This net zero 'debate' is the Coalition at its worst

The way that the junior Coalition partner, the National Party, is conducting its own business in the glare of publicity seems like a shambles. The party's leadership appears to be unwilling to show any leadership. We are treated instead to interminable rambling interviews with leader and Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, Resources Minister Keith Pitt, and Senate leader Bridget McKenzie, who appear to be just stonewalling.

The Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, is reduced to being an outside observer, depending on intermediaries to explain his party's position to his Coalition partner. His travel plans to the COP26 summit in Glasgow became uncertain, and his policies tentative and transactional.

The way the National Party is treating the nation, through the Coalition, is a disgrace; although perhaps not if you are a Nationals donor or supporter, which might see you barracking for Barnaby and enjoying the limelight.

But even Nationals supporters must admit that it is a strange situation, an extraordinary act of parliamentary leverage, when 10 per cent of the House of Representatives can prevent agreement despite the two major parties, Liberal and Labor, now agreeing on the goal. It even appears that a small number of Nationals within their own party room, on whom Joyce's leadership depends, are determining the outcome. This was the price that Joyce paid for his overthrow of Michael McCormack which returned him to the leadership.

The apparent mess should be put in a broader context. The Coalition is a special sort of partnership, even in a global context. The Liberals and Nationals are locked in a permanent embrace to the exclusion of other partners. Other coalitions are improbable. Minority governments, such as the Gillard Labor government, are derided as fragile, impermanent experiments, even when they bring stability and good government.

Our party system is not open to a variety of coalitions or arrangements. It doesn't have the flexibility of many European party systems, in which various combinations of parties are open to forming coalition governments. Germany is a case in point.

It also lacks the flexibility of multi-party systems like those of New Zealand and Canada, where prime ministers like Jacinda Ardern and Justin Trudeau can pick and choose between partners; and also pick and choose between different types of parliamentary arrangements. Rather than forming formal coalitions, the parties in these systems can negotiate other ways of supporting minority governments.

In Australia we have been lulled into complacency by the fact that the Coalition usually doesn't act like a coalition of separate parties. Cabinet solidarity and secrecy contributes to this, as does the previously mentioned secret agreement. Most Nationals leaders, like Tim Fischer and John Anderson, saw themselves as coalitionists, and deals were done behind closed doors.

In our complacency, we can forget the history of the Coalition at both the federal and state levels. There have been previous dramatic examples when the junior partner has flexed its muscles. The most dramatic came after the death of prime minister Harold Holt in December 1967. The Country Party, as the Nationals were then known, vetoed the aspirations of the Liberal treasurer, William McMahon, to become prime minister, paving the way for the elevation of John Gorton.

Much more recently, now-former NSW Nationals leader and deputy premier John Barilaro threatened to take his party to the crossbenches in protest against legislation to protect koala habitat. Remarkably, he wanted to remain part of the ministry from the crossbenches. While his move was widely viewed as laughable, then-premier Gladys Berejiklian acceded to some of his demands and business as usual returned.

Divisions over climate change and its burdens are driving the theatre of the absurd that we are witnessing. But behind the theatre lies the humiliation that the Nationals carry over their perpetual relegation to second fiddle.

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Rather than admitting to a wildly unreasonable mess, the Nationals see themselves as the centre of attention. What to a city audience might seem like interminable pointless media interviews, they see as their time in the limelight.

They see this as an exercise in political positioning which will bring financial benefits in the short to medium term.

The exercise will also pay immediate dividends when these benefits become part of the package the Nationals take to the 2022 federal election. They have positioned themselves above all their potential rivals as the voice of rural and regional Australia.

These rivals include the Labor Party, but only at the margins. More significantly they include other rural and regional parties, like the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers, as well as various independent challengers.

They also include their greatest long-term rival in rural and regional Australia, the Liberal Party. The Liberals are the party which can eat into Nationals territory. Already the federal Nationals don't exist in Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania. The Nationals are an east-coast party, though that does include the largest slice of the Australian population.

One group of parliamentarians gritting their teeth must be the Liberals from regional and rural electorates trying to sell their party's "Backing Regional Australia Plan", including COVID-19 support measures for transport and tourism. These parliamentarians, representing electorates like Grey in South Australia and Leichhardt in Queensland, have ceded the spotlight to the Nationals to their long-term political detriment.