While I sincerely doubt anything I wrote may have had anything to do with his eventual decision, I was pleased he bowed to the inevitable and quit last week.

Mr Joyce has been a strong performer for the party and an undoubted national figure – in every sense of the word “National” but the whiff of bad behaviour and almost daily revelations proved too much and was creating too much of a distraction from the business of government.

As I write these words on a Monday morning, Michael McCormack, from the Riverina area of New South Wales has just been elected as Mr Joyce’s replacement.

I wish Mr McCormack well but to my mind the appointment of a little known leader is a bit of a disappointment. 

Darren Chester seemed to be the stand-out candidate to replace Mr Joyce but perhaps his being a Victorian and perhaps a too-liberal Victorian counted against him.

Mr McCormack now not only has the immediate job of repairing the job of reputational damage to the party.

Longer term there needs to be a reset of what exactly the Nationals stand for.

Are they a genuine party for regional and rural Australia and if so, what exactly does that mean? Should they always and reflexively enter into coalitions with the Liberals and if so for what end other to than to get Nationals bums on ministerial leather? And what of Queensland with its unique arrangement of a combined party, the Liberal National Party?

The LNP addressed the unique situation where the Nationals were the senior member of the coalition in our state. In the early 2000s that Labor had an inexorable hold on government in Queensland as the Nationals had little or no relevance in the south-east where the vast majority of the seats are. Then Campbell Newman appeared to take government from outside parliament and after three years disappeared just as suddenly as he arrived.

Tim Nicholls failed to shine as his replacement and now Deb Frecklington is a more traditional Nationals-style leader. She treads a fine line appealing to two distinct communities – Derek Barry