Division is death and a dead Coalition can never win government
As the Liberal Party struggles to put its house in order following the May 3 election rout, junior is playing hard ball. The National Party's decision to break up the federal Coalition is a mixed blessing, necessary but self-delusional.
Nationals leader David Littleproud said that the partnership was over because the Liberals had refused to agree to his party's policies: lifting the ban on nuclear energy, establishing a $20 billion Regional Australia Future Fund, boosting mobile coverage across Australia and stopping big business abusing market power.
Retaining 15 seats while the Liberals' haul plummeted to 28 has emboldened the Nationals to tell their senior partner to take a hike. But it suggests an inflated sense of self and ignores their bleeding obvious mutual dependence: the Liberal Party and the Nationals need each other to win government.
However, the split will allow both parties to re-evaluate themselves in the face of defeat. The Nationals are not going anywhere, they'll stay in their bush heartland. However, the Liberals must rebuild their own heartland in cities where their vote has gone MIA.
Once the Liberals have done that, they then must turn their minds to reconciling with the recalcitrant Nationals over policies and scale of differences in those policies while injecting some realpolitik into junior's thinking.
They've done this before. The Coalition splintered for a few months in 1987 with the gerrymandered Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen's addled attempt to defeat Bob Hawke. But the agreement between the Liberals and the then Country Party broke up after Gough Whitlam's Labor put them out in 1972, ending 22 years in office. They remained divided for just two years, reunited to fight the 1974 election and went on to win the following year as Labor unravelled with the CP rebadged as the National Party.
The difference between 2025 and those Whitlam years was that the Coalition and Labor were then only a handful of seats apart. Latest counting puts Labor at 93 seats, 50 more than the former Coalition's 43.
The scale of the defeat makes a comeback a tough climb and seriously jeopardises conservative parties' prospects at the next election. The Nationals are unwelcome in the capital cities while the Liberals can realistically only field candidates in regional cities and towns, thereby opening up the damaging possibility of three-way election contests and already there are fears of Liberal internal dissent.
Former prime minister John Howard called on both parties to reform as soon as possible, 'the problem of remaining too far apart for too long is that attitudes harden and differences become deeper'.
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