Australia is now watching the Coalition break down in real time

It’s no small thing when a freshly elected leader of one of the big parties quickly becomes toast, as the well-browned Sussan Ley has. Remarkably, though, that’s not the biggest political event of the moment, which is the federal Coalition’s wilful self-destruction. The Coalition as we’ve come to know it going back to the late 1980s is done. The agreement between the Liberal and National parties to operate jointly in government and opposition clearly has stopped working.

It might formally remain in place for the remainder of this term, but it is destined to be a dead weight, hampered by infighting and a misreading of Australia’s evolving political environment. The Liberal and National parties are locking themselves in the past.

Since the election six months ago, the nation has watched the Coalition break down in real time. Just to recap, in the wake of the election loss, Nationals leader David Littleproud took his party out of the Coalition before being wooed back by Ley a few days later. In one of her earliest acts as Coalition leader, Ley appointed energy spokesman Dan Tehan to fashion a comprehensive energy and climate change policy for the Coalition by early next year.

Meanwhile, Littleproud ordered up his own National Party energy policy. The Nats have now finalised and endorsed that policy, which essentially rejects existing commitments on emissions reduction and favours choking off the move to renewables. Did it occur to anybody in the upper reaches of either party how much potential this unilateral action had to blow up the Coalition?

A properly functioning coalition would have its partners working in lockstep on a policy as broad, economically important and electorally crucial as energy and climate change. It would operate on the basis of trust, shared beliefs and mutual self-interest. It’s not sustainable for a side of politics seeking the public’s endorsement to form government to consist of two organisations that are only ever one step away from holding each other hostage. But that’s the predicament too many among the current generation of Coalition MPs have galloped towards creating.

How did this come about? Obviously, there’s political ineptitude and self-interest. Littleproud has shored up his position, pandering to his party’s support base on climate change by ditching net zero targets. But that is easy. The Nationals are a niche, geographically based party; at the election, they secured a tick over 4 per cent of the lower house vote. Ley is toying with taking the same route to stop the Coalition falling apart.

It’s all for what? To hang on to their hopeless positions for just a bit longer? The Nationals may prosper, reversing One Nation’s march. But the damage to the Liberal Party will be profound, keeping both parties out of office. Even if Tehan, now hurriedly pulling together his energy policy, comes up with something utterly profound, how many voters in urban Australia who care about action on climate change – and who the Liberals need to win over – will be persuaded that a Liberal-National government would be credible on the issue? Most of what’s being discussed on climate change policy reeks of the Coalition’s flimflam approaches of the 2010s.

Right at the heart of this problem for the major non-Labor parties lies something fundamental to the conduct of politics in the 2020s. The contest between the government and the opposition is between two distinct political models – one old, one new. The Coalition, despite losing solidly in 2022 and taking a beating this year, continues to follow the old model of political behaviour. The ALP under Anthony Albanese is deploying a new model – one that has obviously succeeded so far.

The old model worked as recently as 2019, when Scott Morrison pulled off his unexpected victory, but it had run out of puff by early 2022. It was relentlessly combative, it relied on large-scale support from legacy media to amplify lines of attack and to bury mistakes, and it was replete with negative messaging. It was built on the primacy of repetitive rhetoric and attacking the other side at every opportunity. Both sides practised versions of it.

Whether you were in government or opposition didn’t matter. Brutalising your opponents – after all, they were, under this model, always the problem – inside and outside the parliament was the MO. There was positive messaging too, but it was generally deployed after the tenderising of the opponents was done. The Coalition continues to be attached to that strategy. Those of us who have scratched our heads in the past couple of weeks as Ley scaled ever higher points of absurdity with her attack on Kevin Rudd and her ventures on Albanese’s choice of T-shirt and some sort of conspiracy about her thwarted tour of an aluminium smelter threatened with closure are right to have sensed a degree of panic on her part. But they were in keeping with an approach that abhors silence and prizes pugilism.

One of the tired axioms in Australian politics is that it’s the job of every opposition to “hold a government to account” and to “take the fight up to the government” because that’s what voters want. That was true in the past but less so now at the national level. Every government must be accountable, of course, but trust in politics is relatively low these days. In a binary choice, voters will opt for whoever looks more sensible and competent, even if there’s little confidence the favoured option is all that great. That means histrionics, harsh rhetoric and excessive internal manoeuvrings should be avoided, not indulged.

I’ve been critical of Albanese as leader over the years. As opposition leader, he didn’t even try to score a big win against Morrison on the floor of the House, a traditional rite of passage for every opposition leader. But he understood that most voters, as they came out of the pandemic, wanted a cooler form of politics.

He has managed to match up his personality and his natural aversion to risk with a better sense of how changes within society and in digital age news and communications have altered voters’ expectations of politics and politicians’ behaviour. Society keeps changing and eventually, it will be looking for another political model. But the Coalition’s cluelessness and disarray threaten to give Albanese’s approach a long run.

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

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