It depends on how you measure it – but it’s not as big as most are making out, at least not in terms of Lower House representation across the country over the last 13 years. If we take the raw seat numbers from the parliaments of NSW, Vic, Qld, SA, WA, Tas and Federally – and then look at the number of total seats across the country that the Liberal Party, the Labor Party and the National Party have held each year, it shows that the Nats have lost 25 seats across the nation between 1996 and 2007 – but have had their representation level remain consistent since 2001. We can only go up to 2007 unfortunately, as the Liberal/National merger in Qld makes it impossible to include the most recent Qld election result. Just click the charts to expand them.
If we change those total seats numbers into percentages – as in the percentage of total seats each of the parties held at any given time, the National Party representation has dropped from around 14% of all lower house seats to around 10%. Over the same period, the Libs have dropped from 44% of all seats to 27%, while the ALP has gone from 40% to 59%.
Worth looking at as well is a two party Labor vs. Coalition result using the same total State and Federal results – where we can also include the Qld and WA elections, taking us to the present day.
UPDATE:
Antony has the Nats Federal voteshare going back to the Jurassic era
4 Comments
I looked at your electorate demographic thingy for the 9 seats Antony has as still held by the Nats.
These appear to be the common characteristics as compared to the Australian figures.
-less persons in the 20-40 year age range.
-higher rate of ‘couple familiy no kids’
-less non English speaking persons
-less overseas born persons
I’m suggesting these may be the relevant factors in these seats being Nat held.
OK they also, as expected, have more ‘ag. employed’ persons, but that rate varies a bit and is at a maximum in some seats of 20% of those employed, so I suspect the ‘farmer’ influence is less than it appears superficially.
Even if one assumes much of the manufacturing etc is based on ag. products it is possible the historic and cultural influence of ag. interests is waning and propped up by inertia and habit.
It would be interesting to see the influence/impact of media in such districts.
I suspect that a fair bit of news and information comes from local media, print and radio in particular. I further suspect that Rural Press may have an inordinate influence in the cultural and political perceptions of these electorates.
I’d love to see how many local newspapers and radio stations are owned by RP and other groups and how much ‘reach’ they have with the locals.
Just a few thoughts.
There’s a couple of problems with the analysis. If you went back 20 years, you would find the National representation has halved. Most of the loss of National seats took place in Queensland in the late 1980s, at both Federal and state level, at exactly the time the two parties were in greatest competition.
The existence of Coalition agreements has since protected the Nationals from loss of seats. Rural seats at NSW elections are still allocated between the Liberals and the Nationals on the basis of who won which seats at the 1988 election. In most states, the Nationals disproprtionally hold the safest Coalition seats, so in any period where the Coalition lose seats, it will be the Liberals that lose most seats, not the Nationals.
I agree with you there Antony – I’m just a bit surprised that the Nats have actually managed to hold up their total Parliamentary representation levels since 2001.
I see how and why that’s happened, but I’m still a bit surprised at it! While demographics are certainly killing them, they’re probably doing a little better than one would ordinarily expect over the last decade or so.
The most interesting thing about it all was what you pointed out at your place – of the 16 odd National Party seats that have been lost at the Federal level, half were lost to the Libs!
Howard played them for fools – giving them over representation in Cabinet, shoveling special purpose funding into and spending a lot of time in their electorates, yet slowly but surely removing them from the political map all the while.