The political strategies of the Australian country parties from their origins until 1929
Creators: name: Graham, Bruce Desmond
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 1958
Subjects: subject: Parliamentary Country Parties
subject: Federal Country Party
subject: coalition strategy
subject: Country Party History
subject: Country Party. History

description: 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.