Political Science

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Australia’s curious coalition

Brian Costar

To cite this article: Brian Costar (2011) Australia’s curious coalition, Political Science, 63:1, 29-44,
DOI: 10.1177/0032318711404038

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 Political Science
63(1) 29–44
Australia’s curious ª The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/0032318711404038
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Brian Costar

Abstract
While there exists a large and expanding comparative literature on coalition formation and gov-
ernment, it either ignores or seriously distorts the Australian experience, despite coalitions having
been in power nationally for 60 of the past 88 years. Most authors have been content to follow the
lead of Giovanni Sartori’s contention that in Australia there exists not a coalition but a coalescence
because ‘the permanent alliance between the Liberal and Country (National) Party is such that the
two parties do not compete, in the constituencies, against each other’.1 Both contentions are
erroneous, but have proved influential. While it is true that the Australian variant does not closely
resemble the coalition models of Europe and elsewhere, and sometimes gives the appearance of a
single party, it is, nonetheless, a coalition and deserves to be analysed as such. This article locates
Australian coalitionism within the broader comparative literature by focusing on the following:
coalition formation and termination; ministerial allocation; coalition agreements; policy similarities
and differences and the impact of coalition on policy-making; the power of a coalition Prime
Minister or opposition leader; the tension between a coalition and a strong Westminster-style
cabinet system; and the impact of Australia’s federalized party organization on the national coali-
tion. The key argument of the article is that Australia exhibits a tight and closed form of coalition.

Keywords
federalism, Liberal Party, National Party, party system

Australia does not have coalitions; it has the coalition, a quasi-permanent alliance of the
centre-right Liberal and National (née Country) parties which constitutes the major rival
to the centre-left Labor Party in the federal parliament and in four of the six states.2 The
first national Australian coalition government was formed in 1923 and coalitions have
ruled Australia for 60 of the past 88 years (see Figure 1). Of the Anglo-Saxon

Corresponding author:
Brian Costar, Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, PO Box 218, Hawthorn,
Victoria 3122, Australia
Email: bcostar@swin.edu.au

1 Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis, vol. 1 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 1878.
2 But, as the following analysis will show, it is not ‘an unshakable conservative alliance’. Alan
Siaroff, ‘Two-and-a-Half-Party Systems and the Comparative Role of the ‘‘Half’’’, Party
Politics, vol. 9, no. 3 (2003), p. 277.
30 Political Science 63(1)

Commonwealth 67%

New South Wales 29%

Victoria 14%

Queensland 45%

Western Australia 55%

South Australia 8%

Tasmania 5%

Mean 32%

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80%

Figure 1. Australian coalition governments, 19492010 (time in power)

democracies Australia has the longest continuous experience of coalition government.

Political scientists Wolfgang Müller and Kaare Strøm include in their edited collection
Coalition Governance in Western Europe a table comparing the proportion of coalition
and single-party governments in 16 nations from 1945 to 1999.3 At one extreme of the
spectrum are the Netherlands and Luxembourg with 100 per cent coalitions and Britain
and Spain at the other with 0 per cent.4 Austria represents the mean with a 36 per cent
experience of coalitions which uncannily is almost the same as for Australia across the
equivalent time set.
Coalitions have also been prominent at sub-national level in the states of New South
Wales, Queensland, Western Australia and Victoria. Yet the large and continuously
growing comparative literature on coalition government either ignores the Australian
experience or seriously misrepresents it, thereby excluding an instructive, albeit unusual
case-study from the discussion. Most authors have followed the lead of Giovanni Sartori
when he concluded that in Australia a coalescence rather than a coalition exists because
‘the permanent alliance between the Liberal and Country [National] Party is such that the
two parties do not compete, in the constituencies, against each other’.5 Both contentions
are inaccurate, but have proved influential, with Budge and Keman claiming that ‘the

3 Wolfgang Müller and Kaare Strøm, ‘Introduction’, in Coalition Governance in Western

Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 3.
4 The general election of May 2010 led to the formation of the first coalition government in the
UK since the Second World War.
5 Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, vol. 1, pp. 1878.
Costar 31

permanent alliance between the Australian Liberals and the Country Party makes them a
single party for the purposes of the analysis’.6
The Australian variant may not appear to closely resemble the more fluid coalitions of
Europe and elsewhere, but it is, nevertheless, a coalition and deserves to be studied as
such. To borrow an animal analogy, Australia’s coalitions are like another uniquely
antipodean creature, the platypus.7 The two parties are organizationally discrete and
occasional attempts (the latest in the state of Queensland in 2008) to blend them pro-
vokes conflict between and within them. Electoral competition has often been fierce, and
the alliance (especially in the states) has not always proved permanent. At the same time,
the Australian coalition form of government has a number of distinctive characteristics:
the alliance is always between the same two parties and there are no ‘socialist’ coali-
tions;8 the alliance is often, but not always, maintained even when the parties are in
opposition; the closeness of the relationship between them waxes and wanes over time
and place; and the ‘minimal winning’ formulation does not apply, with ‘surplus majority
coalitions’ commonplace, but less so ‘undersized/minority coalitions’.9 The protracted
debate over the application of game theory in explaining coalition formations can be
avoided  there are too few potential players in Australia.
This article brings to the comparative literature an analysis of the hitherto neglected
example of Australian coalitionism. Issues analysed will include coalition formation and
termination; cabinet post allocation; coalition agreements; policy similarities and dif-
ferences and the impact of coalition on policy-making; the power of the Prime Minister
in coalition government and opposition; how a strong cabinet system co-exists with a

