The Coalition believed it was Australia’s anointed leader - now it has no plan B

“Impasse” is among the multitude of French words that English speakers over the centuries have borrowed and repurposed. In English, impasse means a seemingly irreconcilable disagreement or deadlock. In French, its more common meaning is a physical dead end – an alley that leads to nowhere. The predicament in which the Liberals and Nationals find themselves looks mostly French to me.

Nationals leader David Littleproud, with the support of most of his party room, was the one who pulled the trigger on ending – or more correctly suspending – the Coalition arrangement, but the Liberals had helped fashion the bullet. They have simply not been able to cope in any meaningful way with the searing reality of a Labor government.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

Due to the slimness of the parliamentary majority won by Labor in 2022, they were able to indulge themselves on the way to this month’s election that the Albanese government lacked legitimacy. The key assumption was that if the government was met with relentless criticism and a portrayal of the country under Labor that was close to dystopian, the public would quickly come to its senses and realise it had made a mistake by handing the keys to Anthony Albanese.

This attitude first emerged after the election of the Whitlam government in 1972. You need to have lived through that period to fully comprehend just how outraged the Coalition parties were that the public could actually elect the Labor Party. The denial ran deep. When Whitlam was re-elected in 1974, Liberal leader Billy Snedden memorably observed “we didn’t win, but we didn’t lose”. To get the Coalition back into office, his successor Malcolm Fraser engineered a constitutional crisis the following year.

That crisis, which came to be known as the dismissal, took its toll on the Liberals. When Bob Hawke led Labor to power in 1983, the Liberals didn’t try to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the new government. They were exhausted from the years under Fraser, which were often turbulent, and they attempted to sort themselves out. The rivalry between Andrew Peacock and John Howard and an internal ideological schism between moderates and neoliberals took up the party’s energies. These issues took five terms and 13 years to resolve, but it set up the Coalition for four consecutive, stable and effective terms under Howard.

When the next Labor government, led by Kevin Rudd, won office in 2007, there was little appetite within the Liberal Party to spend time on reflection or a reset. In its first two years in opposition, it burnt through leaders. Brendan Nelson made way for Malcolm Turnbull, who made the terrible mistake of accepting the Rudd government’s legitimacy and the reality of climate change. Turnbull negotiated with Labor on an emissions trading scheme. This was all too much for his colleagues. Even though they had gone to the 2007 election endorsing an ETS, they saw their job as frustrating the government. Before the scheme could be legislated, Turnbull was toppled by Tony Abbott.

That was a decisive moment for the Liberals and its repercussions have continued all the way to this week. Abbott was firmly of the view that voters had not consciously elected the Rudd government; really, they had just got a bit tired of the Howard government. Abbott was a negative campaigner par excellence, and he exploited the public’s second thoughts about putting a price on carbon to fight climate change. Most voters had embraced the need to fight climate change, but increasing numbers baulked at the unavoidable prospect of it coming at a cost.

Under Abbott, the Liberals smashed their way to a hung parliament and a minority Labor government under Julia Gillard at the 2010 election and a landslide victory three years later. Nine years in office and more leadership churn followed. Few can readily nominate the lasting big-ticket policy achievements of that period of Coalition government. But the main political KPI for the Liberals – keeping the Labor Party in opposition – was met, which merely highlights its current problem.

Peter Dutton followed the Abbott template faithfully. Relentless negativity and overblown rhetoric can work from opposition if a government helps you out by making a string of mistakes. Labor under Rudd and Gillard made a series of errors, most notably the appalling leadership rivalry that went close to breaking the party.

Dutton and his colleagues assumed that like Abbott, they were fighting a creaking, error-prone outfit. In fact, Albanese made just one big error and that was holding the Voice referendum, which ran down the government’s political capital and stalled policy progress on improving the lives of First Nations people. Dutton’s successful prosecution of the No case encouraged pretty much the entire party to presume it could put its feet up and await its restoration to its rightful place on the Treasury benches.

Instead, new leader Sussan Ley and her people, most of whom will become frontbenchers thanks to the Nationals’ decision to go it alone, now resemble a biblical tribe, wandering the desert in search of a new community and tablets of wisdom that will enable them to go forth into the future. If that is not humiliation, then what is it?

The National Party eschews the need to rebuild or rethink. It won’t budge from its commitment to nuclear energy. The Liberals, after three years of absolute certainty that political posturing rather than fully thought out and well-explained policies would ensure their path back to power, say they want to do nothing but rethink. There is no political value for the Liberals in sticking with nuclear energy.

Inevitably, the parties will have to recreate their coalition. The 2028 election will come around, and they’re going to need a single, joint-parties story to tell and sell – on nuclear and a range of policies. They have taken themselves into a dead end with no notion of how to get out of it.

Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, author and former associate editor of The Age.

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