The Nationals dilemma

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Yesterday, the Nationals announced that they would not be renewing the coalition with the Liberal Party following the 2025 federal election. This is unlikely to be a permanent break, but rather the parties taking some time apart to re-assess their positions after a devastating election defeat.

The nature of these political parties is quite peculiar. Sometimes, the Coalition can best be analysed as a single entity – in contrast to Labor, who run in every seat across the country, no Coalition party runs everywhere. In other ways, they are two parties. That is more relevant to how they operate in Parliament (which, with no immediate federal election, is the most relevant to the current moment). And in other ways the Coalition consists of four parties, with singular parties existing in Queensland and the Northern Territory, with their members sitting with one of the two parties in Canberra. I analysed this peculiarity in detail in 2022.

As the parties now re-assess their position following the recent election, this peculiar relationship seems relevant, because both parties find themselves out of government, and quite a long way out of government. But only one of the two parties bears almost all of the burden of getting back into government.

Sometimes you will see people try to analyse the relative performance of the Liberal and National parties by looking at how well their “vote held up”, or how many seats each party has won.

But the problem with this sort of comparative analysis is that the parties rarely if ever contest seats against each other. Putting aside the Nationals parties in South Australia and Western Australia, which were effectively not a part of the Coalition, the parties only ran against each other in the seat of Bendigo.

The Nationals performed impressively in Bendigo, but that’s just one seat. Everywhere else on the east coast, voters just had one of the two parties to choose from. Indeed in Queensland, they appeared on the ballot as a single party, even though now those successful LNP candidates now have parted ways as either Liberals or Nationals.

While the Coalition as a whole has a vote that goes up or down in electoral competition with other political forces (be they Labor, the Greens, teals, One Nation or anyone else), and gains or loses seats, the relative strength of these two parties is entirely down to the shape of their coalition agreement, which in almost all cases biases the status quo: Liberal seats stay Liberal, and Nationals seats stay National.

The only exceptions are the rare cases where an open seat is challenged by the other party, which has seen seats like Farrer and Nicholls change hands. A defection in the NSW state seat of Port Macquarie also saw that seat move from Nationals to Liberal. The seat was then vacated earlier this year, leading to a fierce by-election contest won by the Liberal.

It seems to be even more difficult for a Queensland seat to move between the two parties after the Liberal National Party merger of 2008. Ian Macfarlane was a Liberal MP representing the seat of Groom, which mostly covers the city of Toowoomba in Queensland. In 2015, he was dropped from the ministry following the election of Malcolm Turnbull as Liberal leader and subsequently prime minister. Later that year, he announced his intention to sit as a National from then on. He had support from local LNP members, but the LNP state executive blocked the move. He ended up retiring at the 2016 election, and Groom remains a Liberal seat.

So the electoral success of the two separate parties is entirely dependent on how they perform in contests against other opponents: Labor, the Greens and independents.

What is particularly peculiar about the most recent iteration of the Coalition is that the Nationals has become a party that exists almost entirely in safe seats.

There are 91 seats where the Coalition was the runner-up on the two-candidate-preferred vote (likely to drop to 90 when the count finishes in Blaxland). The Nationals only made the 2CP in four of those seats – Calare, Bendigo and Richmond, as well as the presumed-National in Lingiari (although Jacinta Price’s defection makes me question that classification). The Nationals were the primary Coalition party in Hunter, where they came third to One Nation, but every other non-classic seat won by a non-Coalition party was one where the Liberals ran.

The former-and-presumably-future Coalition needs to win 33 seats to win the next election. The 33 most marginal seats where the Liberals or Nationals came second in 2025 include just two seats primarily contested by the Nationals: Bendigo and Calare.

While the Nationals could theoretically contest more of these seats, they wouldn’t be a contender in many. Just ten of those seats lie outside of a metropolitan area. This is another reminder that the path for the Coalition to regain power comes from through the cities, a task the Nationals cannot help with.

So almost every seat contested by the Nationals is already held by the Nationals, even after the Coalition suffered such heavy losses in 2025. The Nationals also hold safer seats now: the average Liberal margin is 5.5%, and the average Nationals margin is 11.9%. Of the 18 Liberal or Nationals seats held on margins of 6% or less, just one (Cowper) is a Nationals seat.

As a consequence of the Liberal Party’s domination of marginal seats, the Nationals are now largely immune to electoral fortunes, good or bad. The Nationals now hold exactly the same number of House seats as they did at the peak of the Coalition in 2013. Over that same time, the Liberal Party has lost 47 seats. The Nationals made up 1/6 of their numbers in 2013, but now have over one third.

