Blue ribbon said 'In with best show'
Sydney Morning Herald September 18 2004
By Alan Ramsey
Peter Nixon was one of the hard men of the old Country Party, later the Nationals. He was an MP for 22 years before he quit on the eve of the 1983 election that brought Labor to power, and for 12 of those 22 years, Nixon and Doug Anthony and Ian Sinclair pretty much ran the federal Coalition - and, for seven years, the nation - in tandem with that other hard man of the land, the Liberals' Malcolm Fraser. They were as formidable a quartet - two New South Welshmen and two Victorians - as any in our political history. Seventeen years ago, in October 1987, with the Nats in feuding decline in their heartland, the eastern seaboard states, Nixon chaired an internal committee of review. Its brief: "The future direction of the National Party of Australia."
Seventeen years later and that "future direction" remains what it was 17 years ago: down. How long before "down and out"?
In the July 1987 election, with Sinclair leader, the Nationals won 19 (down two) of 148 seats with 11.5 per cent of the nation's primary vote. Three years ago, under the hapless John Anderson, a nice Catholic family man clueless about politics, the Nationals won 13 (down three) of 150 seats with 5.6 per cent of the nation's vote. The result was even worse than that. The Nationals' primary vote (5.6 per cent) was its lowest in 32 elections since it first contested in 1922 and its 13 winning seats the fewest since the 11 seats the old Country Party gained in each of the 1929, 1943 and 1946 elections - all three sweeping Labor victories.
That brings us to Peter Andren and the Cowra Show.
Andren is the former TV newsreader for the Prime network in Orange, a few hundred kilometres west of Sydney. Eight years ago, in the election that made John Howard Prime Minister, Andren, fed up with the drongos running as local candidates, stood as an independent in his home seat of Calare, a country electorate with a then 90-year history in which, across the 20th century, it voted Country/National Party for 32 years, Labor for 31 years and Liberal (or its anti-Labor predecessors) for 27 years.
In 1996 Labor's David Simmons, a former junior minister, retired when the election was called. He'd won Calare from the Nationals' Sandy MacKenzie in the Hawke triumph of 1983 and held it fairly comfortably for the next 13 years. By 1996 Simmons saw better than Paul Keating the swarming voters' plague and quit before it ate him. Andren saw his chance and thought, "why not?" He was 49, country born (Gulargambone) and bred, and well known to Calare's 78,000 voters as the local TV news bloke. In a field of eight candidates Andren topped the primary vote with 29.4 per cent, barely 300 votes in front of Labor (29 per cent), the Nationals (20.8 per cent) and the Liberals (15.7 per cent).
It was just enough. Andren stayed ahead in the distribution of preferences, eventually downing the National candidate, on Labor preferences, 63 per cent to 37 per cent.
Two years later, in Howard's GST election, Andren did it again, still as an independent. Only this time his primary vote jumped to 40.5 per cent against Labor's 24 per cent, the Nationals' 11.9 per cent, One Nation's 10.9 per cent, and the Libs' 10.5 per cent. After preferences Andren again rolled the NP candidate easily, 72.3 per cent to 27.7 per cent. And then, three years ago, Andren completed the treble.
Only this time, with Howard seeking his third Coalition victory, Andren blew his competitors away. His primary vote bolted to 51.4 per cent in a total vote of 80,000. Andren topped the ballot in 88 of Calare's 90 voting booths. The Liberals didn't even bother standing. The Nationals and Labor each got a bit over 20 per cent and One Nation collapsed to 4 per cent. Andren's whopping two party-preferred margin of 75 per cent to the Nationals' 25 per cent gave the Parliament's only genuine independent the second safest seat in the country.
How could this be? Why would voters, in a prosperous country region evenly shared over the previous century between the three major parties, suddenly turn to an independent and stay with him for eight years? One election win, given the right circumstances, sure. Anything is possible. But three wins on the trot, each more convincing, is no fluke. Voters knew exactly what they were doing, and in increasing numbers.
