(Image: Private Media/Mitchell Squire)

About four days into a call-around for a Crikey article about the National Party, an anonymous email arrived — the equivalent of a cry for help, as though slipped under a hotel room door.

“There is a growing fury among the ranks of young Nats,” the email read. “They view the Nats as fossilised and out of touch, trapped in the ’50s. Their views on women, the environment, and lack of opportunity in regions lies at the core.”

The email joined the dots of recent media coverage:

What emerged from the missive was an ugly picture of resentment against Joyce from the inside. There was “betrayal” and a feeling that “big coal” had set the party’s policy. There was a suggestion too that there was now no chance of repairing the Nats’ “fractured reputation” in respect of “women’s fundamental rights”.

This is what Edvard Munch’s The Scream might have looked like if he was a writer born in Tamworth, New South Wales.

If the National Party of Australia is in the grip of a moral and policy malaise, in the end it’s all about Barnaby. How an accountant schooled at Sydney’s expensive St Ignatius (Riverview) College managed to pass himself off as a knockabout cocky from the bush with the arse hanging out of his pants is just one of the party mysteries the public is asked to accept.

But selling the most extreme of positions as dead normal is Joyce’s peculiar talent — a skill which has seen him hailed as a great “retail politician”. It means that every fault line running through the party ends up at his feet and in his seat of New England.

Former NSW Young Nationals chairman Jessica Price-Purnell, who resigned from the party last year, says its culture is broken: “For a party that once marketed itself as a voice for the people of the bush, the party is now painting itself as a fringe right-wing organisation.”

Price-Purnell points to the role of gas exploration company Santos as “massive donors” to the party, and of the prevalence of mining interests in policy. 

Elsewhere there is a hard core of anger within the party at the way sexual harassment allegations against Joyce have been handled. Western Australian farming leader Sue Middleton — a friend of complainant Catherine Marriott — has raised serious questions about the NSW branch office’s closed-shop investigation of the allegations.

“They only [questioned] two people [Marriott and Joyce], and they sought no evidence from any witnesses,” she said. “They weren’t qualified to run an investigation of this type and it should have been handled by external investigators.”

On climate change, too, Joyce is out of kilter with his own constituency. Earlier this month a survey conducted by Australian Community Media, to which more than 900 people responded, asked readers if they supported a 2050 target of zero net carbon emissions.

“More than 84% were in favour, 14% were against, while the difference were undecided,” rural newspaper The Land reported.

The survey findings are broadly in line with the position of the National Farmers’ Federation, the Victorian Nationals, the WA Nationals, the NSW Young Nationals, and a host of grassroots farming organisations. But if Joyce is so at odds with his own rural constituency on issues such as the environment and same-sex marriage, and if he is so repugnant to women inside and outside the party, how on earth does he get elected to lead the party? 

The answer leads you inexorably to Tamworth. It’s not just Joyce’s electoral base; it and the region around it are the powerhouse of National Party politics in Australia.

The NSW Nationals, along with the NSW Liberals, can lay claim to being one of the most successful political organisations in the country. They have held power federally for the past eight years and have been in government in NSW for a decade. Four Nationals MPs in the NSW Parliament — two in the upper house and two in the lower — come from the area approximately covering Joyce’s federal seat of New England.

The party’s NSW chairman for the five years up to 2019 was Bede Burke, an egg farmer from Tamworth. Burke’s daughter Gil is chair of the NSW Nationals Women’s Council and occasional helper in Joyce’s electorate office.

In May 2021, National Party members in New England had a clear chance to toss Joyce aside in a preselection challenge. Joyce’s challenger, Alex Rubin, was everything Joyce is not. A long-serving member of the Australian Defence Force, Rubin ran on a platform which included greater accountability from government, acknowledging climate change, and addressing domestic violence, coercive control and discrimination.

And yet he was crushed.

New England’s preselectors voted by a margin of about 110 to 10 in favour of Joyce. Rubin declined to comment for this story. It meant that about 120 citizens from a rural NSW town delivered, in Joyce, a wildly unrepresentative politician who wields disproportionate power.

The NSW Nationals insist they are the most democratic of all political parties, with its preselection processes. But that, in the view of Price-Purnell, is garbage.

“One of the biggest issues with the Nationals is that there are people who are doing preselections who are not your average voter,” she said.

“People who join political parties in general are different. But with the National Party it’s really moved to the fringes. The Young Nationals caters to people up to the age of 35. Then there is a huge gap, with a whole lot of [main party] members over 60.”

She says the changing face of membership has led to a party which is inward-looking and self-focused.

The party refuses to disclose how many members it has. Nor will it discuss demographics.

Ultimately Joyce has become his own self-fulfilling prophecy. As a political celebrity he gains votes on name recognition alone, from an electorate that is prepared to stick with the devil it knows.