Will Sussan Ley walk away from nuclear now Nationals have walked away from her?

The Nationals have been criticised for leaving the negotiating table too soon, particularly after Sussan Ley’s bereavement.

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Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse for the Coalition, they have. Scarcely a fortnight after the Liberal-National Coalition crashed to the worst defeat in its history, the Coalition itself has split, ostensibly because the Liberal leader would not guarantee post-election four policies that the Liberals had supported pre-election, including support for nuclear power.

The Nationals have been criticised for leaving the negotiating table too soon, particularly after Sussan Ley’s bereavement.

But it was Ley herself who set an arbitrary deadline to announce her shadow ministry on Thursday that then affected Coalition negotiations. And for what? The only real deadline for Ley is the resumption of parliament and that’s not until July.

After a loss, Labor spends a month going through a convoluted election for a new leader and ministry, yet the Liberals couldn’t wait another week or two to announce their frontbench?

History shows that a strong coalition between the Liberals and the Nationals is the proven pathway to victory and to stable government. Coalition negotiations always involve give and take (I know because I’ve been part of three of them), but both parties normally appreciate that you can’t let impatience, insecurity or greed for the paltry spoils of opposition derail them, especially as neither party can realistically expect to win government on its own.

The established Liberal Party precedent for policy post-election is that everything stands unless changed. That has been the practice for decades until Ley up-ended it by declaring instead that “nothing is adopted, nothing is abandoned”. Even though no opposition can deal itself out of taking a position on the issues of the day for six months of policy introspection and navel-gazing.

When I was the shadow cabinet secretary during the Abbott opposition years, every week legislation forced the joint partyroom to arrive at policy positions without the luxury of a lengthy review. That’s the nature of the Westminster system, and a ruthless Labor Party exploits this to wedge the other side.

Throughout the Abbott opposition years we ran a parallel “election review” process because you must be able to respond intelligently to whatever comes up while devising a coherent set of policies to take to the next election.

There has to be a strong suspicion that the new Liberal leader is preparing to walk away from Peter Dutton’s pro-nuclear policy, as well as from the Coalition itself, given the other three commitments the Nationals wanted were all specific to regional Australia.

It’s noteworthy that while the Opposition Leader’s vision statement published here on Monday reiterated her party’s traditional commitments to low tax and strong national security, it was silent on energy.

Regardless of who actually triggered the breach, what’s strange is that Ley would not agree to the Nationals’ requests given that just two weeks ago this was agreed policy and would be subject anyway to future shadow cabinet and joint partyroom processes. And, as I said, was the accepted precedent going back 30 years.

By declaring that all current policies, especially nuclear, are in limbo, she has given her colleagues a chance to relitigate every policy position, which means it will be arguments inside the opposition rather than the government’s policy inadequacies that get most public attention. What a mess for our country.

It will now be much harder, near mission impossible, for the Liberals to win in 2028, given Ley’s declaration a coalition won’t now be re-formed before the election.

Is she really ready to run three-cornered contests across the country? And what will happen to combined Liberal-National campaign teams and resource sharing, especially given the number of donors who have said they’re walking away until the Liberals get their house in order?

There’s a lot of emotion in politics but the electoral arithmetic is brutal. Without the Nationals, and with Labor’s historic 93-seat majority, unless swiftly reconsidered, this rupture sets up the centre-right for three or more terms in the wilderness. Insiders say one of Ley’s pitches for the leadership was a frontbench job for almost everyone, and this split will deliver that. Indeed, the Liberal Party will have more people in the shadow ministry than on the backbench, all with more salary and extra staff. The Nationals’ readiness to walk away from the spoils of opposition at least validates their claim that theirs was a position of principle.

The longer the two main centre-right parties remain apart, the harder it will be to bring them back together again. Policy positions will be taken, criticisms made and divisions will become entrenched, allowing Anthony Albanese to simply repeat Bob Hawke’s line from the last time the Coalition split, back in 1987: “If you can’t govern yourselves, you can’t govern the country.”

The Liberals must be a “modern” party, representing “modern” Australia, says Ley. This seems to be code for saying the party lost the election because it was “too right wing”, with a message to inner-urban Liberals that the party might purge itself of conservatives as well as reconsider nuclear power. But that would be a real misreading of the electorate here and of the global shifts on energy. Until earlier this year, the Dutton opposition was riding high in the polls even though its only substantive policy was nuclear energy. It was only when Labor opened up its Medicare assault that this changed, as Australians voted with the government to “save” Medicare far more than they voted against the opposition on nuclear.

How can support for nuclear be “hard right” when it’s the policy of the British Labour Party and the US Democratic Party, and with Germany rethinking its previous opposition as Canada’s new left-wing PM has declared he’ll use oil and gas to remake the country as an energy superpower?

It’s no surprise that in his speech to the National Press Club on Wednesday, Labor campaign boss Paul Erickson said the party’s embrace of renewables was key to its success. Of course he would say that because it drives a wedge through his opponents, even though the reality is Labor put Chris Bowen in the freezer for the entire campaign, buried its 2035 emissions targets for fear of spooking voters and was forced to spend billions on household subsidies to buy support, so potent was electricity price pain.

The tragedy for the Liberal campaign is not that the party had a nuclear power policy, it’s that it never fought hard enough for it. Nor was the Liberal energy policy as comprehensive as it needed to be given the piecemeal handling of issues such as gas.

Freed from the more conservative ballast the Nationals have provided, the Liberals could simply “me too” Labor’s renewables-only energy policy. That’s certainly the push from NSW factional players who have significant commercial interests in renewables.

If the Liberals now cave in to cashed-up renewable industry puppet masters, this could become an existential crisis. After all, one of the main factors behind the United Australia Party’s demise was its dependence for funding on shadowy financiers. It was to defeat this that Robert Menzies set up a Liberal Party that – back then at least – was actually responsible to its membership.

Whatever happens, rarely has Menzies’ dictum been more fully borne out that “defeat disunites the defeated”.