In the days before Sussan Ley won the Liberal leadership on May 13, one member of the party told our reporter Olivia Ireland that “if Sussan gets it, it’ll be our Liz Truss moment”.
Truss, chosen by Britain’s Conservative Party to replace Boris Johnson as prime minister, lasted 45 days before being forced to resign. One tabloid newspaper livestreamed a fresh lettuce bought at a supermarket, challenging Truss to outlast it. She failed.
But at the end of this tumultuous week, which saw the National Party announce on Tuesday that it was quitting its coalition with the Liberals for the first time in nearly four decades, before rushing back to the negotiating table on Thursday, visitors to the vegetable aisle might find that it is Nationals leader David Littleproud who is reduced to clear.
Sussan Ley and David Littleproud have had a topsy-turvy week.Credit: Artwork: Marija Ercegovac
On Tuesday, having been told by Ley that all the policies the opposition took to their resounding election defeat would have to be reviewed within the Liberal party room before she could sign up to four key demands by the Nationals, Littleproud called time. “They are going on a journey of rediscovery and this will provide them the opportunity to do that without the spectre of the National Party imposing their will,” he declared.
It soon became apparent that some members of his own party room were kept in the dark regarding other sticking points between the two leaders: Littleproud had sought the deputy opposition leader’s role and an exemption from shadow cabinet solidarity for Nationals, without success.
By Thursday, it seemed the Liberals needed some company on their journey of rediscovery after all. With some members of the larger party saying their review could take months, Littleproud said, “I don’t want to put specific days or weeks on it”. The supposedly principled stand of two days earlier now looked pointless and petulant.
As our chief political commentator, James Massola, wrote on the day of the split, this crisis has been years in the making, as the two parties increasingly pursued different goals and different constituencies. This year they also had very different elections.
Even as voters swung away from the Liberals, and they lost seats across Australia, the Nationals held their seats and in several cases experienced a swing towards them. But just as the Liberal Party boasts fewer and fewer small-l liberals, the Nationals have never been a small-n national force. The policies that they believe helped them get elected in rural and regional areas have failed to deliver for the Coalition in the nation’s cities, where power is lost and won.
In the hours after the parties’ trial separation was announced, one Liberal MP dared to dream aloud of a different world. Tim Wilson, returned to his former seat of Goldstein by a razor-thin margin, called the split a “really exciting opportunity”. “We’ve got to find our Liberal mojo juice if we want to be able to get on and represent the capital cities where the overwhelming majority of Australians are,” he told Sky News.
Wilson is an outlier, but not in the way Nationals might like to think. He is the only Liberal to have captured a metropolitan seat at the election and the first ever to win back a seat from a “teal” independent. This gives his arguments force. When Ley hinted at a possible agreement with Labor over environmental protections, a new spectre began to take shape for Nationals: a Liberal Party that reimagines its place in Australian politics at their expense.
As everyone rushes to claim vindication this weekend, telling their camp that the other side blinked, this fundamental question remains unaddressed: can the Liberals and Nationals agree on and produce a suite of policies with nationwide appeal? Or will they kick the can down the road on nuclear power, climate change and economic policy?
The impression that Littleproud had to be corralled by National Party grandees such as Barnaby Joyce and Michael McCormack – both of whom faced being relegated to the backbench as their leader drew up his “shadow shadow cabinet” – will damage his authority to make bold steps.
But Ley is scarcely better placed, despite emerging from this fiasco with bolstered leadership credentials. The narrow margin of her victory over Angus Taylor and the diminished ranks of her party’s moderate wing mean that her pledge to “respect modern Australia” is still searching for substance. Until that changes, she will struggle to steer away from the siren song of Sky After Dark, which is bound to make much of how she accommodates (or doesn’t) the volatile Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
These questions are not simply part of the psychodrama of conservative politics; the absence of an electable opposition and a parliament where the government has free rein are both bad news at a time when rural and metropolitan Australians face profound challenges in a world of economic, geopolitical and environmental turmoil.
Whether that opposition is a restumped Coalition, a reimagined Liberal Party or some altogether new configuration, it will not have much time to get its house in order. Yet, the health of our democracy depends on it.
Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.