6 Ian Budge and Hans Keman, Parties and Democracy: Coalition Formation and Government
Functioning in Twenty States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p 209.
7 The platypus is found in rivers and streams in eastern Australia. It is a mammal that lays eggs,
it has a duck bill and webbed feet. When the first specimen was sent to the Royal Society in
London early in the nineteenth century it was greeted with such disbelief that its captors were
accused of fraud by dismembering the carcasses of different animals and sewing them together
as one. My use of the analogy is not original. See Stanley Bach, Platypus and Parliament: The
Australian Senate in Theory and Practice (Canberra: Department of the Senate, 2003).
8 The only exceptions occurred in the states of Victoria and Queensland in the first decade of the
twentieth century where a nascent Labor Party took some time to emerge from a broader
Liberal Party in ways which mirrored the ‘LibLab’ alliances in Britain. See John Rickard,
Class and Politics: New South Wales, Victoria and the Early Commonwealth, 18901910
(Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1976), pp. 85ff; Paul Crook, ‘The Crucible 
Labour in Coalition 19037’, in Dennis J. Murphy, Roger B. Joyce and Colin A Hughes (eds),
Prelude to Power: The Rise of the Labour Party in Queensland 18851915 (Brisbane:
University of Queensland Press, 1970), pp. 5673, and Alan R. Ball, British Political Parties:
The Emergence of a Modern Party System, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 44ff.
9 In the modern period minority coalition governments have occurred only in New South Wales
(19925) and Queensland (19968). A recent Labor government in South Australia con-
tained a single National Party minister, but not as the result of any coalition agreement. The
Tasmanian minority Labor government contains two Green members of cabinet, but not as a
coalition. See Norman Abjorensen, ‘Re-thinking Westminster’, on Perspective, ABC Radio
National, 30 January 2007.
32 Political Science 63(1)

two-party coalition; and the impact Australia’s federalized party structure and federalism
generally exert on the national coalition. The article will not attempt a chronological his-
tory of coalitions, but will select representative case-studies to illustrate aspects of the
relationship between the parties. The key argument of the article is that Australia exhibits
a ‘tight and closed’ form of coalition.10

Formation and dissolution

The first coalition administrations involving the largely urban National Party (the then
name of what is now the Liberal Party) and the agrarian Country Party were formed in
New South Wales and Tasmania in 1922. The first federal coalition government was
formed in early 1923, followed by Victoria in the same year, South Australia (1927),
Western Australia (1930) and finally Queensland in 1957.11 The most common factor
motivating the first and subsequent coalitions was the necessity to assemble lower house
parliamentary majorities against the centre-left Australian Labor Party (ALP). The adop-
tion of the alternative vote (AV) for federal elections in 1919 (and later in the states)
allowed for the exchange of preferences between the centre-right parties, often to
Labor’s electoral disadvantage.12 It also allowed competition between the two coalition
partners in areas of weak support for the ALP. When the National Party lost its House of
Representatives majority at the 1922 election, the Country Party forced the resignation of
Prime Minister Billy Hughes, and secured five of the 11 cabinet places including the
Deputy Prime Minister. Never again did the minority party enjoy such a proportional
feast of ministries, but in each future coalition its leader has been Deputy Prime Minister,
or in the states Deputy Premier.13 Only twice (1975 and 1977) since 1949 has the
Liberal Party been able to win a majority of lower house seats without the assistance

10 Müller and Strøm, Coalition Government, p. 578, speak of ‘tight and loose coalitions’ and
employ the contrasting imagery of a ‘Catholic marriage’ and an ‘open relationship’.
Australia’s is a very tight coalition.
11 The anti-socialist parties have often changed their names. The modern Liberal Party was pre-
viously the National Party and then the United Australia Party; the current National Party was
previously the Country Party. There have been other short-lived state coalitions not involving
the agrarian party: in addition to ‘LibLab’ alliances, there was a LiberalNational coalition
in South Australia and a National coalition in Western Australia, both in 1917.
12 Unlike in Europe, proportional representation is not a salient factor in coalition formation.
The state of Tasmania has elected its lower house by a variant of the single transferable vote
proportional representation system since 1907, but has had a coalition government for only
15 months (19689) since then. The local Country Party expired in the 1930s. The com-
monwealth and the other state jurisdictions elect their lower houses by way of the alternate
ballot from single-member districts.
13 Yet the deputy almost never inherits the top job; the last Country Party Prime Minister of any
duration was Earle Page, who lost office in 1941. When Prime Minister Harold Holt drowned
in December 1967, Deputy PM John McEwen was commissioned to form a brief caretaker
government until the Liberal Party chose a new leader.
Costar 33

