James Campbell: Insiders reveal political drama behind Coalition split
Insiders have lifted the lid on the political drama that almost led to the Liberal and National parties splitting up after 40 years this week.
James Campbell
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As dawn broke on Thursday the mood among the MPs, who, until Tuesday, had been trusted coalition partners had moved from shock to a grim gallows humour.
“We’re at that stage of the break-up where we’re publicly accusing each other of lying,” a senior Liberal joked that morning.
He was referring to the decision the night before of someone in Sussan Ley’s office to text in during 7.30 contradicting Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie’s claim that cabinet solidarity had not been a sticking point between the two parties.
Two days earlier the mood had been one of shock and incredulity at the sudden split of the parties after 40 years of political marriage.
Typical was reaction of the Nat who answered the phone with “when you find out, you can tell me” even before the question “why?” had been asked, as was that of the Liberal who, when asked to describe the split, could only splutter “it’s, it’s, it’s nuts!”
Luckily for these confused MPs, by day’s end it seemed that the crisis had passed – for now anyway – and that faced with the scary prospect of going it alone, both sides had suddenly remembered why they needed each other.
There is no agreement, however, on what happened – neither how the split came about nor how it came to be healed.
In retrospect, the ostensible reasons offered by Nats leader David Littleproud on Tuesday – nukes, divestiture, the regional infrastructure fund and regional service obligations for phone companies – didn’t really make sense.
Especially after it became clear the Nats were not demanding they stick to the full Dutton public-ownership policy – which would have been rejected by the Libs – but were merely demanding a vague commitment to Australia joining the atomic age.
It seemed that like many marriage break-ups, the triggers were not the cause, especially after reports emerged on Wednesday that the four policies Littleproud was claiming had caused the split weren’t the whole story and that, along with them, he had also floated the idea that he and his colleagues would not be bound by the rules of cabinet solidarity – something no Liberal would ever accept.
That, combined with the fact it was Littleproud who announced he was leaving on Tuesday, the general assumption has been that it was the Nats who wanted out of the relationship, but according to some Libs, the desire for the single life also afflicts some of them too.
“There’s a group within the Liberal Party who are every bit as avid about not being in coalition with the National Party as that group in the National Party – it is on both sides,” a senior MP from the right of the Liberal Party said.
“These people want us not to have a foothold in regional Australia – don’t assume they’re completely stupid.
“I think what they’re trying to achieve is completely stupid, but they’ve thought that through – they want those seats gone.
“They talk in code about the Liberal Party being the party of the cities. Whenever you hear them talking about getting back the cities, you know what they mean.”
So what drove Littleproud to announce he was outta there?
Nats are divided.
His supporters say it was the principle he said it was.
“I think what this whole exercise has shown is people misunderstand who and what the National Party is about – this particular generation,” said one senior National MP, who blames it all on Ley’s stubbornness.
“There’s been previous (Nat) leaders who have made different calls when presented with different kinds of challenges but there’s always been give and take… (it’s) always ebbed and flowed – she was basically saying no, so what do you do?”
Littleproud’s detractors in the National Party claim the whole thing was really about his desire to keep his job after being challenged the week before by Queensland senator Matt Canavan.
According to this theory, the National Party leader was desperate to avoid having to choose who was going to miss out as the Nat quota of Coalition positions was likely to shrink.
“This sort of stuff is always around in the Nats – ‘oh we’ve got to split, we’ve got to go over here, we should be by ourselves’ – and it always gets talked down, never happens,” one veteran Nat said.
“They let them vent but because Littleproud is in such a tenuous position, he’d rather destroy the place than be taken out as leader.
“He got a fright with Canavan. Canavan got closer than he thought he would.
“He would have had to come back to the room and take lollies off people because he couldn’t secure all these extra bits that Dutton gave him in order to keep in the job – extra shadow ministries, etc, etc – and if that meant he was going to lose a vote or two, then that would mean he was going to lose the leadership.”
Liberals, while reluctant to claim perfect knowledge of what goes on in the heads of their partners, are unsurprisingly more likely to be closer to the latter view.
“I think the blame primarily lies with him,” a Liberal who had voted for Angus Taylor a week earlier conceded.
A Ley supporter agreed, saying Littleproud’s position began to unravel when it became clear that he hadn’t told the National Party room about his demands over cabinet solidarity.
“I think David might not have been as fulsome with his party room as he might have been… they kind of worked out that they didn’t have the full information about what was going on,” the MP said.
“He’s tried to manage it one way and it’s backfired a bit.
“I think he thought this would all go well and they’d all be behind him, but if he wasn’t accurate about what was going on, then maybe they wouldn’t be and I think that’s what was going on.
“I think he made a bit of a mistake in not telling his own people the full story – just leaving a little bit out.
“That was an important bit – the bit about the shadow cabinet solidarity – that’s the thing he knew we were rejecting. We weren’t rejecting the policies – not at all.”
Littleproud’s supporters the idea outright the walkout was about anything other than the four policies.
“She wasn’t able (to give us) the bare minimum, which was the four, so why talk about who gets the treasury portfolio and how many staff and all that stuff if you can’t get through the first gate?” one says, offering this as an explanation why the Nats leader failed to tell his party room there had also been a demand about cabinet solidarity.
“So he put the first gate to the party room and that’s when the party room decided ‘well if we can’t even get this that we ran on, well we’re out’.
“And that was absolutely what precipitated it and when we were out – she gets the heat and tries to make it all about something else that it was never about.
“That’s not why we walked away at all.”
Expect the question of who got “the heat” and backed down to be ventilated in coming days.
The Liberals are adamant it was Littleproud.
“I think they were feeling a bit of heat on their story because their story didn’t quite stack up, because why would you leave the Coalition over four policies for which there’s probably a lot of agreement and not give us the space to consider,” a source close to Ley said.
“She was ready to announce her shadow ministry derived from just the Liberals but when he gave that concession (on ABC radio on Thursday morning), we thought that there was an avenue to a resolution and so we initiated that.”
Nats claim it was Ley who blinked when she realised they were serious about going it alone.
“We had our spokespeople around the office in David’s office today for two hours,” one said on Thursday, “sitting down and mapping out how we’re going to do policy, who is going to be in charge of Labor’s agenda reporting to the party room, setting up our structures to be an independent party.
“And when she knew that – that’s when David gets a text, ‘can you come over?’… She’s blinked, and that’s fine.”
A Liberal puts a different spin on that “fineness”.
“It’s all fine. We almost certainly land where we should have landed last Monday, which (is that) we will agree in principle to the National Party’s four policy positions and the coalition will be reformed,” they said.
As for Littleproud: “I think he’s in trouble. I think he’s in real trouble. He may not have lasted anyway, but I think he is even less likely to last now.”
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