By Mark Kenny

This article was originally published by The Canberra Times.

If you take conservatives literally, the Left has weakened the country through its penchant for identity politics.

We are all Australians, lament the right’s foghorns ad nauseam while committing vast column-inches and endless broadcast hours to tediously lecturing voters about the moral perils of sub-dividing an otherwise harmonious society into competing identity groups, gay/straight, men/women, rich/poor, and so on.

It’s the ABC’s fault, usually.

At the ragged end, there’s the eponymous Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party which, in a shameless breach of its label, commits its modest intellectual resources anything but national one-ness.

More worrying though, by virtue of its secretive coalition relationship, is the Nationals party. Again, the title suggests something unifying and enlarging, but here is an outfit so steeped in identity politics, it is drowning.

It calls itself the Nationals, but rails against the nation’s urbanised majority as a job-lot.

The besieged and now ‘ex’ deputy prime minister Michael McCormack routinely sandbagged his leadership by demonising “green-left” cosmopolitans for their metro-sexual views, their support for the worthy declaration that black lives do matter, their somehow questionable Australianness.

As the light faded, he told the House of Representatives last week that mice which are currently in plague-proportions, should be sent to the urban haunts of metropolitan nature-lovers.

"I agree they should be rehomed, into their inner-city apartments so they can nibble away at their food and their feet at night and scratch their children at night," he said (as acting PM no less).

The deeper problem for the “bush” is that increasingly, it is not even the agricultural community for whom the Nats go into bat so much as FYFO miners, and big coal.

So the hill the Nats will fight and die on now is emissions reduction. Resisting it that is. Never mind that the major farming peak bodies have signed up to the net-zero goal, that major banks, employer peak bodies, scientists and of course farmers themselves are all confronting the climate change problem square-on.

For the Nats, this fight is combatively political rather than economic. It is identity-based.

That the party’s electoral business model widens and exploits these country-city divisions outwardly, is nothing new.

But the gaudy use of divisive identity politics – ie to create divisions rather than bridge them - is being parlayed internally as well.

The whole nation is about to be held hostage to the Nats’ intra-coalition identity crisis as Barnaby Joyce seeks to justify the stabbing of McCormack by articulating a harder line against international emissions cuts.

This bloody-mindedness highlights the most glaring hypocrisy of all: The Nationals frustration at losing their identity as a separate party from the dominant Liberals – a charge that resonated against McCormack in the party room.

That Joyce is the answer proves that the Nationals want to have their cake and eat it too. They want a distinct identity but the same prizes of office: the ministerial coin, the chauffeur-driven cars, the big staff and status. They want to sign up to the Liberals and then complain when they’re seen as one and the same.

If you want to know what the Nationals really stand for, it’s all here – hollow gestures, culture wars, party-before-country, overweening personal ambition, and the open weaponisation of identity.

Mark Kenny is a professor at the Australian Studies Institute ANU and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.