On 1 November, National Party members met in Canberra for their national conference, toppling the first in a series of dominoes when they decided to abandon their commitment to achieving net zero emissions.
The National Party caucus dropped net zero the following day, placing pressure on their senior coalition partner to follow. Finally, the Liberals formally abandoned their own commitment to net zero less than two weeks later, completing the Coalition’s abdication of climate responsibilities.
All of this prompts the question: who are the National Party members with such an outsized influence on Australia’s climate policy?
The answer: a very small slice of Australia. Less than one in every 2,000 voters in NSW is a financial member of the National Party, and their membership has close to halved over the past decade (from 4,500 to 2,500).
NSW is the only state or territory that requires parties to declare how many members they have, though only those with paid memberships (meaning that there may be some Nationals with free memberships not included in these figures).
Members of the National Party are not only few in number, but also unrepresentative. A “former high-profile member” of the Nationals told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2020 that they had “the oldest demographic of the main parties”. In that member’s electorate, “just four out of 80 members were born after 1950, with the most common decades of birth being the 1920s and 30s.”
The NSW branch of the Nationals is one of the largest and most prominent, having supplied nine of the party’s eleven leaders over the past 50 years. Trends in the NSW National Party are likely mirrored in other states, which would mean the party’s membership is dwindling nationally.
But it was those few Australians, just one in 2,000, who ultimately decided the Coalition’s policy on climate last week.
The NSW Nationals’ decline is the starkest, but it is not the only party in the state with slumping membership.
2 Comments
I'm pretty sure Labor party membership is declining, as alluded to in the article, because, as members, we're not angry; we're just really disappointed. We want the party to be bold, use its majority for good and make the country better, but all we're seeing is timidity and the same old same old, with nothing progressive being done on the environment, tax, housing or a myriad of other issues.
They're not only unrepresentative in the Coalition, but also nationally. The Greens get around 12 percent of the vote but have no member in a parliament of over 150 seats. If seats were allocated proportionally they'd get 18 seats. The Nationals get 9 seats with half the votes of the Greens.
The Labor party? Around 30% of the votes and gain a massive majority of over 90 seats. Something is very rotten here.
No wonder the overton window has shifted into loony right wing nutter territory.