This wasn’t always the case. Back in 2007, the Labor government won a number of former Nationals seats including Page, Dawson, Capricornia and the newly-created notional Nationals seat of Flynn. They had also won Richmond off the Nationals in 2004. So The Coalition’s defeat in 2007 hit both the Liberals and Nationals about equally, as a proportion of their strength. And they largely recovered proportionally in 2010 and 2013. But since 2013, the strength of the Liberal Party in cities has collapsed while in regional areas Liberal and Nationals MPs have become relatively safer.

The Nationals also had lost a number of rural seats to independents in the 2007-2013 period, but seats like New England and Lyne are now safe Nationals seats while the independent challenge is strongest in the cities or in regional Liberal seats.

Does this reflect the Nationals just being better at their jobs? I think the evidence is weak. In states where both the Liberals and Nationals had seats where they were in the 2CP (NSW, VIC, QLD and NT), swings in rural classic seats were a bit bigger in the Liberal seats (2.8% to Labor) compared to Nationals seats (1.1% to Labor). The Nationals on paper actually had a swing towards them in provincial seats, but if you exclude their big swing in Bendigo the two parties had almost identical 2.1% swings against them everywhere else.

Such an analysis is basically impossible, because we are not comparing like with like. The Nationals just run in places where Labor is less of a presence.

Now we have the Liberal and National parties separating. For now the space where this coalition breakdown will play out is in the parliamentary arena. It will give them a chance to consider their policy direction, and how it might differ, and eventually how they can make those possibly different directions work together.

The Liberal Party’s path back to government is almost entirely urban. This will be challenging enough with a party room consisting of very few urban MPs, but made even harder with the addition of the Nationals.

The Nationals are in a funny position now. They are in one sense now even more influential in terms of setting the direction of the parties of the once-and-future coalition, particularly considering the numbers of rural Liberals and the divided state of that party room. But that is unlikely to put them on track to returning to government. The Nationals’ influence over a government is entirely dependent on the Liberals finding more seats in the cities.

For now, the coalition’s breakdown is going to play out in the parliament. If it can’t be resolved before the next election, we may see the parties contest more seats against each other. That would also be fascinating, but it may not go the way the Nationals hope. There are numerous seats on the north coast of New South Wales which remain legacy Nationals seats, but now contain large populations of retirees from the capital cities who may be used to voting Liberal. The Liberal Party has already broken through in the state seat of Port Macquarie, and there have been Liberal breakthroughs on local councils in Tweed and Mid-Coast.

I saw a comment earlier today that said the Nationals would be well served by having a relationship with the Liberals more like the relationship the Greens have with Labor. They may not really enjoy such a relationship: it would give the Nationals a lot more freedom to express disagreement, but the electoral system does not do well for smaller parties. The Nationals have been able to keep these seats to themselves. I don’t think the Liberals would sweep them away if there was open competition, but I think it would be tougher on the smaller party. I also don’t see how such a relationship is possible as long as the parties are merged in Queensland, their strongest state.

My assumption at the moment is the parties will find a way to patch up their differences before 2028, but perhaps with such a large gap between their current position and a return to government, the parties may decide to take their chances on a more open electoral contest next time around.

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111 COMMENTS

  1. @ NP
    Yallourn North is a Coal Town but Labor vote has been declining in the La Trobe valley Pre-Adani as the Brown Coal is not exported

  2. If you go by 2022 as there doesn’t seem to be state based info up yet – and the Nats vote held up pretty well – they received 8.24% of the Reps primary vote in NSW. Senate votes tend to be lower and there would be people in some Nat seats who would vote Liberal and some the other way so maybe somewhere in the 7 – 8% range. It might be enough to get a senate seat in their own right though it would depend on where the Lib vote sits. They might pick up some preference flows like Family First earlier so that might help. In Victoria, they polled 3.57% of the primary so they would not have a hope as that would be lower. So Bridget McKenzie would be a turkey voting for Christmas so to speak.

  3. @Nimalan
    Their voters don’t support it, Littleproud is trying to dance on both sides of a barbed wire fence.
    Fact: In the days of Tariffs on manufactured goods, the Australian Farmers and Miners and their communities were far better off, since they provided the material inputs to local manufacturing.
    Have a read up on the economic decline of Broken Hill and Mt Isa over the last 50 years.
    You could include Whyalla, Longreach, Charleville, Gympie, Charters Towers and a hundred other smaller places too.

  4. @Nimalan they’re all either coal towns or small rural towns. Jerrys Plains is a small rural town near Singleton (which is a coal town).

    @Gympie not from my experience. I don’t even know why One Nation advocates for tariffs. No one in the regions has ever advocated for them.

