The Coalition split is an ‘unmitigated disaster’ for Sussan Ley and the Liberals
Sussan Ley’s enemies can’t believe their luck. A week in she’s become the leader who couldn’t keep the Coalition together – reason enough they will say why she has to go, writes James Campbell.
Opinion
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Analysis: Seriously, how lucky is Anthony Albanese?
Three weeks ago two thirds of Australians voted for someone else at the general election.
Yet he has still ended up with close two to thirds of the seats in the House of Representatives.
If that wasn’t luck enough now the Liberal and National Parties have announced they are going their separate ways.
It cannot be emphasised strongly enough what an unmitigated disaster this is for both of them.
Campaigning together it was going to be hard enough for the Coalition to win the next election.
Campaigning separately they haven’t got a snowball’s chance in hell.
The fools among them will try and argue that this trial separation will be good for both of them with the Nats now free to concentrate on the regions and the Liberals the cities.
It’s a pretty idea which ignores a basic fact of political geography – the Liberal Party is not only a party of the city it’s also a party of the bush.
Indeed for most of their history the Liberals have represented more of regional Australia than the Nats, which don’t really exist in two of the states of this Commonwealth.
Splitting up the Coalition won’t mean complementarity – it will mean competition, vicious competition between the two while Labor cements its hold over the cities.
That’s not just because of the resources the Liberals will need to divert away from the cities, it is because in order to hold them they will have to enter into a policy arms race with the Nationals that threatens to render them unelectable.
Take abandoning net zero – let’s assume for arguments sake that it is indeed the electoral catnip outside the cities that some National Party MPs seem to think it is.
That may or may not be true – what is indisputable is that walking away from net zero will mean the end of any dreams the Liberals have or regaining their lost ancestral homelands of Wentworth and Kooyong.
Then there’s Queensland where the Liberal and National Parties sit together inside a merged party structure.
How is that going to work now?
No one I have spoken to seems to know.
Does Sussan Ley understand this?
Some of her colleagues aren’t sure.
Her enemies mutter darkly that in last week’s leadership vote Ley may have offered more shadow cabinet positions for votes than she had positions to offer.
By getting rid of the Nats will mean she can now keep all her promises.
These suspicions were not allayed by her behaviour on today’s Liberal Party teams meeting, held to discuss the bust up, during which she was asked by the soon-to-be-gone South Australian senator David Fawcett what would become of Liberals who accepted shadow cabinet positions in traditional National Party portfolios if and when they go back into coalition.
According to some reports Ley told them she planned to appoint outstanding Liberals to these jobs and there was no guarantee they would give these positions up even if they got back together with the Nats.
Ley’s enemies can’t believe their luck.
Last week they were coming to terms with the idea they were stuck with her as leader for the medium term as the prospect of blowing up their first female leader was too awful to contemplate.
A week into the job and Ley has become the leader who couldn’t keep the coalition together – reason enough they will say why she has to go.
It’s almost enough to make you wonder if some of these Liberals might have had a hand in this decision by their former National Party colleagues.
Either way all Liberal MPs will be praying a way can be found to quickly end this separation.
Because in politics as in marriages, the longer a separation goes on the more likely it is to end in divorce.
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Originally published as The Coalition split is an ‘unmitigated disaster’ for Sussan Ley and the Liberals
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