Writing on his blog Geoff Robinson sketches a brief history of mergers of the non-Labor forces in Queensland. I’m posting this with his permission, and suggest you check his blog out.

The announced merger between the Liberals and nationals in Queensland seems to involve the formation of a merged party at state level with tis federal MPs having the option of whether to sit with the Liberals or Nationals in federal parliament. Is there any reason why an MP would choose to sit with the Nationals? Once current group of Queensland National MPs moves on I would predict that the federal Nationals would disappear in Queensland. Queensland conservative politics has been down this road before. The brief emergence of a Country Party in Queensland in the early 1920s was followed by a reunification of the conservatives as the Country Progressive National Party in 1925. Although the CPNP won the 1929 elections it was otherwise a failure, and in 1935-36 it split into the Country Party and the UAP before briefly merging again in the 1940s. During the mergers federal MPs sat with the party of their choice but most even then caucused with the Nationalists/UAP. In Maranoa, the only seat lost by Labor in its 1943 federal landslide, the fact that the non-Labor candidate disavowed the merger and represented an independent Country Party grouping may have assisted his surprise victory (see my paper on western Queensland politics here).