Nationals can’t play it straight
YOU should know your John Deere from your Massey Ferguson, it helps if you can distinguish a heifer from a steer and you’re certain to be awarded more points if you’re slightly eccentric.
In point of fact, as a candidate to lead the National Party of Australia, you’re more likely to be in the front running if outright lunacy is a defining characteristic, provided of course it’s a discrete, manageable and endearing form of madness.
The job of leading the old Country Party is several bull’s roars away from the job of leading the nation even if the PM does deputise you and periodically leave you in control of Australia.
This week’s brief party room kerfuffle is rare among the Nationals, who normally settle leadership issues in quiet good humour, much like selling a used hay bailer to a neighbour where a plate of pikelets and a cup of tea round things out in a genial manner.
But Barnaby Joyce’s failed tilt at leader Michael Mccormack does raise the question on what type of person the party’s largely regional electorate want at the helm.
The National Party marks its centenary this year and, looking back over 100 years, a leadership archetype is readily identifiable.
If politicians, as British MP Tony Benn once pointed out, can be categorised into “fixers,’’ “straight men’’ and “maddies,’’ the Nationals definitely have a preference for the “maddie.’’ From Artie Fadden to Doug Anthony and onward to the late, great Tim Fischer, National Party voters do tend to embrace a leader whom you might suspect, on first acquaintance, as having a few kangaroos loose in their top paddock.
The party thrives on the sort of idiosyncrasy that allowed Anthony to undertake bilateral talks with world leaders while on summer holidays in a caravan near Brunswick Heads, taking briefs from Canberra bureaucrats on the van park pay phone. The Nationals have had straight men including Warren Truss, John Anderson and the incumbent Mccormack, but it’s only when the maddies get in the saddle that Australia’s attention is diverted to wombat world.
Joyce’s personality has an echo of that of Arthur Fadden, the former North Queensland sugar mill worker who led the old Country Party in the mid 20th century.
The preferred personality type reflects that of an American southern “good ol’ boy’’ who is at ease with country people and shows a consistent bias toward dealing with the practicalities of the world.
Joyce will remain the Nationals “leader-in-waiting.’’