Coalition grapples with internal clash of policy, ideology and personality

Australia Broadcast Center

17-05-2025

Spend enough time around political players — the politicians and their top lieutenants — and it quickly becomes evident how vital fundraising is to the whole game.
It's the fuel that propels everything. The billboards, the TV advertising, the ability to win tough contests in marginal seats.
Australians don't have the numbers yet for the 2025 election, but we know a collective $418 million was spent on political campaigns in the year leading up to the 2022 election.
Labor deployed about $116 million, the Coalition dropped $131 million and independents another $21 million.
This year's tally will be just as eye-watering.
Professional campaigners all say the same thing: without those dollars from donors the car quickly sputters to a halt.
Not far beneath that lies the political base. Each party has one or more of those, and they're the primary source of the coveted political spice melange.
While much is written of the dark influence of a handful of billionaire or corporate donors, the reality is that political parties seek the broadest possible source of funds.
If the base is thriving, built on a growing and ambitious demographic, life for their political representatives can be sweet. Think teal independents and the Labor party. Their trajectory is upward. They're having a moment.
But if they're aging, disengaged or disenchanted, life is very miserable indeed.
Nowhere is this more acute than inside the shattered Coalition, which this week began the process of dusting itself off from the drubbing on May 3.
One of the central arguments made by Angus Taylor to his colleagues in the lead-up to Tuesday's Liberal party-room leadership vote is that without the base the party is nothing.
Rather than downplaying the Coalition's conservative credentials, and instead pursuing "moderate" values to regain inner-city seats lost to teals, he argued the goal should be to double down where the Liberals are still strong.
Part of the Taylor argument is ideological — another episode in the enduring clash between the "wets" and "drys" of the Liberal Party.
But it was also about cold hard cash.
Taylor's view is that some of the party's safest seats are now in the peri-urban regions and in places like Townsville.
He argues that Australia is probably the most suburban country in the world.
And while he lost the leadership to Sussan Ley, that doesn't change the fact that a significant portion of the party room now own marginal, at-risk seats.
Many are in the inner cities, where wealthier voters are more than willing to back Greens, teals and other political brands.
The word "diabolical" comes up a lot in private conversations with Liberals, on both sides of the ideological divide.
It reflects their deep unease over the shrinking party base and the narrowness of Tuesday's vote, which went to Ley 29 votes to 25.
Structurally the omens are not good for the Liberals, particularly outside Queensland. In Victoria the party has been in the doldrums for what feels like decades. May 3 was a bitter rebuke, with Labor enjoying a swing.
In NSW, the news is equally bleak for Liberals, with party membership sliding towards 6000, according to one person familiar with the numbers.
For context, research leaked to a newspaper indicated the NSW branch membership was just shy of 13,000 in 2023, a more than 50 per cent fall in two years.
Furthermore, it stood at 70,000 in 1970, when Australia's total population was well under half what it is today.
The decline is calamitous for the Liberal Party for a number of reasons. But the most immediate is that it's happening at the worst possible time.
New electoral funding and spending laws passed by Labor and the Coalition just before the election come into force on July 1 next year.
Once in place, those laws will limit how much parties can raise and spend.
Ostensibly designed to remove "big money" from elections, the two parties of government worked together in the Senate to effectively cap what independents can deploy against the majors.
But there's a big loophole that every political movement is now racing to take advantage of.
Until the middle of next year the old rules apply, which means there is no limit on how much can be raised and squirrelled away into foundations that generate a steady flow of future donations "dividends".
Parties that out-raise their rivals over the next 13 months may have an enduring structural advantage at future elections.
That was one of the reasons backers of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price's defection to the Liberals were so excited.
She is regarded as a fundraising powerhouse, a political personality who enlivens supporters.
"Jacinta was about getting the base," said one.
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The Liberals are not the only half of the Coalition partnership revisiting questions about their base.
Debate has again erupted over climate policy, which remains the political centre-right's most reliable Rorschach test.
Despite voters rejecting Peter Dutton's nuclear power plans, the policy is on the Coalition's books.
The Coalition's new management under Ley and David Littleproud is yet to announce where they stand on net zero by 2050 — a position the Nationals adopted under Barnaby Joyce in late 2021.
Queensland Senator Matt Canavan's last-minute leadership tilt this week against Littleproud helped put net zero back on the table.
Which is not the first time Canavan has managed to be the tail wagging the dog.
The maverick senator declared net zero "dead" in the middle of Scott Morrison's 2022 election campaign, triggering a firestorm that helped drive inner-city voters to the teals.
Canavan wasted no time this week whipping up another climate policy storm.
In a post on Facebook, Canavan declared "the Liberal and National parties are now openly considering dumping their support for the disastrous net zero emissions by 2050 policy".
Critically — remembering those election law changes next year — Canavan told readers the "best way" to end net zero is to join the local branch "and argue directly to MPs that net zero has got to go!".
He then helpfully included links to the membership pages of the National Party and its affiliates in every state and territory except the ACT.
For now, Canavan's view is a minority one inside the Nationals party room.
But Littleproud is yet to provide Australia with a clear answer on whether he still supports net zero.
The irony is that in September 2023, Littleproud helped defeat a grassroots bid led by Joyce to unwind the party's support for reaching net zero emissions in 2050.
Nationals Federal Conference delegates voted overwhelmingly — 100 votes to 40, one source told this columnist at the time — to remove any reference to "abolishing" net zero from the platform.
Pro-climate action Nationals are pointing out that any move by Littleproud to ditch net zero would be against the wishes of rank-and-file members.
It would also put Ley in a challenging position, to say the least.
Nationals are understood to be demanding seven shadow cabinet spots and up to three assistant ministerial jobs, alongside all the staffing resources such appointments unlock.
But how does Ley — who beat Taylor thanks to the party's moderate wing, where support for climate policy action is strongest — accept such demands if the Nationals also scrap net zero?
Some Nationals point out that keeping nuclear policy would be a de facto scrapping of net zero as the technology would mean Australia misses its mid-century target. Farmers would be among the first in the firing line if trade allies retaliate with carbon penalties.
It's a clash of policy, ideology and personality that suggests things are more likely to get worse for the Coalition before they improve.
Both are a long way from working out how to rebuild their political movements and take on Labor's dominance.
Diabolical indeed.