TONY Abbott and Barnaby Joyce get each other; they are kindred spirits in some respects, cut from the same cultural cloth.

Before Abbott assumed the responsibility of the leadership, he and Joyce exhibited common traits as politicians: raffish conservatives, with a tendency to speak startling truths to lurking television cameras.

These days, Abbott embodies the very principle of sound-bite discipline. He's clean-freak tidy in utterance.

Barnaby less so, although periodically he tries. With Joyce, the metaphors surge like white water, careening into one another. Containment via talking points and gaffer tape is never a viable option.

Both are in transition to being the leadership combination of the next Coalition government. Through this period of opposition, they are forging their pact, case study by case study.

All Liberal leaders must define their accommodation with the Nationals. John Howard, a devout coalitionist, had the affable Tim Fischer and a couple of instinctive freeish-marketeers and free-traders in John Anderson and Mark Vaile.

The compact Howard forged with the Nationals was uncomplicated. We Liberals do the economic policy (some of it tough for your constituents, sorry) and, in return, have this money. Scads of it, to invest in roads, bridges, swimming pools and the like. Sorry to be blunt, but there it is.

It wasn't all plain sailing of course. Joyce's arrival in 2005 was a game-changer in Coalition relations. The bush populist was on a mission to restore the distinct identity of the Nats. The Joyce philosophy was that Nationals should dance with the people who brought them to Canberra, to a tune selected by those people.

Joyce fractured the settled pact by changing the internal dynamic within the Nationals.
There was consequent angst. In Peter Costello's office, teeth were ground in frustration. Staff from Howard's office (and beyond) were deployed to the Senate with an explicit mandate to Barnaby whisper.

But despite the uptick in irritation, the fundamentals (Liberals do policy, Nationals prime pumps) remained in place through the Howard years.

Now there's a new era.

If Abbott wins the next election, he will govern in different circumstances than his predecessors, with different personnel. And while I'm sure he'd refute this, Abbott is not by reflex Howard, Costello or Peter Reith on economic philosophy; not a crusader on policies that are articles of faith for the free-market right of the Liberal Party.

Abbott wants to win, not genuflect in abstraction before the H. R. Nicholls Society. And last week's Coalition discussion paper on foreign investment provides instructive material in interpreting the new and evolving Coalition pact.

Future food security is a policy issue worth debating. But you certainly cannot imagine Costello in government copping cheerfully a dramatic reduction in the threshold for overseas purchases of farm land. There would have been objections about populism, the signalling, and about excessive red tape for investors - which the Coalition as a whole professes to be against.

Feeling no obligation to mince words about the current dynamic, Reith noted last week that Joyce ''has a bias towards protectionism and … does not like foreign investment''. Finance Minister Penny Wong forged a unity ticket. The Nats, she said, were now ''writing Coalition economic policy''.

The Nationals are doubtless pushing the envelope - wanting hard policy concessions as well as cash. That incursion troubles the rationalist Liberals, compounded by Abbott's own pragmatic tendencies.
Will he be tough enough with them? It's an important question, because it will define the essential character of his government.

My view on the substance of the foreign investment change is it's likely more political window dressing than substance: a clarion call to the Coalition base and Labor's blue-collar outer suburban ''battlers'' who've defected to Abbott, rather than a policy revolution. (And a nod to Sydney radio king Alan Jones, who has been off the leash on farmland.)

The Nats did not get as much as they wanted. Activists wanted the foreign investment regime knocked down and rebuilt - in the end they got a new kitchen and some patriotic wallpaper.
Warren Truss managed to keep a lid on Joyce (which is in his interests given he is still the Nationals' leader, and in Abbott's interests given the free-marketeers in the Liberal Party made it clear they would cop only so much politicking on this question, and no more).

But while the Coalition rationalists console themselves that it could have been so much worse, these facts remain. Evidence shows we don't have a ''problem'' with foreign investment in agricultural land. Maybe we will develop one, but we haven't yet.

Foreign investment is, as Abbott says, unequivocally good for this country. That's a hard message to sell. Given that reality, best you don't trip lightly into adjusting a regime that seems to work in the national interest, whatever the apocalyptic pub talk might suggest. Everything you give away becomes impossible to give back.

Direction matters. Precedent matters, even if political reality requires balancing internal interests. The counter argument to ''nothing substantive to see here'' is a question that lingers after last week's compromise : what are you saying here, Mr Abbott?


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