Just last month he completed the Sydney Morning Herald Half Marathon in 2hrs 11mins 6secs - ‘not bad for a bloke in his 64th year’.

“I’m into marathons, so I’m in this for the long haul, too,” Mr Pape said, referring to his quest for a merger of the Nationals and Liberals in NSW.

A motion to this effect, put by the Armidale and Guyra branches of the Nationals, was rejected at the party’s annual state conference in Sydney just over a week ago.

Mr Pape, who is chairman of the New England Federal Electorate Council of the Nationals, was one of a handful of the 200 voters who supported the motion.

“It drew a lot of heat but, in my view, not much light,” he said.

“In one sense it was a big premature, but the majority of our (Armidale and Guyra) members take the view that we should have gone down this track . . . we did and we pressed it pretty hard.

“But I was not going to convince anybody no matter what I said, they had already made up their mind . . . to put it bluntly, their eyes were deaf.”

Mr Pape remains convinced of the benefits of the merger, such as greater synergy with the Liberals and economies of scale.

“And there can be rationalisation,” he said.

“I would advocate the sale of head office and putting in three big regional offices into country NSW.

“We’re supposed to be the party of decentralisation and we’ve got a head office stuck in Carrington St, Sydney.”

Mr Pape had attempted, unsuccessfully, to have the whole debate adjourned until after the release late next month of a special review of the Nationals being prepared by former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson and the party’s former NSW State Director, Michael Priebe.

“We’ll wait and see what the report and federal management committee have to say about it,” he said.

FOOTNOTE: The Armidale branch did have one success at the conference with a motion that ‘the States transfer their powers in respect of universities to the Commonwealth and the Commonwealth administer universities under a statutory authority to be known as the Universities Commission’.