is either grim resignation or persistent agitation, it is hard to sanction a bit of pragmatic product differentiation without seeing it spiral into grandstanding and the kind of bold adventurism we’ve seen play out during the recent internal battle over the banking royal commission.
And adventurism is highly combustible when disciplined Liberals, upset by what they would see as self-interested posturing by the junior Coalition partner, the Nationals, then either lose patience, or jump on the bandwagon, because in a parliament as finely balanced as this one numerically, everyone can play every man or woman for themselves.
That game is, in fact, the easiest game in politics to play.
The hardest game at the moment seems to be don’t lose your mind in public.
Fortunately for Turnbull, one game Joyce has absolutely zero interest in playing is the abiding killing season favourite – let’s change the prime minister.
While some in the Queensland Nationals might fancy a bit of sport which adds to generalised destabilisation and intrigue, which might just deliver a more conservative prime minister than the current besieged incumbent of the Lodge, Joyce wants none of it, and has made that clear both privately and publicly.
So while Joyce’s return is a whole lot better than nothing, unfortunately for Turnbull, the remainder of this grim and gruelling political year is studded with a whole lot of something.
Assuming Joyce survives, there is still the Bennelong byelection to come, and Labor, backed by its formidable campaign operation, is throwing everything at that contest.
As of early next week, the declarations from MPs about whether or not they meet the basic eligibility requirements set down in the constitution will also start hitting the deck, doubtless setting off another round of hand-wringing, chest bumping and mayhem.
In Canberra, it is all stormy seas, with no calming horizon in sight.
