The battle for the soul of conservative Australia may have just begun

The Age

21-05-2025

In the 1974 Queensland state election, the Bjelke-Petersen Country-Liberal coalition was re-elected in a landslide off the back of Gough Whitlam's massive unpopularity north of the Tweed, reducing Labor to a cricket team in parliament – a result not eclipsed until Campbell Newman's landslide in 2012 reduced it to a netball team. (Labor returned the favour with its own counter-landslide three years later, but that's another story.)
Little noticed at the time was the result in the electorate of Wynnum, a bayside suburb of Brisbane. Labor was defeated in one of its safest seats – not by the Liberal candidate but, in a three-cornered contest – by the Country Party. It was the first time the Country Party won a capital city seat and heralded years of struggle between the two parties, culminating in the Liberal Party terminating the coalition in 1983.
Like current Nationals' leader David Littleproud, the then-Liberal leader Terry White said it was a principled decision. (In White's case, this was true: the immediate catalyst of the split was Liberal demands for a parliamentary public accounts committee – thinly coded language for the need for a mechanism to expose the blatant corruption of ministers such as the storied Russ Hinze.) But the public saw only political chaos, for which they blamed the Liberals – White had theatrically torn up the coalition agreement at a press conference – who were decimated at the election the crisis precipitated.
After two terms, Labor won a landslide victory in 1989 and remained in office for 30 of the next 35 years. (There are many landslides in Queensland elections. We are not famous for nuance.) The intense mutual antagonism of the former coalition partners continued in opposition, coming to an end only when the parties merged in 2008.
That antagonism was initially fuelled by Liberal alarm that their erstwhile coalition partners were trying to drive them out of their urban political heartlands. The fears were well founded. After capturing its first capital city seat, the Country Party decided to expand into the cities. It began to de-ruralise its image: In 1975 it changed its name to 'National Country Party', and thereafter to the current 'National Party'.
This was not a cosmetic change. The Queensland Nationals (unlike their interstate counterparts) were set on a deliberate strategy to supplant the Liberal Party completely. They challenged Liberals in three-cornered contests throughout Brisbane and in provincial cities. The plan worked: by the time of the 1986 election – Bjelke-Petersen's high-water mark – the Nationals had all but conquered the Liberal heartlands, including Brisbane, displacing Liberals in all but a handful of their traditional seats.
Their success gave birth to even grander ambitions: the 'Joh for PM' campaign the following year (the last time the federal coalition split). That hubris-fuelled descent into political madness destroyed whatever chance John Howard had of winning the 1987 election. Nine more years of Labor government followed.
While state and federal politics are very different, as the contagion of 'Joh for PM' demonstrates, political disunity at one level can spill over into the other. More importantly, the history of non-Labor politics in Queensland for most of the past half-century provides the clearest possible demonstration of how much more difficult it is to defeat a Labor government when the opposition is divided. Something that would make Tuesday's split even more damaging would be if it metastasised into the kind of fight over political territory that kept the non-Labor parties out of office in Queensland for so long.