‘100 per cent disappointed. Furious’: Nationals MP says Littleproud misled the party

Queensland Nationals MP Colin Boyce has unloaded on party leader David Littleproud, refusing to support his leadership and saying he misled colleagues over the scope of demands made during the split with the Liberals.

In comments that increase the chances of a Nationals’ leadership spill when parliament returns in late July, Boyce said he was “100 per cent disappointed, furious in fact” about how the Coalition split played out.

Nationals MP Colin Boyce has said of David Littleproud’s leadership: “I can’t support a man who misleads the party room”.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“How David Littleproud’s leadership pans out in the long term is unknown. I can’t support a man who misleads the party room,” Boyce said.

The Nationals quit the federal Coalition last week, the first split in 38 years, after a dispute over four key policies – support for nuclear power, laws that could force supermarket divestiture, improved regional mobile phone coverage and a billion-dollar regional fund – as well as Littleproud’s demand to end the principle of shadow cabinet solidarity, which binds frontbenchers over collective decisions.

But after an outcry from party elders, including former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott, and hasty repair efforts from former Nationals leaders Barnaby Joyce and Michael McCormack, Littleproud and Liberal leader Sussan Ley returned to the negotiating table to reform the alliance late last week.

Littleproud told Sky News on Monday evening that it was still up to the Nationals in the party room to decide if they would return to the Coalition.

“We want to be in a Coalition, but I’m not going to walk away from the values and principles of the people who sent me to ­Canberra,” Littleproud said.

“We’ll continue to review some of those policies, including net zero,” he said, a day after deputy party leader Kevin Hogan said debate over the policy was settled.

On Tuesday, Littleproud confirmed “we’ve [he and Ley] got a set of words back that I’ll present to our party room”.

“There’s no flip-flopping from the National Party. We did not blink,” he said, defending the temporary split.

The signal that the two parties were on track to formally re-enter an agreement this week came as Ley prepared to unveil her shadow ministry as soon as Wednesday, with National-turned-Liberal Jacinta Nampijinpa Price facing demotion to the outer ministry after swapping parties.

This masthead reported on Monday that Liberal moderates, including former cabinet minister Melissa Price, presumptive Goldstein MP Tim Wilson, shadow minister Angie Bell, shadow assistant minister Andrew Bragg and Victorian backbencher MP Zoe McKenzie are in line for promotion. One of Ley’s closest allies, former Morrison government cabinet minister Alex Hawke, is also expected to be rewarded.

Senior conservatives Angus Taylor, Dan Tehan, James Paterson and Andrew Hastie are also expected to be given prominent roles.

Taylor is tipped to be handed the shadow defence portfolio, Tehan and Paterson are likely to be given foreign affairs and home affairs respectively, while Hastie wants to leave defence for an economic portfolio such as small business or resources.

In a sign of the divisions that still exist within the Nationals over the Coalition’s split, and following suggestions that former leader McCormack could be drafted in to replace the current leader – suggestions McCormack has dismissed – Boyce said the temporary break-up had been a “fiasco” and that he was not sure Littleproud would keep his job.

Boyce said Littleproud had not told the party room about his request to end shadow cabinet solidarity.

“A lot has been said about it, the advice we were given originally, we were not told the whole truth about the conversations, the letters, the little extras that were demanded. It was a chest-beating exercise on David Littleproud’s part,” he said.

“I was misled and not told the whole truth about those conversations between Sussan and David.

“How on earth can you have a Coalition when you don’t support cabinet solidarity? That’s ridiculous.”

The Nationals’ leader last week said he had accepted Ley’s decision to reject the shadow cabinet solidarity demand and that he had only made the request so he could avoid a repeat of the Nationals’ formal opposition to the Voice to parliament nearly six months before the Liberals arrived at the same decision.

Boyce, like Nationals senator Matt Canavan and former leader Joyce, is an outspoken critic of the Coalition’s commitment to net zero emissions by 2050, and he said he would push for the Nationals to drop their support of the target.

“My view remains, as it always has been, I am vehemently against this net zero argument, the emissions targets. Anyone suggesting this will not come up in Nationals party room is sadly deluding themselves. I will 100 per cent be bringing this up,” he said.

He said the Nationals’ support for net zero had not been discussed in the party room meeting last week, when the decision to split from the Liberals was taken, and that it should have been.

“Why wasn’t this [net zero] raised in the first instance in respect to the fiasco that has unfolded under Littleproud’s leadership?” Boyce said.

Last week, when challenged about whether he’d asked for extra conditions such as a waiver on cabinet solidarity,
Littleproud told ABC News Breakfast: “The only sticking point that we have are the four policy points”.

But he conceded there had been a “range of requests” sent in writing to Ley.

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