of the National Party, thereby making a coalition necessary to form a government on all
other occasions.14
Coalition formations have involved ‘agreements’ between the parties, but the
difference with Europe is stark. Müller and Strøm report on coalition agreements from
12 countries and find that these range in length from 204 words (Finland) to 43,550
words (Belgium).15 By contrast, from 1949 until 1987 the federal coalition agreement
rested on nothing other than a handshake of the two parliamentary party leaders; after
that date it was a brief letter signed by the two, which was also the situation in New
South Wales. In Queensland the letter was signed by the presidents of the party
organizations. The longest Australian agreement publicly available is the Memor-
andum of Understanding, signed by the presidents and parliamentary leaders of the
Victorian Liberal and National parties in July 1990, which was a quasi-legal document
of 1400 words. There had been no coalition government in the state since 1948 and the
two parties had been electoral and parliamentary enemies. This lack of trust and good-
will was evident in the document, which reads like a pre-nuptial agreement. Not sur-
prisingly its terms were breached during the term of the government and the coalition
was dissolved in the wake of an electoral defeat in 1999, but later re-formed in 2008
when the two parties were still in opposition.16 Unlike their European counterparts,
Australian agreements are almost always silent on policy; what they do contain is a
statement of the number, and less frequently the subject areas, of ministerial portfolios
to be allocated to each party (which is often expressed as a proportion of seats held)
and an electoral pact outlawing hostile contests against incumbents. The latter has
often proved very contentious.
That coalitions may be reconfigured or dissolved is a commonplace of Western
European politics, but the strong expectation among the Australian political class and the
electorate of a continuous coalition means that any divorces have major political
ramifications. Five of the nine cases of federal or state coalition termination since 1929
were the direct result of electoral defeat. The most significant of these occurred at the
December 1972 federal election which ended 23 years of consecutive conservative
coalition rule. The coalition was dissolved but was re-formed 18 months later after
another electoral defeat and was returned to power in December 1975.
Conflict over portfolio allocation and the ability of the United Australia Party (UAP 
the immediate predecessor of the modern Liberal Party) to govern alone meant no
coalition was formed after the 1931 federal election, but it was restored in 1934. In
Victoria a coalition was ended in 1935 by a tactical withdrawal by the Country Party,
which then formed a minority ministry with ALP support. In 1948 the Victorian parties
split over the handling of an industrial dispute.

14 Even after the 1975 and 1977 elections the coalition was maintained, even though it was not
arithmetically necessary to do so.
15 Müller and Strøm, Coalition Government, p. 576.
16 Brian Costar, ‘Coalition Government: An Unequal Partnership’, in Brian Costar and
Nicholas Economou (eds), The Kennett Revolution: Victorian Politics in the 1990s (Sydney:
University of New South Wales Press, 1999), pp. 8891.
34 Political Science 63(1)

The two remaining terminations involved the Queensland division of the National
Party and had major impacts on Australian politics.17 The first was precipitated in 1983
by the decision of a Liberal minister in the state coalition government to vote with the
Labor opposition to establish a parliamentary Public Accounts Committee in accordance
with Liberal Party policy. The National Party Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, regarded this
as a gross breach of cabinet solidarity and required the Liberal leader and Deputy Pre-
mier to secure the resignation of the errant minister. Instead, the minister overthrew his
leader in a party-room ballot, but Bjelke-Petersen refused to serve with him and the
coalition unravelled. The Premier then called an election at which the National Party
won sufficient former Liberal seats (with the help of Liberal defectors) to form the first
majority National Party government in Australia’s history. A quarter of a century later
the Liberal Party had not recovered and lost so much political mass that it could not resist
absorption by the National Party (see below). Australia’s major conservative party now
has no distinctive brand in the nation’s third largest state.
The second suspension was brief, but its circumstances cost the Liberal and National
parties the 1987 federal election; again Premier Bjelke-Petersen and the Queensland
Nationals were central players. Emboldened by his re-election in 1986, the Queensland
Premier developed a taste for federal politics and in early 1987 launched a politically
adventurous and destabilizing ‘Joh-for-PM’ campaign.18 This occurred at a time of lead-
ership instability in the federal coalition and, in an attempt to displace the National Party
leader Ian Sinclair, the Queensland National Party organization forced its federal parlia-
mentarians to withdraw from the coalition on pain of losing their party endorsements.
The coalition collapsed and the Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke took advantage of the
conservatives’ disharmony and called a double dissolution election which he won easily.
The coalition was then re-formed. This incident highlights an important dynamic of
Australian coalitionism, namely the devolved federal structures of the two parties. Since
the state divisions (branches) effectively control federal candidate selection, a local
dominant Premier was able to destroy the national coalition against the wishes of the
federal parliamentary leadership and even other state National Party divisions.

Ministerial politics
Coalition government, as distinct from minority administration, involves an allocation
of ministerial portfolios among the participating parties. Reflecting the different sizes of
their caucuses (Liberal ¼ 94 MPs; National ¼ 16 MPs) the major party had 86 per cent of
ministries in the Howard government on the eve of its 2007 federal election defeat.
Following the European pattern, the agrarian party holds ministries close to its interests,
such as transport and regional services, trade (Australia exports 80 per cent of its primary

