The Nationals policy record

The Nationals fight 28 November as the junior partner in a joint ticket, with one idea of their own: at least 25% of new infrastructure spending in regional Victoria. The guarantee has no definition and no price, and the $15bn the party calls corruption is counted as a saving, as a past loss and as a $5,000 bill to each household.

Terrain @terrain.pub

Oct 29, 20268 min read

ost of what the Nationals promise is promised jointly with the Liberals. What is theirs alone is a funding formula nobody has defined, a Treaty replacement with no cost, and a civil-liberties package that would put protest registration in Victoria Police’s hands.

The Nationals hold 9 of 88 Assembly seats and 2 of 40 in the Council, their best lower-house result since 1943¹ . Danny O’Brien has led the party since November 2024 and is Deputy Leader of the Coalition. The election is on 28 November, and the platform is addressed almost entirely to regional Victoria.

Both campaign booklets are joint Liberal–Nationals documents, with forewords from Brad Battin and O’Brien and authorisation from both parties²parties³ . Most of what is in them is shared. That covers 3,000 police, the bail and sentencing changes, stamp duty abolition to $1m, the payroll threshold, scrapping the emergency services fund and stopping VNI West. The shared platform is set out on the Liberal page and isn’t repeated here.

What follows is the Nationals’ own column: the commitments their policies page publishes and the Liberal releases do not, and the places where the two parties take different positions⁴ .

A quarter of the people, 25% of the money

The Fair Share Guarantee is the party’s organising idea. The Nationals say regional Victoria is 25% of the state’s population and gets 12% of infrastructure funding, a figure they attribute to the Parliamentary Budget Office⁵ . The guarantee is that at least 25% of all new government infrastructure investment will be spent in regional Victoria⁴ .

No document defines “new government infrastructure investment”. Whether the base includes maintenance, grants to councils or projects the Commonwealth pays for is not stated. No costing has been published, and no paper behind the 12% figure is reproduced in either booklet.

The guarantee is also the mechanism that is said to pay for everything else. The roads page puts $5bn for road repair “locked in through our Fair Share Guarantee”⁶ . Every regional commitment on this page is nominally funded by it, so none of them is separately costed.

The Liberals adopted the same 25% guarantee in May 2026, so it is joint policy⁷ . The Nationals published it first and campaign on it harder.

The eight things that are theirs alone

Treaty replaced, with no price on the replacement

A Nationals government would repeal Treaty within its first 100 days and establish First Nations Victoria in its place⁴ . The agency would have one minister responsible for it, and would publish quarterly updates and an annual report to Parliament. The October 2025 release that announced the plan called it a standalone department⁸ . The 2026 policies page calls it a standalone service delivery agency. Both documents are the party’s own.

The party puts the saving at about $1bn over a decade, citing a Parliamentary Budget Office finding that Treaty would cost $948.3m over that period⁴ . The Ten Year Plan rounds the same saving to $1bn over ten years³ .

First Nations Victoria has no published cost. If the agency is set up, it draws on money the repeal is counted as saving, and neither document nets the two figures against each other.

Organised crime, and a civil-liberties package

Two crime commitments are not in the Liberal record. The first is legislation modelled on the United States RICO framework, aimed at gang leaders who profit from serious criminal activity and would face significant prison sentences⁴ . Alongside it, a taskforce of Victoria Police, the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Taxation Office would seize assets linked to crime on Big Build sites. Neither is costed, and the role the two Commonwealth agencies would play is not described.

The civil-liberties package is the widest divergence between the two Coalition partners and has had almost no coverage. Police would get move-on powers back, so they could direct people to leave a place, including during protests the party calls disruptive or unsafe. Major protests would have to be registered with Victoria Police in advance. Prisoners would serve their full sentences, with Emergency Management Days abolished. Suppression orders would be limited to cases where the party says they are genuinely necessary⁴ .

Each item moves the line between the state and the people it polices, and none has a published cost. The registration requirement does not say what counts as a major protest, or what happens to organisers who don’t register.

Firearms: a position, not a policy

Neither booklet nor the policies page contains a firearms policy. The position exists in media releases responding to the Lay review, which the government commissioned after the Bondi attack. Martin Cameron called the review knee-jerk and said it unfairly targeted sporting shooters, recreational shooters and farmers⁹ .

