Illustration: John Shakespeare It didn't feel like a win for the NSW Nationals leader, Troy Grant, who'd led the proposal for a ban, but it was counted as a victory for the bulk of the party. Grant's consolation prize: he has kept his job as leader. It was the same story at the election itself. While the Turnbull government lost 14 seats and clung to power with a bare majority of one, the National Party actually made a gain. The Nationals held 15 seats before the election and 16 after, representing 21 per cent of the Coalition. This is quite a revival. Eight years ago they held just nine seats. This year's election was the first time since 1929 that the Nationals have increased their representation at an election while in government.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull both raised concerns with South Australia's energy infrastructure. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen And because they emerged as a bigger share of the Coalition, they were entitled to an extra seat at the cabinet table as well. In a cabinet of 23, the Nationals now occupy five seats. That's the biggest number the party has ever enjoyed, last matched under Arthur (Artie) Fadden in 1950 in the Menzies government. The Nationals now have their hands on portfolios encompassing water, agriculture, mining, infrastructure, transport, small business and regional development. They have not lost any major policy arguments inside the government for a long time.

This is the same political party whose own former leaders wrote it off just eight years ago. They lined up to administer the last rites – Doug Anthony, Ian Sinclair, Peter Nixon and John Anderson called for the party to surrender its identity and merge fully with the Liberals after the 2007 election. "The size of the party will continue to decline," said Doug Anthony. "Equally severe will be the decline in our reputation as an influential party as numbers decline." He predicted a collapse in party support, finances and even the loyalty of Nationals MPs. Instead, the party has come back from the dead. The bigger picture is that the Coalition between the Liberals and Nationals is perhaps the most successful in the Western world. As academic Linda Botterill pointed out in her 2009 book on the party, "the stability and predictability" of the Coalition makes it "an anomaly" in Western politics.

And the new vigour of the Nationals with an accommodating Liberal partner promises to extend its durability. Joyce has a close and convivial relationship with Turnbull. Barnaby Joyce intends to build the relationship into the same long and strong power-sharing arrangement enjoyed by the Liberals' Menzies and Nationals' Black Jack McEwen. McEwen was such a force that he ultimately had the power to veto the Liberals' choice of leader for their own party post-Menzies, when he blocked Billy McMahon in favour of John Gorton. Black Jack "deserves the attention reserved for prime ministers because of his national prominence and his dominance of trade and industry policy during the postwar decades," according to the Oxford Companion to Australian Politics. No doubt Joyce would enjoy a similar epitaph on his own political career. He sees the correct relationship with the Liberals as being "business partners — we're not sycophants and we're not enemies".

How has this Nationals revival happened? And how has it happened under a leader that many regard as a bumpkin, a clot and a clown? Look at him on the TV on Thursday, holding forth to the media, complete with an Akubra on his head, an unsightly skin cancer rash on his beetroot-red face and a liberal festooning of dandruff on his coat collar? There are two major factors. One is that the old division of political labour between the two parties has changed. It was always based on the Nationals representing the farmer and the country while the Liberals were the party of the city-dweller and capital. Today, it's not so straightforward. "The vast bulk of our votes don't come from people who live on farms, they come from people who live in streets where the garbage is collected" in towns and regional centres and peripheries, Joyce has pointed out to colleagues.

The Nationals' core constituency now has the same sort of white, low-income, working-class sensibility as Donald Trump's supporters. Today the Nationals represent a poor-man's conservatism and the Liberals represent a more laissez-faire liberalism. It's obvious in the contrast between the parties on same-sex marriage, for instance. Turnbull calls it "marriage equality"; Joyce calls it "marriage redefinition". Turnbull hoped that the plebiscite, a policy bequeathed him by Tony Abbott as a compromise between Liberal and National, would lead to progress; Joyce supported it in the hope that it would lead to stalling. Courtesy of Labor's decision this week to block legislation for a plebiscite, Joyce has now got his wish granted. The immutable position of the Nationals in favour of a plebiscite guarantees that there will be no compromise from the government, even if Turnbull wanted to offer one.

When a Liberal leader veers too conservative, he is rejected by his own party. Tony Abbott is the case in point. Better to have a more liberal Liberal and allow the Nationals to appeal to the conservative vote. "That way you have two very genuinely different spear-chuckers for ultimately different arms of the Coalition," Joyce has observed privately. This is exactly what just happened at the July election, according to the analysis of the Nationals. Turnbull's coup against Abbott angered many conservative Liberals who couldn't bring themselves to vote Liberal as a result. They voted National, where there was one available, instead. Second is the persona of Joyce himself. Abbott once described him as Australia's most effective retail politician for the way he challenged and finally broke the Australian political consensus in favour of carbon pricing. To Joyce, the Nationals aren't thriving despite the fact that he looks like a bumpkin but because he looks like a bumpkin. A successful conservative is unashamed of who he or she is, in Joyce's philosophy. "The biggest mistake a National can make is to try to look like a Liberal – the voters just drip off you," he's told colleagues.

Consider the way that Joyce and the Nationals led the attack on renewable energy when South Australia's electricity system shut down. They instantly pounced on the opportunity to blame renewable energy, even in the face of the fact that it was not solar panels but a mighty storm that shut the grid. They were denounced and mocked, yet they have succeeded in reinvigorating the national policy debate on energy supply and finding the right place of coal and renewables. Turnbull himself, the man once known primarily as an advocate of carbon pricing, took up the cry. This was not coincidental; he and Joyce co-ordinated from the moment the lights went out in Adelaide. You may despise Joyce for the way he disregards the facts in the pursuit of an argument, but you can't deny his effectiveness. The Nationals don't hold any seats in South Australia yet managed to frame the national debate according to their agenda.

It's not all smooth in Barnabyland, of course. There are seething tensions in his party. Many Nationals resent the way that Joyce promoted his former chief of staff, Matt Canavan, into a cabinet post after a mere two years in Parliament, for example. And Joyce is under pressure for his blatantly pork-barrelling decision to relocate an agency in his portfolio, the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, from Canberra and into his own electorate. But for a party whose own former leaders thought doomed less than a decade ago, the Nationals are succeeding remarkably well. And nothing breeds success like success itself. The party's fundraising dinner in Canberra on Thursday night was sold out and with a waiting list. Big-ticket donors like Gina Rinehart, James Packer and Nick Paspaley are staunch supporters. For a party that's always been scraping for funds, it's suddenly flush. Let the city folk and the elites giggle at me, Barnaby tells a confidant – "that way they don't see the tackle coming". Peter Hartcher is political editor.