17 It is significant that Queensland is the only jurisdiction in which the National Party was (until
the 2008 merger) the senior coalition partner.
18 For a detailed analysis of the campaign, see Dennis Woodward and Brian Costar, ‘The
National Party Campaign’, in Ian McAllister and John Warhurst (eds), Australia Votes: The
1987 Federal Election (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1998), pp. 8498.
Costar 35

produce) and agriculture. The gradual electoral decline of the National Party is reflected
in its proportion of ministries: during the long reign of consecutive conservative
administrations (194972; 197583) it usually held 25 per cent of portfolios, falling to
18 per cent in the first Howard government (19968) and to 14 per cent in the fourth
(20047). The last decline was caused by the defection of a National senator to the
Liberals, which naturally caused tension between the two parties, though such cross-
party defections are rare.
Influence in cabinet is affected by the quality of leadership of the minority party more
than by simple arithmetic. In that regard John McEwen’s tenure as Deputy Prime
Minister from 1958 to 1971 was the apotheosis of Country Party influence, as well as
during the years of the Fraser government (197583).19 The Country Party was espe-
cially influential between 1961 and 1963 when the government had only a two-seat
majority in the House of Representatives. A period of indifferent health on the part
of the Prime Minister Robert Menzies elevated McEwen’s status in the government
and the media, and it was reported that if Menzies were to retire some Liberals were
keen to promote the Country Party leader.20 Menzies recovered, and despite McEwen’s
opposition called an early election in 1963 and increased the government’s majority.21
Uncharacteristic leadership instability in the National Party since 1989, and notably
since the departure of Tim Fischer in 1999, has seen a decline in the party’s influence.
For instance, when then leader John Anderson, expressed concern about parts of
rural Australia ‘being left behind’, he earned a sharp public rebuke from the Prime
Minister22  something Menzies would never have done to McEwen, nor Fraser to
Doug Anthony, nor even Howard to Fischer.
Generalizing from the European experience, Vernon Bogdanor has concluded that
‘[A Prime Minister] will have less authority over a coalition Cabinet than he would in a
single-party government because he will have to share his authority with the leader of the
other party’.23 Yet there is no evidence of this phenomenon in Australia; on the contrary,
Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s authority was enhanced by his support from a ‘kitchen
cabinet’ of three National Party ministers, including the Deputy Prime Minister, with
whom he had a very close rapport and who, being in a different party, could never chal-
lenge him for the leadership.24 Prime Ministerial power has been on the rise in Australia
for the past three decades regardless of whether the Coalition or Labor has been in office.

19 Brian Costar, ‘The Politics of Coalition’, in Scott Prasser, John Nethercote and John
Warhurst (eds), The Menzies Era: A Reappraisal of Government, Politics and Policy
(Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1995), pp. 93110.
20 The Age, 11 December 1962.
21 Sydney Morning Herald, 16 October 1963.
22 Brian Costar and Jennifer Curtin, Rebels with a Cause: Independents in Australian Politics
(Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004), p. 11.
23 Vernon Bogdanor (ed.), Coalition Government in Western Europe (London: Heinemann
Educational Books, 1982), p. 270.
24 Colin A. Hughes, ‘Prime Ministers and the Electorate’. in Patrick Weller (ed.), Menzies to
Keating: The Development of the Australian Prime Ministership (Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press, 1992), p. 141.
36 Political Science 63(1)

Walter and Strangio have described the unity and discipline of John Howard’s cabinet
and how he locked his colleagues (whether Liberal or National) into decisions, thus
‘achieving a dominance that has deterred dissidents and leakers’.25
There are institutional as well as personal factors which make Australian coalition
Prime Ministers much more than primus inter pares: only two ideologically close parties
are ever part of the coalition, which reduces the potential for policy divergence and the
system of cabinet government is strong. Ministers, other than the Prime Minister, are
unable to act as ‘policy dictators in their own jurisdictions’ because of a Westminster-
like cabinet discipline and the existence of an Expenditure Review Committee which can
rein in wandering ministers by proposing funding cuts to any pet projects.26 Party disci-
pline is tight in the Liberal and National parties (though not quite as tight as in the ALP)
and organizational ownership of candidate endorsement is a powerful agent of control.

Policy conflicts
While the Australian coalition partners (unlike many of those in Europe) are especially
ideologically close, with the only major difference being that the Nationals are uniformly
social conservatives whereas there remains a small pocket of progressives within the
Liberal Party, they are not always at one as to policy. The longstanding urban versus
rural divide partly explains many of the conflicts, but this alone is too simplistic, since
the Liberal Party itself has a large rural and regional constituency; by contrast, the
National Party holds only rural constituencies. Surprisingly, the two parties’ rurally
based parliamentarians rarely form cross-party ‘coalitions’, mainly because they are
often rivals for the same electoral territory. While there have been serious policy disputes
within the federal coalition, never has it fractured when in government. Given that coali-
tions have been in office for 42 of the 66 years since the Second World War, this is a
remarkable achievement.
Counter-intuitively, this stability may be the product of a serious policy dispute which
occurred very soon after the coalition won the 1949 federal election. Concerns about
post-war inflation put pressure on the government to appreciate Australia’s currency
(then the pound). This, however, would have increased the cost of Australian exports,
notably wool and wheat, and the Country Party refused to countenance it. Pat Weller pro-
vides a fascinating account, based on a close examination of the cabinet minutes, of the
dynamics of coalition policy-making on this matter. The debate commenced in August
1950 and continued for 15 months, and on two occasions there were slim majorities in

