The political strategies of the Australian country parties from their origins until 1929
Date
1958
Authors
Graham, Bruce Desmond
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Abstract
Parliamentary Country Parties were established in
Western Australia in 1914 Queensland in 1915, Victoria
in 1917, South Australia in 1918, New South Wales in 1920
and Tasmania in 1922, while a Federal Country Party was
formed in 1919.
The farm pressure groups which founded the Country
Parties had to choose between making an electoral alliance
with one of the existing parties and fighting independent election campaigns. Once separate Country Parties had been established in Parliament they faced a choice of four broad strategies: first, they could adopt the coalitions and press for Cabinet posts as the best means of influencing policy; second, they could pursue the conditional-support strategy and, without accepting Cabinet posts, bargain their support to whichever party was willing to grant them the most
concessions; third, they could manoeuvre themselves into
a position where one or other of the existing parties
would be forced to support them in power as a minority
government; fourth, they could press for discarding the
Cabinet system in favour of some form of elective executive.
Apart from this choice of strategies, the Country
Parties were compelled to choose between adopting an
anti-Labor role in the wider struggle between the Labor and non-Labor forces and following a policy of
political neutrality.
Within the Victorian Country Party movement, a
left-wing group advocated a combination of political
neutrality and the conditional-support strategy while
a right-wing group favoured linking an anti-Labor policy
with the coalition strategy. Unable to realise their
objectives, the left-wing group broke away from the
main Party in 1926 and established a Country Progressive
Party.
In the New South Wales Country Party movement, which
was more conservative than its Victorian counterpart, an
attempt was made to combine the conditional-support
strategy with an anti-Labor policy. In 1927, however, the
Country Party joined a coalition government with the
State Nationalists.
The Western Australian Country Party, formed in
1914, gave conditional support to first a Labor and then a
Liberal (Government. It joined a coalition in 1917 but
did not obtain sufficient recognition of its rights
by the Nationalists. This situation led to a serious
split in the Party in late 1923, but the resultant
differences were settled during the term of the Collier
Labor Government (1924-30).
The Federal Country Party gave conditional-support to the Hughes Government from 1920 to 1922. After the election
held in the latter year it formed a coalition government
with the Nationalists. The pattern of this coalition
arrangement, designed to preserve the Party's separate
identity, was followed by subsequent Country Party Nationalist
Coalitions on the State level.
The changes wrought by the rise of the Country Parties
did not alter the Australian Party System in any
fundamental sense.
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Parliamentary Country Parties, Federal Country Party, coalition strategy
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