In practical terms it’s a strange thing to demand: calling on the leadership to pass a package that has no obvious prospect of passing the parliament without amendment in the time left available.

But six Queensland Nationals have elected to put the boot into their leader, Michael McCormack, for failing on two fronts: failing to pressure the Liberals to pass the so-called “big stick” package, which they believe will lower power prices, and failing to sign up to new taxpayer-backed investments in power generation. For most Nationals north of the New South Wales border, that means new coal generation.

The foray is about a substantive issue. The Nationals have been focused on energy throughout the government’s tortuous, sometimes incoherent, backwards and forwards movements in this policy space over the current term in government.

It’s not a cause of convenience.

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But with this sortie, the rebels are hanging a lantern over a problem their leader can’t really solve, and he can’t solve it, predominantly, because the government has comprehensively botched things up.

A brief history might be useful. The then Turnbull government weighed in to power prices and grid reliability a couple of years ago (remembering those are normally state issues) in order to indulge what people imagined would be a quick and dirty partisan fight – only to find themselves mired in an actual policy problem of some complexity, which they’d made themselves responsible for politically.

As a consequence of this basic political miscalculation, the government has been trying to defuse their own cunning plan for most of the current term, without much success.

Added to that longer term problem is a more recent point of friction within the governing coalition, and this is an important driver in the new insurgency.

The coal-friendly quarters of the National party (read the central Queensland crew) are now deeply concerned that the Liberals are going to stiff them on new taxpayer-backed coal-fired power plants in order to hold progressive centre-right voters in the southern states.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Scott Morrison with Michael McCormack (left) and Barnaby Joyce. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

With polling showing voters deeply concerned about climate change, and with the Liberals facing insurgencies in their own heartland, Scott Morrison is now treading more carefully on coal to try to stem a protest vote that looms as a material threat to his government’s re-election chances in May.

The Nationals’ concerns, as well as the rolling energy policy frustrations, has prompted the six MPs to lob their small grenade.

The gesture tells you everything you need to know about the mulish mood inside the National party.

Many MPs are exasperated with McCormack’s performance on a range of fronts, and despairing (I don’t use the word lightly) about where they have washed up collectively in the post-Barnaby period.

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There is frustration that McCormack won’t stand up to the Liberals, a passivity that has allowed the Liberals to mission creep into areas like drought and disaster relief, which should be core business for the junior coalition partner.

Nationals are feeling a growing backlash from their constituents, which has been gathering pace in regional areas, giving rise to more coordinated activity by local independents – but they remain divided about what, if anything, can be done about their current predicament.

And the sad part is, to a substantial degree, they only have themselves to blame.

The Nationals have spent years coasting on the personal brand of a populist leader to differentiate themselves from the Liberals, and to send a message to the bush that they are fighting the good fight in Canberra. But they failed to plan for what might happen when that cycle turned from boom to bust.

The Nationals now face an election season with an underwhelming frontman, who just this week struggled to articulate a single instance where the Nationals had sided with the interests of farmers over the interests of miners when they come into conflict.

The Project (@theprojecttv) Waleed: “Could you name a single, big policy area where the Nats have sided with the interests of farmers over the interest of miners when they come into conflict?”



Nationals leader Michael McCormack responds. #auspol #TheProjectTV pic.twitter.com/YnhmNV2ZFJ

Given the Nationals have been fretting among themselves for months, but apparently unable to agree on what to do to turn around their collective fortunes, the antidote now appears to be a version of every man and woman for themselves.

As one of the signatories to the letter, Keith Pitt, put it on Thursday when asked to explain his intervention: “The federal election is coming up and I want to be able to look every one of our constituents in the eye and say I have done everything I possibly can.”

The translation for that is simple: if the leader can’t carry the water for the Nationals, as leaders are supposed to do, then we have to start, at the local level, getting out and carrying our own.