25 James Walter and Paul Strangio, No Prime Minister: Reclaiming Politics from Leaders
(Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007), p. 18.
26 Michael Laver and Kenneth A. Shepsle, ‘Coalitions and Cabinet Governments’, American
Political Science Review, vol. 84, no. 3, (1990), p. 888. It was once contended that there was
a time when Australian government was genuinely ‘ministerial’, but recent research utilizing
the papers of cabinet refutes this. See Patrick Weller, Cabinet Government in Australia,
19012006 (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007). Weller argues (p. 285)
that Prime Ministers have always been pre-eminent, but that the most effective of them
worked ‘through the cabinet because they know that it strengthens their hand’.
Costar 37

favour of appreciation, but Prime Minister Menzies refused to act with such a divided
cabinet, especially as the Country Party ministers were supported by some Liberals.27
Appreciation did not occur, but in order to curb rampant inflation caused by the Korean
War the government was forced to introduce a restrictive 19512 budget which almost
caused its electoral defeat in 1954.
By obdurately refusing to agree to such an important policy decision so early in the
life of the coalition, the Country Party put the Liberal Party on notice that its compliance
could not be taken for granted. Economic policy flashpoints continued to erupt
throughout Menzies’ long Prime Ministership (194966) and afterwards. Other public
policy clashes between the coalition partners concerned such diverse matters as banking
reform, the recognition of the People’s Republic of China, tariffs, the level of foreign
investment and electoral laws.28 In 1967 the Governor-General and former Liberal min-
ister, Richard Casey, was so concerned that the personal and policy hostilities between
McEwen and Liberal Treasurer Billy McMahon would tear apart the coalition that he
was prepared to stretch constitutional propriety by privately warning McMahon about
the possible consequences of his behaviour.29 Yet the coalition survived until its elec-
toral defeat in 1972. Official relations between the partners were notably positive during
the Prime Ministership of Malcolm Fraser (197583) partly because he was a pastoralist
and had a greater affinity for regional Australia than his metropolitan predecessors, and,
as was noted earlier, his key cabinet allies were senior National Party ministers, some of
whom were more experienced than him.
From 1983 to 1996 the Liberal and National parties experienced their longest
continuous period in opposition; yet, save for six weeks in 1987, the coalition
remained intact. By the time it returned to power in 1996 the Australian political
landscape had altered dramatically. The impact of rapid globalization, the opening of
the Australian economy to free trade, the floating of the Australian dollar and the
erosion of traditional values in the face of new social movements presented govern-
ments of all persuasions with novel challenges. The HowardFischer coalition gov-
ernment experienced a baptism of policy fire akin to that which had greeted Menzies
and Fadden 40 years earlier when on 28 April 1996, just a month after polling day, a
lone gunman killed 35 people and wounded many more at a tourist site in Port Arthur,
Tasmania. Since the federal government has no direct power over firearms, Prime
Minister Howard called on the states to implement a new and more restrictive code of
gun ownership.
Gun control had come onto the Australian political agenda during the 1980s when a
number of state Labor administrations attempted to tighten laws, often encountering
opposition from the conservative parties. Firearms use is a complex issue in rural
Australia, since many farmers use rifles and shotguns professionally and some use them
recreationally. In the context of the longstanding urban/rural divide, gun possession

27 Weller, Cabinet Government, pp. 1057.

28 Costar, ‘The Politics of Coalition’, pp. 96106.
29 Peter Golding, Black Jack McEwen: Political Gladiator (Melbourne: Melbourne University
Press, 1996), pp. 2537.
38 Political Science 63(1)

becomes an iconic issue and passions often run high.30 The 1996 Port Arthur massacre
shocked the nation, and state and federal police ministers approved the banning of the
private ownership of automatic and semi-automatic weapons, and a gun buy-back
scheme was instituted. This provoked a series of public protests from the ‘gun lobby’ and
when Deputy Prime Minister Fischer supported Howard his leadership of the National
Party came under threat from within.31 The two stared down their opponents and, by
threatening a constitutional referendum to extend federal power over weapons and
ammunition, forced all the states to approve uniform gun laws.
The coalition government led by John Howard (19962007) was typical of its pre-
decessors in having to contain policy differences between the Liberal and National
parties. Serious public clashes occurred over tariffs (a perennial fault line between the
parties), the transfer of land title to indigenous communities, the impact on regional
campuses of the removal of the requirement of university students to pay compulsory
service fees, and the protracted debate over the privatization of the telecommunications
entity known as Telstra. Many of these divisions were accompanied by harsh words
being exchanged in public, and in 2005 a fist fight in the joint party room between
Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan and National Senator Barnaby Joyce was only narrowly
averted. Yet, as in previous federal coalitions, unity was preserved in government but not
in opposition after the Howard government was defeated in November 2007.
Had the Howard government been returned it is possible that the coalition would have
been torn over the necessity to deal with the fallout from the ‘greatest trade scandal in
Australian history’.32 When the United Nations introduced its ‘oil for food’ programme
as part of the relaxation of sanctions against Iraq in April 1995, Australia was among the
countries that successfully tendered to supply 600,000 tonnes of wheat at US$180 per
tonne. At the time the export of wheat from Australia was under the control of a federal
government-owned but grower-controlled authority called the Australian Wheat Board
(AWB). The growing and marketing of wheat was central to the formation of the Coun-
try parties around the time of the Great War, and during the inter-war years divided the
non-Labor parties and caused a split in the Victorian Country Party in the 1920s. The
debate was whether there should be established a ‘compulsory wheat pool’, which would
purchase wheat from farmers and sell it on the domestic and international market  in
other words a single-desk marketing system. While majority Country Party opinion sup-
ported this form of ‘orderly marketing’ because it helped stabilize prices, their coalition
colleagues were sceptical of such a monopoly and preferred a system of private grain
merchants. A further complication was that some large wheat growers also supported

