One of the set-piece questions asked of would-be cadet journalists at The Canberra Times in the early 1970s was about the future of the Country Party. Out of sheer sentiment, but also because the answers told one something about the applicant, I always asked the same question when I was interviewing and appointing 20 or 30 years later. The party had by now become the National Party and was a very different creature from that of Jack McEwen; its popular vote had fallen by nearly 70 per cent, and its numerical representation in the federal parliament had halved—and that in a bigger parliament. But the sort of speculation that gave one a sensible answer in 1970—about changing rural demography, about changing rural and regional economics, about differentiating the National product from that of senior Liberal coalition partners, and about the contradictions between pretending to be for free enterprise and believing in ‘orderly markets’—held through all the while.
My grandfather was a founding member of the party nearly 90 years ago, and, although he stayed in until his death, he never ceased to say how much it had disappointed him. The party he had thought he had joined at Casino was to be something of a Peasant Party—an alliance of cockies, townspeople and rural labour with conservative morals, a vaguely socialist small-enterprise perspective and a deep suspicion of big business, manufacturers, big cities and domination by powerful interest groups. Instead, he said, the NSW branch of the party was fairly promptly seized by large squatting interests, particularly from the New England area, and had never effectively promoted the interests of rural people, as opposed to those of big farmers. Moreover, it was heavily anti-Catholic in northern NSW, with, as he said, the right of Catholic members such as himself restricted to a veto over which wealthy Protestant was going to misrepresent him.
But the character of the party varied around the nation. The Victorian branch was more strongly dominated by small farmers, the Queensland branch far more market interventionist. Branches in most of the other states had declined to next to nothing by the late 1970s: the West Australian branch was never much more than a tiny rump. As various leaders faced the fact of rural population decline, and the increasing lack of efficacy of state-subsidised marketing schemes for wool, wheat, milk and other produce, efforts were made to broaden the party’s appeal.
There