Melina Bath said there is no evidence that arbitrary caps on ownership reduce large-scale terrorist events, and that rejecting that recommendation was the right call. The party says it will examine the legislation when it is released to protect the rights of licensed owners⁹ . It also says nearly 100,000 people signed its petitions against a cap on how many firearms one person may own.

The accurate description is opposition to numerical caps plus scrutiny of the Lay bill. The party has not said it opposes firearms law more broadly, and neither document sets out what it would change.

Health and roads money

The rural health commitment is $40m over four years for a Victorian Rural Health Workforce Incentive Scheme. Doctors, nurses, midwives and allied health staff would get up to $10,000, plus relocation, accommodation and professional development support, to take hard-to-fill regional jobs⁴ . The party costed it itself, and no independent costing has been published.

Country Roads and Bridges would send $288m to all 48 regional councils, $1.5m each a year for four years, with no tied list of projects⁴ . The design gives councils discretion the rest of the platform doesn’t, and the figure is again the party’s own.

The V/Line commitment is 25 three-car train sets across five corridors⁴ . The party’s published seat totals don’t agree. One list gives 1,110 extra seats, with 888 of them on the western corridors; another gives 5,328 across five corridors. No cost has been published for the fleet.

The ledger, and the $15bn counted three ways

The Ten Year Plan promises a cash surplus by 2032 and lists the savings that get there. They are $22bn from a hiring freeze on back-office roles, $1bn from repealing Treaty, and $20m from capping executive salaries. The fourth is the elimination of “Labor’s $15 billion of corruption payments on capital projects”³ . The regional booklet is more careful about the timeline and says the party won’t promise a surplus in its first year² .

The $15bn is used three ways in the party’s own documents. On page 4 of the plan it is a forward saving. On page 9 it is money already gone: “at least $15 billion in taxpayer funds has been lost, misused, or redirected to bikies and organised crime”. In the same paragraph it is a cost to households, a “corruption tax” of $5,000 per household³ .

Money already lost is not a saving in a forward estimate. The plan does not argue that any of the $15bn can be recovered, and it does not price the taskforce that would try.

Two more figures carry a mismatch of period. The $22bn hiring freeze is a ten-year figure set against four-year commitments. The policies page describes the same freeze as 2.5 years and says no public servant will be sacked, with the back office reduced by natural attrition⁴ .

Tax is a promise and a review that sit awkwardly together. The party commits to no new taxes or charges, and also to a review of the entire tax system, without saying what the review may recommend⁴ .

The stamp duty pledge, abolition for first home buyers up to $1m, has no 2026 dollar cost. The party quotes a Parliamentary Budget Office estimate of more than 17,000 exemptions in the first full year⁴ . The regional booklet adds a saving to a buyer of up to $54,560² . The only dollar figure in circulation is the Liberals’ May 2025 estimate of $1.09bn over four years, which has not been updated.

What the Nationals have not published

These are silences in the party’s own record, checked against both booklets, the policies page and the four portfolio sub-pages.

A definition or a cost for the Fair Share Guarantee, which is the funding mechanism for the rest of the platform.
A cost for First Nations Victoria, for the RICO laws, for the joint asset taskforce or for any part of the civil-liberties package.
A cost for the 25 V/Line train sets.
Any housing supply target for the next term, and any rental policy at all — no minimum standards, no eviction reform, no rent cap. The housing page is a feedback form.
A state climate target, or any nuclear position. The site’s nuclear material comes from federal MPs.
Positions on abortion, assisted dying, drug reform or gambling reform.

How this compares

Labor’s page carries the toll and fare caps and the $1.5bn hospital plan, and the shared Coalition platform sits on the Liberal page. Between the Nationals and the Liberals the differences are the eight items above. The civil-liberties package is the one whose effects reach people who would never vote for either party.

One caution if you read the party’s news feed. It republishes federal Nationals material alongside state releases, and the front page currently leads with a visit by Senator Matt Canavan⁴ . Searches there for firearms, nuclear or net zero return mostly federal MPs, so a state position can’t be read off them.

Linked notes

https://terrain.pub/notes/cost-of-living-and-energy-prices

https://terrain.pub/notes/crime-and-community-safety

https://terrain.pub/notes/statewide-treaty

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Terrain @terrain.pub