30 This is akin to the ‘Countryside’ debate in the United Kingdom. See, for example, Michael
Woods, ‘Researching Rural Conflicts: Hunting, Local Politics and Actor Networks’, Journal
of Rural Studies, vol. 14, no. 3 (1997), pp. 32140.
31 Elizabeth van Acker, ‘The Legacy of Port Arthur: New Gun Laws’, in Scott Prasser and
Graeme Starr (eds), Policy and Change: The Howard Mandate, (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger,
1997), pp. 192208.
32 Caroline Overington, Kickback : Inside the Australian Wheat Board Scandal (Sydney: Allen
and Unwin, 2007), p. 2.
Costar 39

a free market  as they still do today. The debate was settled in the Country Party’s
favour in 1939 when the Australian Wheat Board was established.
Wheat is an iconic issue for the National Party which became a central player in a
very closed policy network around the industry. Stephen Bartos has gone so far to refer to
it as a ‘family’:

The key players in the AWB affair [see below] were all part of the one small agripolitical club
 they all knew each other, and were very much interrelated (sometimes literally). A typical
career path sees a wheatgrower/aspirant agripolitician gaining office in his or her state grains
body, possibly doing a sideways stint on the Wheat Export Authority or in another grains-
related statutory body, then becoming an office-bearer with the Grains Council of Australia.
From there the path might involve lucrative consulting to grains bodies, working on projects
funded by the Grains Research and Development Corporation, entering federal politics on a
National or Liberal ticket or moving on to the AWB board.33

The political potency of this ‘family’ was well illustrated when the Howard government
included the AWB in its programme of privatizing public utilities in 1999. But the
‘privatizing’ of AWB was not carried out by way of a tender sale or a public float; rather
responsibility for operating the authority was transferred to the wheat growers.34 A new
company, AWB Ltd, was established which operated a subsidiary, AWB International,
with two tiers of shareholders, Class A and Class B  with the stipulation that only wheat
growers could hold Class A shares.
Australia was part of ‘the coalition of the willing’ which invaded Iraq in March 2003
and overthrew the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Evidence then emerged that the regime
had been avoiding UN sanctions by gaining access to foreign currency and the subsequent
United States-based Volker Inquiry showed that from 1999 the AWB had paid bribes to the
Hussein regime of AUS$290 million to gain wheat contracts. Needless to say this informa-
tion caused a furore in Australia and abroad, especially in North America. Yet the policy
response by the coalition government was surprisingly muted and reflected National Party
influence; while it did conduct a Royal Commission into the affair, it proved very reluctant
to fully deregulate the wheat export trade, despite strong support from some prominent Lib-
erals, especially from Western Australia. Instead, growers were to be given until 1 March
2008 to establish a new entity which, in the Prime Minister’s words, ‘must be completely
separate from AWB Ltd’.35 But that new entity would have single-desk status and the
Wheat Export Authority would have the power to prevent other companies exporting
wheat. Former Liberal minister, Wilson Tuckey, blamed the influence of the National Party
for opposing deregulation and accused its parliamentarians of being ‘screaming fanatics’
who were unable to spell ‘corruption’.36

33 Stephen Bartos, Against the Grain: The AWB Scandal and Why it Happened (Sydney:
University of New South Wales Press, 2006), p. 66.
34 The factual information reported here is drawn from Stephen Bartos, Against the Grain, and
Overington, Kickback.
35 Australian Financial Review, 23 May 2007.
36 Australian Financial Review, 23 May 2007.
40 Political Science 63(1)

Tuckey went so far as to threaten to introduce a private member’s bill into parliament
to create a free market in wheat. Had he done so the coalition might have collapsed, but
this possibility was removed by the government’s electoral defeat in late 2007. The new
Labor government moved swiftly to deregulate the market by introducing the Wheat
Export Marketing Bill, 2008 and the Wheat Export Marketing (Repeal and Con-
sequential Amendment) Bill, 2008. Before a meeting of the coalition party room was
held in March 2008 to decide on a response to the bill, the National Party leader enraged
his Liberal colleagues by issuing a statement in favour of the retention of the single-
desk system.37 When the bill was referred to the Senate’s Rural and Regional Affairs
and Transport Committee, there were clear differences between Liberal and National
Senators. Three National Party members of the committee issued a dissenting report
calling for the bills to be withdrawn and seven Liberal members issued an ‘Additional
Comments’ statement which supported the bill with amendments (Senate Committee
Report, 24 April 2008).38 Before the committee reported, the National Party MP Kay
Hulls wrote to its secretary to complain that the ‘knowledge base of many of those
heading the inquiry beggars belief’, and specifically identified four Liberal Senators.
When the bills came before the House of Representatives in June 2008 the coalition
parties voted against each other for the first time in a quarter of a century.39

