Barnaby Joyce has been around long enough to seem merely a bumbling, amusing politician, but ... Credit:Andrew Meares The National Party is why the greyhound industry lives another year in NSW, condemning thousands of dogs to die in perpetuity – given its in-built need to slaughter old, slow, and broken dogs – so a few more of us can have a punt. The National Party is part of the reason why Australia's response to climate change is so languid compared to the threat. That is despite farmers, its core constituency, being among the most at risk. It might say that "to protect our environment for future generations, we need to tackle climate change", but it was the first out of the blocks to blame renewable energy when the lights went out in Adelaide. It was up to its neck in the dishonest and disastrous campaign against an effective, sensible, and inexpensive climate policy. The National Party is why we have an interminable debate instead of getting on with joining the rest of the advanced world and let two women wed. Despite an enormous majority of polled Australians in favour of equality, we're still talking about Tony Abbott's delaying contrivance because it's in the agreement Malcolm Turnbull signed with the junior Coalition partner, the junior calling the shots. Andrew Broad, an otherwise obscure MP for the north-west corner of Victoria, threatened to bring down the government if it allowed a parliamentary vote on marriage equality. His "conditional" support for his own government was over an issue so exceptionally important to him that it is ignored by his website. It also goes unmentioned on his party's website too, as if it didn't want people to know its position.

Why would an MP supposedly fighting for the interests of rural Australians throw government away to stop a few more weddings? There is a clue in the Nationals' constitution. Its first object – listed before any other, before economic growth or trade benefits for farmers – is to promote within Australia "a society based on Christian ethics and loyalty to the Crown". The National Party is a religious party, one with an increasing number of MPs but with a vote mired in the single-digits, and not that much higher that One Nation is polling with its policy renovated with new people to hate. In the three elections before its Queensland chapter merged with the Liberals to form the LNP in 2008, the Nationals didn't win more than 6 per cent of the national first preference vote. In Queensland, for every vote it won, the LIberals won four. Adding a fifth of LNP votes at the last election to the Nationals' total means it still only nominally attracted 6.4 per cent of first preferences across the country. Yet for its fringe, minority appeal, it gets majority action, wagging conservative governments since 1923. It is the party for guns, the party for killing dogs, the party for interfering in people's personal lives.

It's the party of George Christensen, the anti-Islam member from northern Queensland, who wants to end income tax because "there are only a few things more detestable than someone mooching directly off your income, even if it is the state and it is supposedly for the common good". It is the party of that poor advertisement for a pretty town, Barry O'Sullivan, of Toowoomba, whose approach to examining witnesses in Senate estimates hearings is to be rude, and let others think. He's the one who interrupted last year's instalment of the rolling inquisition into the Human Rights Commission to boom: "I thought you might like to hear a man's voice." Not if it's yours, Barry. And it's the party of Barnaby Joyce, who proves both that the clown can get the prize – if the prize is occasionally acting up as prime minister – and that Stockholm syndrome applies to politics. He's been around long enough to seem merely a bumbling, amusing politician. Likeable enough. But as weirdos across the world are proving, clowns can be dangerous, and these performers need to be put in their place. Tim Dick is a Fairfax Media columnist.