  5. Latest from the Courier Mail today, they’re getting back together if the Liberals agree on lifting the Nuclear ban.
    If that’s right, then this is the first test of Ley’s leadership. Agree, and Liberals will wear the blame when Labor goes down the Nuclear road.

  6. John

    The Nationals got spanked in Calare which is centred on Orange and Bathurst – despite wanting to win it so badly they could taste it. They spent a lot of money – Farraway’s signage was everywhere and at pre-poll and on the day there were lots of EB helpers.

    As a result of this loss, the Nationals now do not hold either the Federal or State electorates in central west NSW.

  7. Ben talked about the Nationals dilemma, while in fact the Liberal Party have much more of a dilemma than the Nationals. The Liberal Party cannot win back urban seats and government as long as it is beholden to the hard right conservatives in the national party, whose policies and priorities simply don’t align with the values and concerns of the majority of Australians living in the major cities. For example, Nationals have been the biggest force against climate action in the Coalition. Nationals politicians are overwhelmingly anti-renewables and pro-nuclear, some are even anti-net zero. The Liberal Party adopted the nuclear policy in 2022 partly to appease the Nationals. However, without the Nationals, the Liberals’ job of defeating Labor and forming an alternative government will become next to impossible for the foreseeable future.

    RedBridge Group Director Kos Samaras perfectly sums up the Liberals’ dilemma: “The Liberals cannot win without a Coalition with the Nationals. But they cannot win whilst in a Coalition with the Nationals”. https://x.com/KosSamaras/status/1925812982782611491

    As the Liberal Party loses urban seats while the Nationals retain almost all of their seats, the Nationals influence and power in the Coalition has increased so dramatically that the Liberal Party began to mirror its partner more than charting its own path, amplified by the influence of the QLD LNP. The Liberal Party has become a fainter version of the Nationals, more attuned to regional concerns, less connected to the cities it once dominated, causing greater disconnect between the Liberal Party and urban voters and further haemorrahaging of urban seats. The only way to stop this vicious cycle and rebuild the Liberal Party in urban areas is to split from the Nationals and develop its own policies that appeal to urban voters.

    The federal Liberals don’t want to decouple from the Nationals because: 1 Due to the Liberal Party having so few seats in the house, the Liberals can’t govern without the Nationals for the foreseeable future. The Liberal Party can also barely campaign in some regional seats without the help of Nationals supporters. 2 The federal Liberals lack moderates to enable them to move to the centre and reconnect with lost urban voters. Some say spliting from the Nationals will allow the Liberals to move to the centre, however considering the severe shortage of moderate and capital city-based MPs in the Liberal Party room, I doubt whether the Liberals can move to the centre on its own. 3 Three-corned contests in regional seats won’t necessarily help either the Liberal or National parties, and could make the job even harder for the Nationals. Not having a joint ticket with the Liberals will also deprive the Nationals of Senate seats.

    “But they cannot win whilst in a Coalition with the Nationals”: Interestly the NSW state Liberals can. I am surprised by the NSW Liberals’ ability to pursue ambitious climate policies, including 70% emissions reduction by 2035 and investment in renewable energy, whilst in a Coalition with the Nationals. If federal Liberals adopt such policies, the Nationals would have split from the Liberals. Being in a Coalition with the Nationals does not seem to affect the NSW Liberals’ ability to win Sydney seats, in particular seats overlapping federal teal seats. The fact that the NSW Nationals can pursue progressive policies and get the Nationals agree to them while the federal Liberals can’t may be explained by the fact that NSW Liberals is moderate-dominated while the federal Liberals is conservative-dominated, and that the NSW Nationals also have moderate members while their federal counterparts doesn’t.

  8. That’s not necessarily true. Without a coalition the nats are vulnerable enable to the libs running in their seats against their sitting ,embers

  9. Nationals were calling for a Nuclear policy for years, so was Sky News and The Australian.
    Once Dutton took the bait, they all went to ground.
    Now the Nationals want Nuclear again.
    Sussan Ley isn’t stupid, Nuclear isn’t a goer with voters who read, that’s clear from the election result.
    Now, Greens can never support Nuclear and still elect Senators, so should Labor decide to go Nuclear, they’ll need help to overturn the Nuclear ban.
    That’s what this is all about, imo. Nationals are at their limit atm, Liberals could win another 50 seats under the right conditions, so arguments that the Nationals should have more say on policy are selfr serving and should be ignored.

  10. BREAKING: COALITION RETURNS

    The Liberals and Nationals have reached an agreement to reform the Coalition.

    The split officially lasted just seven days, aka just one week.

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