Electoral competition
One of the most enduring myths perpetrated about the Australian variant of coalitionism
is that the two parties do not compete against each other electorally. In fact they do and
have always done so. In 1924 the federal parliamentary leaders of the then Nationalist
and Country parties negotiated an ‘electoral pact’ to try to extend immunity for sitting
members from challenges by either party.40 The pact was controversial within the Country
Party, especially in Victoria, but did succeed in limiting ‘three-cornered contests’ at the
1925 federal election. Yet the level of constituency competition has varied over time and
place. Relations have been the most cordial at the federal level and in the state of New
South Wales, whereas in Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia they have often been
characterized by open warfare.41 Since the Second World War, except in Queensland
where the Nationals have historically been the larger coalition partner, the Liberals have

37 Australian Financial Review, 19 March 2008.

38 Report of the Senate Standing Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport
(exposure drafts of the Wheat Export Marketing Bill 2008 and the Wheat Export Marketing
(Repeal and Consequential Amendments) Bill 2008, April 2008.
39 Australian Parliamentary Debates (Representatives), 4 June 2008, pp. 1516.
40 Bruce D. Graham, The Formation of the Australian Country Parties (Canberra: Australian
National University Press, 1966), pp. 223f.
41 For a discussion of intra-coalition electoral competition, see Colin A. Hughes, ‘In the Con-
stituencies: Competition with the Liberal Party’, in Brian Costar and Dennis Woodward
(eds), Country to National: Australian Rural Politics and Beyond (Sydney: Allen and Unwin,
1985), pp. 3553.
Costar 41

had much the better of the electoral contest, as is evidenced by recent Liberal victories in
three federal seats (Murray, Indi and Farrer) when long-serving Nationals retired.
Rather than provide a necessarily repetitive account of the many contests between the
two partners, the remainder of this section will analyse the composition of the coalition
Senate ticket in Victoria in the 1970s. The case-study reveals an important dynamic of
the Australian variant of coalitions: namely that the highly federal structure of the extra-
parliamentary organizations of the two parties means that intra-state hostilities cannot
always be quarantined because the state branches have the power to select candidates for
federal parliament.
Despite not having been in coalition since 1948 and having been fierce electoral
competitors for the state parliament, for over two decades the Liberal and Country
parties in Victoria had constructed a joint Senate ticket whereby at each alternate
election a Country Party nominee would be placed in a winnable position and in return
the Country Party would campaign for the Liberal ticket at the subsequent election. In
February 1973, however, the Liberal Party informed the Country Party that it intended to
offer serving CP Senator J. Webster the third place on the ticket rather than the usual
second place, for the Senate election which had to be held before July 1974. It was most
unlikely that Webster would win from third place.
The Liberal Party was emboldened to take this action against its partner for a number
of reasons: the federal coalition was terminated following its election defeat on
2 December 1972; the Victorian Division of the Liberal Party came under the control of a
progressive faction which was hostile to the social conservatism of the Country Party;
and during negotiations about the ticket the Victorian Liberals won a landslide victory at
the May 1973 state election, whereas the Country Party stagnated. Naturally the Country
Party reacted negatively to what it regarded as Liberal treachery and the next six months
saw a public (and private) slanging match between the two parties. Despite Liberal
grandee and long-term Prime Minister Robert Menzies publicly chiding his party for its
actions and saying that ‘I, for one, propose to give my second vote to Jim Webster’,42 the
party organization stood firm. The Country Party was at a distinct disadvantage in the
dispute because its threat to run a successful separate Senate ticket was not credible
given its incapacity to campaign in urban seats where most of the voters resided.
Webster’s political career was saved by the unscheduled double dissolution election
of May 1974 which saw ten rather than five Senators elected from Victoria. Yet in
advance of Webster’s term expiring at the 1980 election, the Victorian Liberal Party
again offered him an unwinnable position. By now Webster was a minister in the
coalition government led by Malcolm Fraser, who was a Victorian Liberal. The spectacle
then presented itself of a minister having been effectively removed from parliament by
the state division of the Prime Minister’s own party. When Fraser was unable to persuade
the Victorians to allocate Webster a winnable position, he avoided complete humiliation
by appointing him to a diplomatic post in New Zealand. The replacement CP Senator did
lose the seat at the 1980 election, but to the small Australian Democrats Party, not to the
Liberal Party.

