Last Sunday, the Liberals had the chance to break free. But they blew it. They went back into a destructive, dog-waging relationship, beguiled by an unnecessary feeling of being so dependent on the Nationals that they could never win office without them.
But the Nationals have been in chronic decline disguised by big occasions when they have held their own against anti-conservative swings: in 1972, 1983, 2007, 2022, and 2025. In those elections the Liberals got hammered and the Nationals kept their seats. It gave an illusion of a permanent, impenetrable and reliable swag of seats for the conservatives.
But between those elections, when there was no change of government and not much to see, the Nationals lost a seat here and there in an unnoticeable small-drip decline.
Overall, the Nationals have fallen from 19 seats in a 123-seat House (15.5 percent of the seats) in 1949 to 10 seats in a 150-seat House in 2025 (6.7 per cent of the seats). It is a huge fall.
The reasons the Nationals are headed for the endangered-species list is because their habitat (old, white, rural, narrow-minded) is shrinking.
Australia has become more urban and cosmopolitan. The rural rump has contracted but is still strong in the areas it has contracted to – retaining the illusion of a vital element to any centre-right government.
Oddly enough, the big supporters of having a coalition, Liberal Leader Sussan Ley, and prospective leader Angus Taylor, should be more alert to the drag the Nationals have on centre-right politics. Both now hold seats that were once held by National Party leaders – Tim Fischer in Ley’s Farrer and John Sharp in Taylor’s Hume.
The National Party contracted before their eyes, yet Ley has read the history badly.
The Nationals must be mightily relieved to return to the Coalition. For a start, Senator Ross Cadell (NSW) and Senator Bridget McKenizie (Vic) will most likely be re-elected in 2028. Outside coalition, on a split ticket, they would have lost, because the Nationals on their own, get nowhere near a Senate-seat quota.
That might delay the extinction trend for the Nationals for a little bit, but the Liberals should be asking, why should they be surrendering one of two Senate seats in each of those states to the Nationals who get so little support – increasing the right’s voice at the expense of the centre.
In the House of Representatives in 2022 and 2025, the Nationals got 6.7 per cent of the seats with just 4 per cent of the vote. (The figures are muddied a bit by the fact that the Liberals and Nationals stand on one ticket in Queensland).
And the Liberals feel that they must have that 6.7 per cent of the seats to attain government. But they are not reading the demographic trends and not looking at the cost.
Eighty per cent of Australians live in cities with more than 100,000 people. Nearly all migrants go to these cities, especially Sydney and Melbourne. These cities are comprising an ever-higher percentage of the population. Young people from rural areas, too, are moving to the cities for jobs.
Come electoral redistribution time, any new seats will be created in cities, at the expense of rural seats.
In the cities, people are more likely to favour multiculturalism, climate action, renewable energy, and social diversity and be responsive to new ideas. That favours centre-left politics.
There could be some truth in One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s assertion that Labor likes high immigration because it brings in the votes, even if it disadvantages the very people Labor seeks to attract – the young seeking housing and care for the environment and lower-income people seeking better government services and infrastructure.
Former Coalition Attorney-General George Brandis went so far as to posit that Labor would increase the size of the Parliament to take advantage of the demographic trend.
He is reading the demography correctly. If you look at the Australian electoral map you see large rural areas painted National Party green and Liberal Party blue – taking up more than 90 per cent of the land mass with less than 15 per cent of the population.
If more seats are to be created, there are not enough people in these places to create more seats. The new seats will be created in urban areas. And those seats will be ripe for Labor, Green, and teal-type independents to take, especially if the National Party uses its Coalition position to force the Liberal Party to adopt policy positions which are an anathema to city dwellers.
The immediate problem for the Liberal Party is the drag the Nationals will have on policy. With so many moderate, urban Liberals lost to the teals and Labor over the past two elections, the National voice is comparatively larger, as is the voice of the conservative surviving Liberals who hold virtually no seats in the cities and have seats with higher-than-average ages.
The big issues will not be energy-climate or cultural wars. The latter is of little electoral consequence, and the former has a self-solving economic trajectory. Sooner or later the grid and fleet will go renewable because national and household economics will drive it.
Rather, the National Party push towards poor policy will come with the up-coming debate on tax and intergenerational fairness which has been flagged by Treasurer Jim Chalmers.
The National Party holds five of the six electorates with the highest average age. That is half of their seats. And the others are not far behind.
Older people tend to own their own home; have investment property and shares. It means that in any debate about capital gains, negative gearing, and franked dividends, the Nationals and the Liberal survivors are more likely to oppose change.
Younger people are angered and frustrated about housing and tax fairness. These are the biggest issues in Australian politics, related directly to the cost of living. With the Nationals dragging the Liberals to do nothing, younger voters will go Labor, Green, and Independent, or reject the whole lot.
Prime Minister John Howard might have been astute to massage older voters with tax hand-outs in the early years of this century. But older voters tend to die off leaving you in a voterless electoral graveyard.
Sunday’s decision to allow the Nationals back into Coalition means the Liberals will find it near impossible to get back city seats. They blew it. For them it is back to their echo chambers to talk about irrelevant nuclear power and identity politics.
Crispin Hull
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 10 February 2026.
Oh, Mr Hull! The Liberals select on merit! They tell us all the time! Maybe it’s now time to review their selection criteria and job description? The Liberal and National parties are probably past the time for total reform.
Thanks Crispin for your detailed analysis. The Nationals are terminal and the Liberals have joined them in their death spiral. Albo doesn’t need to be so cautious. Be bold Albo, be bold!
Just a comment from someone without any party political affiliation who has lived in the city and the bush: men, women and the young who have elected to stay in regional Australia almost all vote and will continue to vote National Party because the city-based parties either ignore or openly denigrate them.
I have a perhaps irrational desire to see the Nationals revert to their roots, namely, being a genuine country party where they speak for farmers and not the mining industry. They need to cast off their neo-liberal agenda, after all, a bit of agrarian socialism is what farmers really want. And they need to do a 180-degree turn on climate change, pushing for strong mitigation and adaptation policies because farmers are now at the mercy of climate change-induced severe weather.
What I have found with young people is many have progressive views which support mass immigration. They are the victims of mass immigration in being locked out of the housing market but the “Big Australia” spruikers have been successful in having them believe it is all due to such things as negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts and nothing to do with immigration and the law of supply and demand. I have even had them accuse true environmentalists opposed to mass immigration of being eco-terrorists.