Then I went to lunch on Wednesday (minced chicken and potato salad, lettuce, celery, avocado, red capsicum, a bread roll on each plate, chopped pineapple and ice cream to follow) as a guest of the Cowra Show Society on the second day of its annual two-day agricultural show. Pity John Anderson couldn't have been there. He might have learnt something, about his party and its dwindling supporters.
We were in a small room at one end of a corrugated iron-roofed pavilion hall at the Cowra showground. It was a glorious spring day, and on the 190-kilometre drive west from Canberra you wondered where the drought had gone, so green as an Irish postcard was the countryside, so full were the dams, so yellow were the swathes of canola paddocks. There were 40 of us at lunch, four tables of 10 squeezed together, perhaps 15 guests, one politician (Peter Andren) and one politician's wife (Jenny Armstrong, secretary of the Cowra Wine Show, wife of the Nationals' former deputy premier, Ian Armstrong, and, like all country people, our charming lunch hostess). If the food was plain the people were open and welcoming and ready to talk, to a reporter over lunch as much as anyone.
The society's immediate past president, a third-generation cattleman who breeds stud animals, a former Packer associate one of his neighbours, talked schools, education, the young bloke who worked for him, and the Herald. You knew he'd been a Country/National Party voter for ever, just like his family. So too the bloke opposite, a farmer and grazier whose family sold to extend Rupert Murdoch's "Cavan" property, south of Yass, a few years ago. The incumbent president is a successful town businessman who, when I rang the following evening to check a few things, was in his spa with his wife and a bottle of white wine. His passion is landscape painting and next year he's going to Italy.
And who do they vote for these days?
Most locals at the lunch, all of whom would never vote Labor and always voted National Party unquestioningly, are now Andren voters, it would seem. Cowra's 9600 population was redrawn within Calare's boundaries last election. Andren won a majority in every Cowra booth, bar one. Why? Because he speaks for voters, not party politics.
They know him, they're convinced of his sincerity, they endorse him even when they don't agree with him. And Andren is not a safe, say-nothing politician in a constituency where former Labor voters support him as much as do conservative Nationals. He opposes our military commitment to Iraq, the US free trade agreement as it stands, and any further sale of Telstra. He says so, often and with passion. His slogan is Your Choice, Your Voice and it resonates.
And what is the National Party doing?
Anderson visited Calare a week or so ago and said a lot of silly things about Andren and went away. Know the Nationals' candidate, a Baptist minister named Robert Griffith, and you'll understand. Griffith feels he has God working for him. He believes prayer will get him over the line. Two weeks ago, in a "Campaign Update", Griffith emailed members of his church: "We are off and running with some great news and lots to pray about.
"There will be a combined churches prayer meeting every Sunday from 5pm in the Blue Room (rear of the Baptist Church, Sale Street, Orange). Everyone welcome. The focus will be the election. On Friday, October 8 (the night before the big day!) there will be a combined churches worship from 7.30pm. Everyone welcome as we lift our hearts and prayers to heaven in anticipation of God's mighty miracle the following day. On election day there will be continuous prayer all day. Bring your own lunch. Half a day in prayer and half a day on the voting booth. The battle is being fought in the media, through the letterboxes. But it will be won in prayer.
"Please tell everyone. And please send my email address to all the Christians you know in Calare. I will be sending out updates throughout the campaign. We need as many people as possible praying. Please keep this news to yourself. Just praise God and pray for more miracles..."
Somebody did not keep "the news" to him or herself. He or she sent his email to the local paper in Orange and to Prime television. Griffith's spruiking of his "secret weapon from God" has been in the news ever since. He announced he felt "betrayed" and ended his campaign "updates". Peter Nixon recommended 17 years ago: "Far greater care must be given to [the choice] of candidates." He must now wonder, for God's sake...? There will be no Calare miracle.
Peter Andren is a certainty.