Peta Credlin: Wake up Lib MPs, way back to office is not through aping Labor

The two Coalition parties must stop the scrapping, pick themselves up, unite and focus on the job of being the strong opposition Australians demand and deserve, writes Peta Credlin.

It was Bob Menzies who noted that “defeat disunites the defeated”; and that’s been more than demonstrated within the Coalition even if their planned divorce turns out, as is likely, to be just a trial separation.

And for what?

Going back decades and decades, the Coalition’s precedent is that every policy taken to an election stands until it’s specifically changed. Not so, said new Liberal leader Sussan Ley, who threw everything up in the air.

Fine said the Nationals, have your reviews, but if you want us to sign a new Coalition Agreement, we must have four key policies locked in given how strongly our supporters feel about these issues. Fair enough you might say. After all, it’s not as though the four policies that the Nationals wanted confirmed were captain’s calls during the campaign.

The universal service obligation for country telecommunications dates back to John Howard’s time. The $20 billion regional fund was a commitment that Barnaby Joyce extracted from Scott Morrison as the price of signing up (reluctantly) to Net Zero in 2021. The divestiture power in competition law for over-concentrated markets exists in the US and the UK. And both the Liberals and the Nationals formally agreed to support civil nuclear power back in 2023.

Former prime minister John Howard described the breaking of the Liberals-Nationals relationship as “stupid”. Picture: NewsWire/Damian Shaw

Forget the whole “he said” - “she said” charade, the plain fact remains that all four policies sought by the Nationals had gone through the Coalition’s proper party processes and were deliberately taken to the election. To break the relationship over this was, in John Howard’s own words, “stupid”; something a raft of MPs past and present agreed, given the Liberal Party-National Party Coalition is the most successful political partnership in Australia’s history, having governed for 51 of the past 76 years. The two leaders should have kept at negotiations until they got the deal over the line.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley’s inexperience making the big calls showed last week. Picture: NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Instead, Ley put an artificial deadline of last Thursday on things so she could announce her new shadow ministry even though her only real deadline was the return of parliament in late July; meaning she had the time to get it right and didn’t use it. Despite having been in the parliament for 24 years, Ley’s inexperience making the big calls showed last week. The Nats might be the junior partner but that does not mean they are subservient and no Liberal leader builds trust implying that they’re barely tolerated.

And so it was on Friday, that the Liberal Party-room authorised their new leader to go back to the negotiating table with the Nationals, four policy preconditions accepted. The real question is why Ley ever felt the need to refuse them in the first place.

Plainly, there are some Liberals who wanted the Coalition to break because they think that the Nationals connection has made the Liberal Party too conservative. On Thursday, former MP Jason Falinski, who lost his seat to a Teal in 2022, said that the Nationals were to blame for the Liberals’ declining vote; even though it’s the Liberal primary vote that’s fallen through the floor since 2013 while the Nationals vote has remained consistent.

Unsurprisingly, Malcolm Turnbull chimed in, telling an ABC podcast that the Nationals had treated the Liberals with “zero respect” and that, if Ley re-formed the Coalition, that would be “just another case of the tail wagging the dog”.

The off-on-maybe discussions with the Nationals about renewing a coalition suggests that some senior Liberals think that their path back to power is to be more left-wing, or Labor-lite. Pretty obviously, some Liberal MPs want to use the election defeat to justify abandoning nuclear power; even though it’s clear that Labor’s renewables-only policy will continue to put up power prices, drive industry offshore, and increase the risk of blackouts.

Sussan Ley’s power base is the NSW Liberal Party moderates and this faction is full of players with considerable commercial interests tied up in renewables. Almost instantly after the election defeat, expensive TV ads appeared, demanding that the Liberals drop their pro-nuclear policy, from a hitherto unheard-of entity called Liberals Against Nuclear. Obviously, this would only be possible if the Liberals were no longer in coalition with the pro-nuclear Nationals.

Yes, the Liberals lost but nuclear power was not what cost them the election. Labor’s Medicare campaign was brutally effective and so too Labor’s lie about the $600 billion cost of nuclear. But nowhere did Labor argue against nuclear power as an energy source, because how could they; Labor support nuclear powered submarines?

Liberal MPs need to wake up; their way back to office is not through aping the Labor Party. Last week was an embarrassingly self-indulgent exercise after a demoralising campaign. Stop the scrapping, pick yourselves up, unite and focus on the job of being the strong opposition that Australians demand and deserve!

THUMBS UP

New Zealand government: “We are not prepared to sit on the sidelines and watch our industrial and manufacturing dwindle because of energy security concerns,” said Resources Minister Shane Jones as they abandoned net zero.

THUMBS DOWN

Lack of vision: Can’t we do something about harvesting too much water in the north for the benefit of drought-affected farmers in the south? Come on Canberra – think big!

Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm

Originally published as Peta Credlin: Wake up Lib MPs, way back to office is not through aping Labor