Libs and Nats have more to do than kiss and make up

It has been a baptism of fire for Liberal Party leader Sussan Ley as the federal Coalition has split and potentially reunited within a week. The instability has served only to highlight the difficult task Ms Ley faces in rebuilding conservative stocks in the electorate.

For Nationals leader David Littleproud it was a week of high drama in which he overplayed his hand and in the process advertised the structural problems at the heart of the marriage of the nation’s two major non-Labor forces.

As things played out, Anthony Albanese was visibly tending to an unfolding flood disaster in Nationals heartland in rural NSW. No doubt he had brought a dose of clarity to the thinking of many Nationals MPs by declining to increase the party’s parliamentary entitlements if they opted out of being part of the official opposition.

Ms Ley bowed to the wisdom and pressure of party elders, including John Howard and Tony Abbott, and offered an olive branch to Mr Littleproud, opening the way for further talks. She made the approach before appointing her Liberal colleagues to a clean sweep of shadow portfolios.

Had she not pushed pause it would have been much more difficult for the Coalition partners to re-embrace. Late on Friday it still was not a done deal, but Mr Howard no doubt was correct in his observation that the longer the time spent apart, the more difficult it would be to put the Coalition back together.

That said, a speedy reconciliation is unlikely to be the end of the matter. What the past week has shown is that the Nationals are ill-prepared to compromise and will continue to demand a big role in shaping opposition policy.

The four markers highlighted by Mr Littleproud for his decision to pull the Nationals from the Coalition were the ability to break up the big supermarkets, continued support for nuclear power, establishing another off-budget regional fund, and upgrading regional telecommunications.

A virtual meeting of Liberal MPs gave its in-principle support to these measures. Ms Ley claims she had stared down a demand by Mr Littleproud for Nationals MPs to have the right to breach cabinet solidarity.

There is no doubt that the road ahead will include many difficult discussions for the Coalition partners, including on net zero. There are passionate points of view on both sides.

As foreign editor Greg Sheridan writes on Saturday in Inquirer, Queensland Nationals senator Matt Canavan launched his recent (unsuccessful) leadership challenge against Mr Littleproud because he was determined to force his party and what he called the “comfortable, coddled and second-rate political class of this country” to confront the grave policy questions that both campaigns comprehensively avoided through the election.

Some on the Liberal side do not believe that accepting positions that suit the Nationals is necessarily the best way to rebuild conservative stocks where it is most needed, in the city and metropolitan areas.

As we editorialised on Tuesday, going it alone would give the Liberal Party more flexibility to negotiate with Labor on sensible pro-business reforms in the Senate and weaken the Greens. It is no secret that the Liberal Party has been estranged from business, to the detriment of both sides. Nationals policy on divestiture powers has been a point of contention.

With the Nationals set to rejoin the Coalition, big questions remain about how they jointly can shape policy that delivers on the free-enterprise, small-government values they share across a broad sweep of the political landscape that is being increasingly divided by special-interest minor parties and independents. The vital ingredient is leadership.