“We’ve grown apart.” “I need some space.” “I have to focus on me for a while.” The relationship breakdown platitudes sat thick in the air on Tuesday afternoon.
Later in the day, the two former Coalition partners had almost adopted the Costanzan position: “It’s not you. It’s me.”
The formal party of opposition will have no fewer than 28 MHRs in the parliament, including Tim Wilson who has won in Goldstein.
The Nats have 15, the teals six, possibly seven if the count holds for teal independent in Bradfield, Nicolette Boele. Assorted indies have five on the crossbenches. The Greens have one. Labor has 93.
The Nationals have formally fled the field of battle, preferring instead to have a long lie-down on the crossbenches. Bats and balls have been taken home in huffs.
The tantrum means the Nats now must rely on the generosity of Anthony Albanese to determine crucial matters of party status and funding, administrative support and senior roles in parliamentary committees. In the absence of an act of prime ministerial magnanimity (I have to ask, why should he?), the Nationals on the frontbenches in the 47th parliament effectively have voted for a 60 per cent pay cut in the 48th. To be fair, they will be working a lot less. As many as nine Nationals who had been poised to take positions in the shadow cabinet now will be consigned to the backbenches. It really is that dumb.
In the Senate, the Nats have been whittled down to just three with the loss of Perin Davey in NSW who was third on the joint Coalition Senate ticket and failed to get even close to a quota.
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who left the party to caucus with the Liberal Party, almost certainly will get a shadow ministry. At the same time, her new friends may be wondering how she may get re-elected to the Senate representing a party that has no presence in the Northern Territory, but that’s a problem for two elections away. For now, if the Territorian senator wants to take the great leap to the lower house there aren’t many safe seats left, and those that are will not be coughed up in a hurry. In any event, now would not be a good time.
David Littleproud’s latest crack at nominative determinism was an ambush for the hell of it. Alas, we are at that point in the relationship breakdown known as the “Now, let’s not say anything we can’t take back” stage where tempers are a little fraught.
Otherwise, the Liberal partyroom would be voluble in condemnation, knowing the member for Maranoa offered Sussan Ley what effectively was a take-it-or-we-leave shakedown less than a week after her mother died. When asked what the urgency was, Littleproud resumed relationship banalities. The Liberal Party was going on its own journey and he was loath to intervene. Sure, they’d text, What’sApp, and be supportive of one another and maybe, just maybe. Well, who knows?
“At some point we will be trying to get back together and make sure we give a cogent argument of the Australian people about an alternative to Anthony Albanese,” Littleproud said.
It would have been an act of high duplicity for Ley to accede to these demands without consulting her partyroom. But the last straw was an insistence that Nationals members of the shadow cabinet should be unrestrained by cabinet solidarity and offer free criticism of Liberal policy as they saw fit. Do these people want Albanese to be Prime Minister for life?
Ley was right to walk away. Now she has to choose 23 shadow cabinet positions and seven shadow members of the outer ministry, with more than half of the party’s MPs in line for an appointment. In sporting terms, we could call it giving the kids a go, and it may supercharge the development of some MPs who otherwise might be consigned to the backbenches. The appointment of these previously untried youngsters renders a kiss-and-make-up reconciliation before the next election just that little bit more complicated.
For Ley, it would be an act of political harakiri to strip her own people of their jobs and hand them to Littleproud and co.
In any big bust-up, it’s the kids who suffer most; those poor suckers, some of whom voted for the Coalition and many who did not, all of whom live under the admittedly dubious expectation that elected representatives might serve the Australian people rather than themselves or their shrinking parties.
I know enough about Labor in government to understand that, unrestrained by parliamentary scrutiny, Albanese and those on the crowded Treasury benches will make errors, sometimes big ugly mistakes. Black-letter bills are rarely, if ever, perfect legal documents and it often falls to an opposition to detect shortcomings and prevent outcomes from veering into what policymakers explain afterwards, with a shrug, were unintended consequences.
We will also know if the Albanese government is replete with hubris if it pursues some of its fruitier first-term plans such as the misinformation and disinformation bill – a bad idea then and even uglier now.
We have the road map for this already. Walk around Melbourne and everyone will tell you how frustrated they are with the Allan government and its manifest failures but no one ever mentions the Liberal opposition as a viable alternative. Or we could take a lazy stroll across the Nullarbor and peer into the West Australian Liberal partyroom where its lower house MPs caucus under a doona.
The spark has gone, glimmers in eyes have turned to cold stares. Amid the turmoil, there is the dreadful reminder that Coalition leaders who stood hand on heart at five minutes to midnight, promising they and only they knew how to govern the country, could not govern themselves five minutes after the clock struck 12.
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