National Party of Australia

The National Party of Australia, also known as The Nationals or The Nats, is a centre-right Australian political party. Traditionally representing graziers, farmers, and regional voters generally, it began as the Australian Country Party in 1920 at a federal level. In 1975 it adopted the name National Country Party, before taking its current name in 1982. A conservative and agrarian party, the Nationals combine social conservatism with agrarian socialist economic policies. Ensuring support for farmers, either through government grants and subsidies or through community appeals, is a major focus of National Party policy. The process for obtaining these funds has come into question in recent years, such as during the Sports Rorts Affair. According to Ian McAllister, the Nationals are the only remaining party from the "wave of agrarian socialist parties set up around the Western world in the 1920s". Federally and to various extents in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia, the Nationals have been the minor party in centre-right Coalition governments with the Liberal Party; its leader has usually served as Deputy Prime Minister. In Opposition the Coalition was usually maintained, but even otherwise the party still generally continued to work in co-operation with the Liberals (as had their predecessors the Nationalist Party and United Australia Party). Due to the closeness and integration of the two parties, as well as the declining vote of the Nationals in recent years, it has been proposed several times that the Liberals and the Nationals formally merge. In Queensland, for instance, the Country Party (later National Party) was the senior coalition party between 1925 and 2008, after which it merged with the junior Liberal Party to form the Liberal National Party of Queensland. The current leader of the National Party is David Littleproud, representing the Queensland electorate of Maranoa. He replaced Barnaby Joyce following a leadership spill in May 2022, after the Coalition's defeat in the 2022 federal election.