parliament of 2010 one National MP sat on the cross-benches rather than join
in coalition with the Liberal Party; National Party MPs have, in recent years,
served in Labor Cabinets;^19 and three times over the past century there have
originated, from the National Party, MPs that have either secured Labor
minority governments, or felled anti-Labor ones.^20
The singularity of this endurance is highlighted by the fact that organized
rural-specific politics came late to Australia: when American prairies were
aflame with populism, there was no organized rural-specific party in the
sunburnt country. In the September 1914 federal election the two parties—
the Australian Labor Party and the Commonwealth Liberal Party—together
won 98 per cent of the vote, with both easily spanning the rural–urban divide.
At the state level, NSW beyond the Great Dividing Range was a near con-
tinuous expanse of Labor seats (twenty-seven of its forty-six seats were from
outside Sydney), with the Commonwealth Liberal Party reaching beyond
Sydney, up and down the long rural coast.
It was the upheaval of world war that split anti-Labor forces. Thefirst
‘Country’member of the federal parliament was elected on 14 December
- The general election of December 1919 returned to the federal parlia-
ment seven‘Country Party’parliamentarians, almost depriving the govern-
ment of a majority. The new politics were even more starkly evinced in 1922,
when the Country Party entered into government withfive of the eleven
ministries, including the Treasury.
How did it come to pass that, since 1918, there have been two anti-Labor
parties when there had been only one before?
It might be construed as the correction, or overcorrection, of the lopsided
political economy of both parties before the First World War. The Deakinite
political economy of the pre-war era had been essentially an urban transac-
tion. The expansion of the apparatus of state was inevitably focused on the
metropolis: the successful Kyabram movement of 1902 to overthrow the
Deakinite Premier of Victoria, Alexander Peacock, originated from the bush.
The‘Harvester Judgement’of 1907 amounted, of course, to a tax on the
purchase of agricultural implements. These pre-existing rural–urban tensions
were inflamed by the First World War through the high prices of foodstuffs
paid by cities, and by the price maxima subsequently imposed on the sellers of
foodstuffs. The war revealed to rural producers so many policy devices that
could powerfully harm—or powerfully benefit—them, and rural producers
strived to win command of these new tools.
(^19) South Australia, Karlene Maywald 2004–10.
(^20) William McWilliams in 1929; Alexander Wilson in 1941; Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor
in 2010.
William O. Coleman