Nationals members have set the Coalition’s climate policy, but there’s half as many as there were a decade ago

On 1 November, National Party members met in Canberra for their national conference, toppling the first in a series of dominoes when they decided to abandon their commitment to achieving net zero emissions. 

The National Party caucus dropped net zero the following day, placing pressure on their senior coalition partner to follow. Finally, the Liberals formally abandoned their own commitment to net zero less than two weeks later, completing the Coalition’s abdication of climate responsibilities. 

All of this prompts the question: who are the National Party members with such an outsized influence on Australia’s climate policy? 

The answer: a very small slice of Australia. Less than one in every 2,000 voters in NSW is a financial member of the National Party, and their membership has close to halved over the past decade (from 4,500 to 2,500). 

NSW is the only state or territory that requires parties to declare how many members they have, though only those with paid memberships (meaning that there may be some Nationals with free memberships not included in these figures). 

Members of the National Party are not only few in number, but also unrepresentative. A “former high-profile member” of the Nationals told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2020 that they had “the oldest demographic of the main parties”. In that member’s electorate, “just four out of 80 members were born after 1950, with the most common decades of birth being the 1920s and 30s.” 

The NSW branch of the Nationals is one of the largest and most prominent, having supplied nine of the party’s eleven leaders over the past 50 years. Trends in the NSW National Party are likely mirrored in other states, which would mean the party’s membership is dwindling nationally.  

But it was those few Australians, just one in 2,000, who ultimately decided the Coalition’s policy on climate last week. 

The NSW Nationals’ decline is the starkest, but it is not the only party in the state with slumping membership. 

The NSW Liberals are not faring much better than their junior Coalition partners, with just under 10,000 members. This is far below their ten-year high point in 2019, when they had 13,619 members, buoyed by state and federal election victories. The number only includes paying members; leaked figures in 2023 implied that the party had 2,018 non-financial members.  

Almost one in ten NSW Labor members have left since 2022 (when it had approximately 19,615) – perhaps a sign of the difficulties of maintaining enthusiasm after three years of government. Because NSW Labor offers three-year memberships, and the NSW Electoral Commission only requires them to be reported in the year that they are paid, Labor’s membership has been approximated using the method outlined here. 

The Greens’ membership rose from 2,578 to 4,230 from 2021 to 2022, when they recorded their best-ever election result nationally. Since then, their membership has declined slightly to 4,014. The Greens are the only party to report the number of non-financial members, making this the most definitive membership figure. 

Despite media bluster about One Nation’s membership surging at the expense of the Nationals, this can’t be confirmed using NSW’s membership data. That’s because One Nation NSW does not have any paying members, nor does it have any internal democratic structures. Instead, all One Nation members pay their fees to the national body, which is tightly controlled by its president-for-life, Pauline Hanson. That allowed Hanson to unilaterally spill the state branch’s executive and expel then-leader Mark Latham from the party in 2023. 

Political party membership is growing rarer. Only 0.6% of NSW voters are members of any of the four biggest parties (Labor, Liberal, National and Green). 

Flagging party membership is a symptom of a general decline in political engagement in Australia.  

That decline means the average member of a political party has less in common with the average Australian, and parties have appealed to ever-smaller sections of the Australian population. It means the making of policy and pre-selection of candidates lie in the hands of fewer and fewer people. 

But this decline is entirely reversible. If more Australians engage with politics, including by joining parties, those important decisions will be made by larger, more representative groups, not just the handful who currently show up.