Coalition of the unwilling: Climate wars will soon eclipse reunification relief

What was the point of the Eight-Day War? David Littleproud wrenched the Coalition apart last week only to put it back together this week.

He claimed victory for his National Party: “We did not blink.” One of his Nationals’ colleagues agrees: “He didn’t blink because he didn’t open his f---ing eyes. He made us look like fools.”

Illustration by Joe BenkeCredit:

The futility of the exercise qualifies Littleproud as the parliament’s Grand Old Duke of York who, as folklore has it, had 10,000 men: “He marched them up to the top of the hill, And he marched them down again. When they were up, they were up, And when they were down, they were down, And when they were only halfway up, they were neither up nor down.”

Announcing the split with the Liberals, Littleproud claimed that it was all about four key areas of policy. “We made it very clear that those four policy areas were the principle on which we left” the Coalition. These burning policy imperatives were so crucial that the Nationals’ chief whip, Michelle Landry, was unable to name all four in a radio interview on Wednesday.

Unwisely, Littleproud allowed himself to get carried away with his own moral righteousness in defending the party’s walkout on an 80-year arrangement: “I know that it’s hard for many in the gallery here to understand there are politicians here that are prepared to take a pay cut because they believe in something, but that’s what the National Party did,” he huffed on Channel Nine’s Today program.

“This would change people’s lives. This would save people’s lives. Well, I’ve been given a privileged position to come here. Why wouldn’t I? Why wouldn’t I take that opportunity and stand for something and not walk away from it just for political expedience?”

Reunited: Liberal leader Sussan Ley and Nationals leader David Littleproud face the media on Wednesday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

And then he walked away from it just for political expedience. Of course, he claims he won grand concessions from the Liberals’ leader, Sussan Ley. The so-called concessions are tokenistic face-savers to allow Littleproud to justify a capitulation. Foremost is his demand that the Coalition keep its policy of a taxpayer-funded nuclear power system.

The satirical site The Shovel explained the position this way: “BREAKING: Mum and Dad Back Together. Two weeks after Dad moved out because Mum wouldn’t let him build a nuclear reactor, the two say they are going to give it another go. In a statement today, Mum confirmed that she’d let Dad have his nuclear reactor, as long as she didn’t have to pay for it.”

That gets close, but, in truth, Ley didn’t even go that far. All she agreed to was that the Coalition would support an end to the moratorium on the building of nuclear power plants. She emphatically did not agree to finance and build seven nuclear power plants. Not even one.

On the other three areas that Peter Dutton’s Coalition had taken to the election and that Littleproud insisted remain, Ley has agreed but so hedged them with conditions that they are almost meaningless.

And what of Littleproud’s other early demand – that Nationals members of a Coalition shadow cabinet should not be bound by the principle of solidarity? He quickly abandoned that when it was roundly rejected.

He achieved nothing he couldn’t have accomplished with a quiet conversation behind closed doors, as is customary between the Libs and Nats. All he’s managed to do is make himself a laughing stock with a limited leadership lifespan. And diminish the entire Coalition in the process.

So far, the Liberals have done two things right since the election. First, they elected a woman as leader. Second, that woman handled the Nat spat with calm and steely grace. But the really hard part lies ahead, and the Coalition ruction was the opening act.

“It wasn’t a fight about four policies,” says a Liberal. “It was really about us being totally fine with them running all over us in three or six months’ time when we reach a policy on climate change.”

Ley and Littleproud. The Liberal leader did not agree to finance and build seven nuclear power plants.Credit: The Age

The climate wars are over. And the Coalition lost. But it will have great difficulty in accepting this fact. The Liberals have undertaken to review their policy; it will be traumatic.

Ley will want to bring the party to a recognition that climate change is not only real but a reality that the party must embrace in its policies: “You won’t see any climate denial from Sussan,” says a Liberal from her camp. “It’s about respectful engagement, so voters understand that we are believers.”

Pollster Jim Reed of Resolve Strategic says that this is an irreducible minimum for any party that hopes to win power. “In the early to mid-2000s we regularly asked a question in our polling – do you believe in climate change? Very quickly, over two or three years, it became redundant,” he tells me. “Speaking to tradies in focus groups, a no-nonsense group who, in the past, would have had some of the doubters in it, today, they say, ‘Yes, and we can see it happening, we see the effects.’ The ship has sailed.”

Yet climate disbelief runs deep in the surviving members of the Coalition. In the Nats, certainly. Littleproud says he supports the pre-existing Coalition commitment to reach net zero emissions by 2050. But Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan, Michael McCormack, Colin Boyce and Llew O’Brien, at a minimum, will fight to defeat it.

But climate scepticism also runs strongly through the ranks of the Libs, as Andrew Hastie reminded us this week: “I think the question of net zero, that’s a straitjacket that I’m already getting out of,” the new shadow minister for Home Affairs told the ABC. “The real question is should Australian families and businesses be paying more for their electricity?”

Other Liberals, even climate sceptics, think it’s time for the party to bow before the electoral reality. “Some of the colleagues still haven’t absorbed the magnitude of our loss,” says one who, like Hastie, is a frontbencher from the party’s conservative side.

“When they walk into the House, and they’re confronted with the wall of Labor MPs, it will be a reality check for them. We’ll see the final numbers and see what we have to do if we want to get back into government – it’ll be of the order of 30 seats or around a 7 per cent swing.” A daunting prospect and extraordinarily difficult to accomplish in a single term.

“I can’t think of a single seat in the country that we’ll be able to win without a commitment to net zero.”

Liberal Zoe McKenzie points to a statistic that should rivet the party’s attention. Of the 151 seats in the House, 88 are metropolitan. Of those, the Coalition occupies just eight. This is, in effect, the banishment of the Liberal Party from the cities of Australia.

Even if the Coalition can hold those eight and win all the other 63 seats in the parliament, it would hold a total of only 71. In other words, it’s mathematically impossible for it to win a majority, which is 76, without returning to metropolitan Australia.

And belief in climate change is the price of admission to city seats. McKenzie, factionally non-aligned and freshly elected to a second term in the seat of Flinders covering Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, hopes that the party retains its net zero commitment. As it debates the policy, she wants the party to “keep the voices of the ghosts alive”, meaning all the moderate Liberals who lost their seats in recent elections. The former MPs who’d be arguing in favour of net zero and climate-friendly policy.

Overarching all of this is the larger question of the party’s political philosophy. Fundamentally, the Liberals have to decide whether they are the party of Robert Menzies or Rupert Murdoch.

Menzies was a great pragmatist, principled but not ideological, who adapted to his times. He was preoccupied with the concerns and interests of the suburban middle class, not the capitalist class but the ordinary men and women of aspiration. Murdoch is a right-wing populist interested in pressing always further rightward to build constituencies favourable to his own business interests.

The Liberals have to choose. Once they decide whether to continue following the Murdoch pied piper to electoral irrelevance or to rediscover the Menzian attachment to middle Australia, all their other choices will become clearer.

And the Nationals? They are now reduced to four senators. The same number as One Nation. And, like One Nation, the Nationals won a touch over 6 per cent of the national primary vote for the House. “We, as Liberals, would never allow One Nation to determine our policies,” points out a Lib. So, his logic runs, why should the party accept the Nationals’ terms?

If the Eight-Day War helped the Liberal Party find clarity on this point in the course of discovering its own identity, it won’t have been entirely futile.

Peter Hartcher is political editor.

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