The Coalition is back together, that may not be a good thing
If there was ever any question about the dire state of conservative politics in Australia after the Coalition’s comprehensive election rout, the self-indulgent posturing of the past week leaves no doubt.
The Coalition has just recorded the worst result in its 80-year history, with 43 seats out of 150 in the House of Representatives to Labor’s 94 – and counting.
Within the now splintering Coalition, the National party has 15 seats and, with just five senators, does not even reach “major party” status in the Senate. The Liberal Party was the election’s biggest loser in the Labor landslide to now have 28 seats.
It is a staggering loss and one that augurs the end of the Liberal Party as a political force unless the need for wholesale changes at every level — organisational, membership, pre-selection and, above all, policies — is acknowledged and acted on.
To her credit, new Liberal leader Sussan Ley, in her first major statement, recognised this, declaring a defeat of such scale demanded a root and branch review of every aspect of the party’s election campaign.
This was an essential recognition of the need for renewal and rebuilding that faces every party in opposition, to make it “relevant and electable” again.
Ley’s election was itself historic. Not only is she the first woman to lead the Liberal Party, most telling in this tawdry internecine power play, is that she is also therefore the first female leader of the Coalition.
Therein lies a tale, one that ought to be central to any understanding of the Nationals’ petulant refusal to accept Ley’s authority over her own party, let alone over the Coalition.
Ley had been leader for barely a week when, in a moment of post-election denial and delusion, the leader of the Nationals, David Littleproud, demanded that she pre-empt the slated election review and lock in place the very policies that had driven the Liberals’ disastrous electoral showing.
Littleproud handed Ley an ultimatum – that she pre-emptively accept four key policy positions before the planned review had even begun. If not, he would pull the Nationals out of the Coalition and, not to put too fine a point on it, wreck the joint.
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Those demands were: A recommitment to Peter Dutton’s failed nuclear energy policy, a $20 billion regional infrastructure fund, communication services guarantees in the bush, and divestiture powers to break up supermarkets found to be abusing market share.
Significant in all of this is the Coalition’s archaic view of women as both voters and politicians – even those, as recent events have shown, at the highest level of its own leadership.
The proportion of women MPs in the Liberal and National parties today is just 28.5 per cent – less than a third.
In the House of Representatives, the proportion of Coalition women members fell 3 per cent at the 2025 election to sit at just 21 per cent, or barely one in five. Only three of the Nationals’ current crop of 15 “merit-based” MPs in the House of Representatives are women, and they have never had a female leader.
Any consideration of this critical context has been notably absent in the numerous political commentaries about Littleproud’s short-lived breach, each trying to find a new way to depict this conservative political upheaval as a cheesy “relationship” meme – because, well, a female leader.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Numerous commentaries reduced this significant political rupture to a personal one: “Liberals and Nationals consciously uncouple after long and fruitful marriage”; “After the Coalition’s very public split, I can only offer this time-honoured break-up advice: Work on yourself’”; “As with all break-ups, you don’t want to say anything too harsh in case the couple gets back together”; “What does the divorce mean?” I won’t go on, it’s excruciating.
Could these commentaries be any more reflective of the gender aspect to this episode, while at the same time completely overlooking it?
Ley had been leader for just over a week and was in Albury with her dying mother. Littleproud drove to Albury three days after Ley’s mother died to give her the Nationals’ ultimatum in person. Classy.
Ley’s response to these standover tactics, “holding a gun to the Liberal Party’s head” as Malcolm Turnbull described it, was strong, calm and on point: The Liberal Party would now form the official Opposition, alone. “
As the largest non-government political party, the Liberal Party is the official opposition”, Ley said, and the shadow portfolios would be “drawn exclusively from the Liberal Party party room”.
With the Nationals sidelined by their own miscalculation, it looked as though Ley had just found the spine that Turnbull left on the floor of the Coalition party room 10 years ago when he capitulated to the Nationals’ demands on climate action.
Faced with the loss of shadow portfolios, status and resources, the Nationals’ walkout lasted barely 24 hours before negotiations began, and within a week the Coalition was back.
If nothing else, Littleproud achieved something I never thought possible: He made Barnaby Joyce sound sensible.
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Joyce and others in the “sensible centre” of the deeply divided Nationals immediately disputed Littleproud’s unilateral demand that the Nationals not be bound by Coalition cabinet solidarity, which had been neither raised with nor agreed to by the party room.
This impossible demand would have ensured ongoing disruption and public division over Coalition policies, given Nationals members the right to dispute those policies, and permanently undermined Ley’s leadership and authority. Little wonder she rejected it out of hand.
The equally damaging demand that the Liberals lock in the retention of Dutton’s failed nuclear energy policy was politically no less damaging. It rested on a near delusional denial of the facts of the Coalition’s election loss, namely that the nuclear policy was electoral kryptonite that cost the Coalition as many as 11 seats.
Dutton’s nuclear plan was electoral kryptonite. Photo: TND/AAP
Yet this is one of the four major policies that the Nationals demand be retained without review or reflection. They could scarcely have devised a clearer pathway to certain electoral failure.
Littleproud has since agreed to a compromise, that the Liberal Party support removing the moratorium on nuclear energy, while leaving energy policy open to review. A position that was agreed to by the Nationals’ party room on Wednesday.
True to form, Littleproud and his supporters presented these rapid backdowns as a win, even while Nationals MPs described his leadership as “terminal”.
Matt Canavan, who had stood against Littleproud for the leadership, described the outcome as a “win” for regional Australia: “we will always fight hard for you!” he crowed, even as thousands of his regional constituents remained isolated by record floods and drought, exacerbated by that climate change that Canavan, among others in the Coalition parties, continues to deny.
The damage from this “ seismic event” is profound and, despite all efforts to successfully refloat the leaking Coalition, it will endure, eroding any remaining shared political calculus within the parties as much as between them.
The critical question now is whether the Liberals will succumb to the Nationals’ demands and pre-emptively constrain Ley’s promised comprehensive review by removing these policies from its remit.
The nuclear option was adopted only as a “political fix” to counter the Albanese government’s successful drive to renewables. It is a political chimera without hope of realisation, designed only to derail the push for renewables and prolong the life of fossil fuels.
Australia is already on track to having 83 per cent of our energy supplied by renewables by 2030 and to reach the Paris target of a 42 per cent cut in emissions by 2030.
With Labor’s landslide election result, it can be expected to remain in government for at least six years, by which time the transition to renewables will be all but complete.
The Nationals’ demand that the Coalition again support a policy of untested and impossibly costly nuclear energy is, for the urban-based Liberal Party desperately in need of renewal, a vapid form of political suicide.
Nor would overturning the moratorium on nuclear development be seen as a valid political compromise. It would simply signal to the electorate that the promised seven nuclear reactors remain in the Coalition wings, waiting to be reactivated should it ever return to government.
That the Liberal Party could even be contemplating retaining it is an indication of just how far removed it is from contemporary Australian political reality.
Jenny Hocking is Emeritus Professor at Monash University, Distinguished Whitlam Fellow at the Whitlam Institute at Western Sydney University and award-winning biographer of Gough Whitlam.
This article originally appeared on Pearls And Irritations.
