Nationals' decentralisation agenda remains in the dark

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce elevated his supporters, and demoted MPs closer to his predecessor Michael McCormack. It was a display of the ugly, brutal and often disappointing nature of politics in Australia.

Darren Chester, a widely respected veterans' affairs minister who had a positive working relationship with many veterans' representatives, moves to the backbench not for his performance but because he isn't aligned to Mr Joyce within the party. It doesn't really make sense, except by the base logic of politics.

It points to something missing from the Coalition government since Mr Joyce regained the Nationals leadership last week. Coherence is sorely lacking, and it is unclear what the party's decision to switch leaders means for the government's overall agenda.

It's important to alleviate that doubt, not least because it affects regional Australia, whose best interests the Nationals say they represent. The main sign for regional Australians trying to work out how Mr Joyce will do things differently is the party's bizarre and chaotic attempt to rewrite the Murray Darling Basin Plan last week.

Canberrans will wonder at the intentions of the Joyce-led Nationals, too. Judging on past form, the party's agenda could impact on the national capital.

It won't have escaped notice that in the new Nationals ministerial team, Bridget McKenzie returns to cabinet as Minister for Regionalisation, among other portfolios. There will be questions about what "regionalisation" means, and how the National party proposes to pursue it.

Regionalisation has been defined among other things as developing economic and social infrastructure in regional centres to create jobs and economic growth in those places.

That's a vague and broad ambition, and one that could cover a multitude of agendas.

Whether, for example, that would include plans to move public service jobs to regional areas remains to be seen.

Mr McCormack made it clear in March that decentralisation was still on the agenda for the government, saying a $41 million research package would identify more public service jobs to move into regions.

Nationals MP Andrew Gee has been the minister for decentralisation while in the outer ministry. As minister for regionalisation, Bridget McKenzie could bring that task back into cabinet, and presumably higher on the priority list for the government.

How high a priority, and exactly what form regionalisation will take in terms of decentralising the public service, will likely never be known because the public does not get to see the Coalition agreement that binds the Liberals and the Nationals.

But in Senator McKenzie the government has a regionalisation minister who has been a staunch advocate for decentralisation. She sparred with other MPs while sitting on a parliamentary committee in 2017 investigating Mr Joyce's controversial project to move the pesticides authority to Armidale from Canberra, defending Coalition efforts to decentralise government agencies. She was later decentralisation minister, starting in 2018, at a time the Coalition announced it would move other public service jobs from the ACT.

It's up to the Nationals in coming days to lay out their plans. This includes explaining what the next round of decentralisation will involve.

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