Decline and division in the WA country party

Abstract

IN AUGUST-October 1978 the Western Australian Country Party split in two, the National Country Party (NCP) retaining organisational continuity, coalition membership and party name while the new National Party (NP) created a parallel ruralbased political organisation with a substantial number of former NCP members. This event was a dramatic one, not least in its highlighting of two major themes in party history: the first the extent of diversity among State country parties and the second the divided nature of party response to political decline (and particularly to political decline within coalition). It is to these two themes that this article is in turn addressed. Dominant in Queensland, more-or-Iess secure in New South Wales and the Northern Territory, on the defensive in Victoria, virtually non-existent in South Australia and Tasmania, and divided in two in Western Australia: the regional differences are as evident as are the commonalities among the various State country parties and they present some difficulties for writers who seek to generalise across State boundaries. Nevertheless analysts have offered a number of general explanations for both party decline and party longevity. The question is how far the particularities of the Western Australian experience conform to the broad patterns discerned in these overviews. The Western Australian experience has been above all one of falling representation, a situation which has not everywhere been the case as is evident in Table 1. Whereas in the New South Wales and Queensland popular houses the party actually improved its position in the thirty years after 1947, in Western Australia representation was halved. Only in Victoria was there greater decline. Decreases in both parliamentary and coalition representation were evident in Western Australia through the whole of the post-war period but their impact was muted until the 1970s when the trend accelerated. Indeed in the thirtyto thirty-two-seat Legislative Council (increased to thirty-two in 1977) the party maintained its hold on either seven or eight seats throughout the post-war period until 1974 when the number fell to three. However as Year