Senator says under-pressure leader has ‘earned his spurs’ and warns against preferencing One Nation

The Liberal senator Arthur Sinodinos has said the Nationals need to rally behind their federal leader, Michael McCormack, after the New South Wales election result, which saw the Nationals punished in the bush.

Sinodinos also sent a clear public message that preferencing One Nation in the coming federal contest would be damaging to the Liberal party’s brand.

The former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce warned on Saturday night as the NSW results came in that his party needed to pursue more aggressive product differentiation, sending a “different message in regional areas” from the Liberal party, or risk another round of punishment.

“The Liberal party, as we go into this federal election, has to understand there are different constituencies, and we have to stand up for ours, or what was reflected at a state election will be reflected at a federal election,” Joyce said.

Even before the mind-focusing regional backlash in NSW, federal Nationals were positioning to resume public campaigning on internally contested policy issues, such as coal and energy prices, and water allocations, once they were clear of the state contest.

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While Nationals sources insist McCormack will not be toppled before the federal election, with Joyce a divisive figure internally, MPs are reserving their right to campaign without regard for the Liberal party’s imperative of defending metropolitan seats.

Some are also reserving the right to do preference deals with the fringe parties that polled strongly in NSW if that improves their chances of re-election in May.

Sinodinos, appearing on the ABC TV’s Insiders on Sunday, said the Nationals needed to stay united and support McCormack, who has been criticised internally for not standing up to the Liberals and not cutting through with voters.

In an intervention that will likely annoy some Nationals, the Liberal senator said McCormack had the support of the prime minister, Scott Morrison, and the treasurer and Liberal deputy leader, Josh Frydenberg.

McCormack, Sinodinos said, had “earned his spurs” and was fighting hard. He invoked the Nationals leader’s Twitter feed as evidence of his work ethic. “I follow his Twitter feed – he’s all over the country announcing projects.”

He conceded that McCormack, who replaced Joyce when the travails of his private life made his leadership untenable, was in a position of having “to establish a profile from a low base”.

We will repudiate any party which stands for stuff that is outside the mainstream Arthur Sinodinos

“That is true, but he’s establishing that profile,” Sinodinos said. “And I think it’s important for all the National party members to get behind Michael McCormack as we go into the home stretch.”

He characterised Joyce as a “marketing dynamo” despite the fact he had to resign from the Nationals leadership, and counselled him to use his energies for the “greater good of the Coalition”.

“That’s why Scott Morrison appointed him as an envoy on the drought, to give him that particular responsibility, to help channel him constructively into the work of the government,” Sinodinos said.

Asked about the desirability of preference deals with One Nation, given fringe parties performed strongly in regional NSW, Sinodinos argued the Coalition was better off pursuing a strategy to boost its primary vote rather than cutting deals to boost its position, which risked leakage to fringe parties on the right.

While Morrison declined to say on Friday whether Pauline Hanson was a racist, Sinodinos was clear on Sunday about One Nation. “We will repudiate any party which stands for stuff that is outside the mainstream, and that includes the sorts of racism or Islamophobia that some parties, including One Nation, have been out there talking about,” he said.

“And we will be saying to people who might be tempted to vote for a fringe party like that – don’t vote for them. Vote for a mainstream party which is putting the economy first and is trying to bring all Australians together.”

Sinodinos also pointed to negative consequences in state contests in Western Australia and Queensland, when the Coalition failed to repudiate One Nation and made a clear argument that preferencing parties such as One Nation was bad for the Liberal party brand.

He said the decision about preferences was ultimately one for party strategists on the ground, but those backroom calculations also needed to take into account how preferencing one party over another affected the image of the party as a whole.

Sinodinos said the brand of the party was established by core values and beliefs. He said the party of Robert Menzies stood against “identity politics and picking on people because of their colour, race, gender or ethnicity”.

He said Menzies negotiated a trade treaty with Japan in 1957, “at the time when memories of the war were still very raw in this country”.

“That’s the sort of lens we have to bring to all of these things”.