The Nationals were once feared. Now they merely stamp their feet

The Age

20-05-2025

Interpreted, it simply means the Nationals and the Liberals will retreat to their corners – very small corners after the election, each not much larger than a proverbial telephone booth – and sulk about their positions on nuclear power and supermarkets and a few other things – until it becomes obvious they have to climb back into bed together and yield a bit on their separate pet ideologies, or perish.
Whether either Ley or Littleproud will still be leaders by then is far from guaranteed, as these things tend to be when chaos descends after what was less a federal election than a cruel flogging of the non-existent Coalition.
How very far and how very pale it all seems from the days when the Country Party, later the Nationals, were led by genuinely tough champions of agrarian socialism.
The troika, they were called in the 1960s and 70s: National Country Party leader Doug Anthony and ministerial colleagues Peter Nixon and Ian Sinclair.
They could leave senior Liberals – whose party was supposed to be the senior partner in the Coalition – white-faced and shaking when they strode together into meetings determined to get their way on behalf of the farming community.
In the early 1970s, for instance, Liberal prime minister Billy McMahon wanted to revalue Australia's currency.
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The troika – believing the move would harm Australia's rural exports – laid down the law, stalked out of cabinet three times and threatened to leave the Coalition. McMahon and his Liberals went to water and dropped the proposal.
Before the troika, of course, was Country Party leader John 'Black Jack' McEwen.
After Liberal prime minister Harold Holt went missing in the surf near Portsea, Victoria, McEwen exercised his muscle to black-ban Billy McMahon from becoming prime minister.
McMahon, as the Liberals' deputy leader, had the right to expect to become PM. But McMahon was a free trader, which McEwen opposed as a threat to rural Australia.
McEwen said he and the Country Party wouldn't serve under a McMahon prime ministership. And the Liberal Party, knowing he was serious, folded and appointed John Gorton instead. McMahon had to wait until McEwen retired.
It is unimaginable that the Nationals' troika or Black Jack McEwen would ever, in laying out their threat to crash the Coalition, simper about how 'you get back together and join together with clearer clarity and focus on what the relationship was all about and when you get back together, how it is going to work even better'.