42 The Age, 28 July 1973.

42 Political Science 63(1)

Blending the two parties

No clearer evidence exists that the Liberal and National parties are not ‘a single party’
than the attempts that have been made to blend them into a single political entity. The
idea of merging the parties is almost as old as the National (Country) Party, and despite
the fact that such proposals often create tension within and between them, mergers
have occurred. Liberal and agrarian elements came together in Queensland in 1924 to
form the Country Progressive National Party, which lasted until 1936, when it broke up
after a severe electoral reversal; similar elements combined in South Australia in the
early 1930s as the Liberal Country League, but a separate, but not very successful
Country Party re-emerged in the 1960s; and in 1974 a Liberal Country Party was
formed in the Northern Territory and still persists.43 On two of the three occasions
when Australia’s national conservative party has reconstructed itself (1931 and
19445) the Country Party was approached to participate but declined on both occa-
sions. Since the coalition’s electoral victory in 1949 most of the pro-merger activity
has occurred in the states, but when the coalition was defeated in 1983 and did not
return to power until 1996 there were periodic outbreaks of national amalgamation fer-
vour, but they came to nothing.44
The standard position of the two parties on the merger option is that the Liberal Party,
as the larger of the two, is usually in support (though it is a factional issue in some Liberal
branches), while the smaller National Party is in opposition. In the state of Queensland,
however, the positions are reversed, largely because the Nationals have been the larger
party. But this is so only in the state parliament, whereas the Liberal Party has had more
Queensland members and senators in the federal parliament. A Country (National)/
Liberal coalition ruled Queensland from 1957 to 1983, when it imploded and was
replaced by a majority National Party government until 1998. In the last two decades,
however, the non-Labor parties have been in office, in an unstable minority coalition, for
only three years, and this encouraged amalgamation strategies from within both the
National and Liberal parties. The rationale is that a blended party would win more votes
and seats than two parties operating in coalition, which of course is a proposition difficult
to test in advance. After Labor’s second landslide victory in 1992, the state conferences
of the National and Liberal parties voted in favour of motions calling for negotiations to
establish a ‘unified non-Labor force’.45 However, the move was opposed by the federal
parliamentary leadership of the coalition, who feared that prolonged and probably divi-
sive negotiations could endanger their prospects at the federal election that was to be
held that year, and the proposal fizzled out.

43 For an account of the history of Liberal/Country Party mergers and attempted mergers, see
Brian Costar, ‘The Merger Idea and Australia’s Non-Labor Parties 19171990’, in Brian
Costar and Scott Prasser (eds), Amalgamate or Perish? The Future of the Non-Labor Parties
in Australia (Toowoomba: University of Southern Queensland, 1990), pp. 828.
44 Brian Costar, ‘The National Party: Revival or Extinction?’ in Brian Costar (ed.), For Better
or for Worse: The Federal Coalition (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994), pp. 13844.
45 The Bulletin, 10 August 1993, p. 10.
Costar 43

The next attempt at amalgamation can only charitably be described as farcical. On

Monday 30 May 2006 the parliamentary leaders and presidents of the Queensland
Liberal and National parties announced that they had agreed to merge. It soon became
clear that they had not consulted their deputies, the state or federal parliamentarians, the
Prime Minister or Deputy Prime Minister or the party state executives  though it was
claimed that both executives endorsed the move later that day.46 Prime Minister Howard
immediately rejected the loss of the Liberal brand in Queensland, and for the next three
days observers were treated to an extraordinary display of support, opposition, confusion
and rancour emanating from various members of the two parties, with one Liberal
Senator declaring ‘we need this like a hole in the head’.47 By 1 June the plan was dead,
but not before it claimed the federal president of the National Party who had known of
the proposal but had kept it secret from the federal parliamentary leadership. Partly
because of his role in the aborted plot, the Liberal parliamentary leader was replaced a
few months later, and in September the Labor Premier called an early election, which he
won easily. Apparently the impetus for the merger came from sections of the business
community who allegedly told the parties ‘no unity, no financial support’.48
Following the federal coalition’s election loss in November 2007 there were pre-
dictable calls for a full merger of the parties, but again it was the Queenslanders who
went it alone. In early April 2008 National state parliamentary leader Lawrence
Springborg underscored his personal desire for amalgamation by declaring he would
not lead his party to the next election ‘in its present form’.49 Not surprisingly this
sparked another round of merger speculation with the usual people taking up the usual
positions. This time, however, the federal parliamentary leader of the Liberal Party
declined to veto a Queensland-only merger and the two parties combined as the Liberal
National Party in July 2008.50

Conclusion
The primary purpose of this article has been to argue the case that any macro-theory of
coalition government must be prepared to embrace all examples of the phenomenon,
even if that entails diluting the current Euro-centric bias in the literature. The lengthy
experience of coalition government in Australia constitutes a case worthy of inclusion,
but so too do India, New Zealand and Israel, to name but three. This assumes, of course,
that a theory of coalitions is possible in the face of the particularism that is the inevitable
consequence of different political systems, histories and cultures in which potential
coalition partners operate. Pridham, for example, has contended that ‘while formal the-
ories have had the merit of focusing on certain obviously key components of coalition

46 Courier Mail; The Australian, 30 May 2006.

47 The Australian, 29 May 2006.
48 The Australian, 31 May 2006.
49 The Australian, 1 April 2008.
50 For further details see Brian Costar, ‘Party Futures: Independence, Coalition or
Amalgamation?’, in Linda Courtenay Botterill and Geoff Cockfield (eds), The National Party;
Prospects for the Great Survivors (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2009), pp. 1659.
44 Political Science 63(1)

politics . . . it is evident that they fail to take account of a range of variables or

determinants on coalition behaviour’.51 Yet it is important to acknowledge that this
is a universal problem of coalition theory-building and is not confined to what some
regard as anomalous examples like Australia  Europe is also not as homogeneous
as is sometimes assumed.

Biographical note
Brian Costar is Professor of Victorian State Parliamentary Democracy. His research
interests include parliament, political parties and electoral methods. He has published
widely in the area of Australian politics including on coalition governments in the
commonwealth and the states of Victoria and Queensland.

51 Geoffrey Pridham, Coalitional Behaviour in Theory and Practice: An Inductive Model for
Western Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 2.