Shadow cabinet split creates fresh Coalition crisis

The futures of three Nationals shadow ministers are in doubt after they voted against the Coalition’s agreed position on hate crimes legislation, exposing ongoing disunity and disorganisation in the opposition as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese capped off a messy month by passing two bills that respond to last month’s Bondi attack.

Senior Nationals MPs Bridget McKenzie, Ross Cadell and Susan McDonald crossed the floor on Tuesday night, as did backbencher Matt Canavan, to vote against the government’s bill that outlaws hate groups and makes it easier to cancel visas.

The Coalition shadow cabinet had agreed to support the bill on Sunday, meaning the Nationals shadow ministers broke convention on shadow cabinet solidarity. A Nationals MP, speaking on the condition of anonymity on Tuesday night, said it was now a question for Opposition Leader Sussan Ley as to whether she would enforce the convention and ask the shadow ministers to quit the front bench.

Ley had rebuked Nationals leaders who suggested they would oppose the laws banning neo-Nazis and radical Islamist groups during a series of tense meetings between leaders of the two Coalition parties held throughout Monday and Tuesday.

Ley claimed to have fixed the initial hate crimes bill by narrowing the circumstances that could cause an organisation to be outlawed, and by mandating a review of the post-Bondi laws in two years.

But Nationals senators walked out of the chamber during a vote on the bill’s second reading on Tuesday night, and voted against it after none of their amendments were successfully adopted. South Australian Liberal Alex Antic was the only Liberal to vote against the bill, alongside the Greens, One Nation, independent senators David Pocock, Fatima Payman and Tammy Tyrell, and the lone United Australia Party senator Ralph Babet.

The hate laws were passed by Labor and Liberal senators after 11pm (AEDT) following a marathon sitting day.

Laws setting up a national gun buyback and stopping non-citizens from buying guns also passed earlier in the evening, with the Greens’ backing. The entire Coalition opposed those laws because, they argued, Albanese was cynically using gun laws to divert attention from extremism.

The prime minister displayed signs of pressure on Tuesday as he was forced to defend his record in the first question time since the Bondi attack. Albanese turned on the Coalition by claiming former prime minister Scott Morrison had been weak on antisemitism, before Morrison hit back hours later.

But tensions were also flaring inside the Coalition in a week when polls showed the opposition’s support remained low, putting the spotlight back on Ley’s authority and leadership prospects as the Coalition again split on a key policy issue.

While Nationals leader David Littleproud had agreed in principle to pass the hate crimes bill in a Sunday evening shadow cabinet meeting, the junior Coalition party’s position shifted on Monday afternoon, when outspoken senator Matt Canavan, in particular, aired concerns that the bill could lead to religious or political groups being outlawed. Canavan also led the Nationals’ opposition to net zero.

At the same time, Coalition MPs were being deluged with questionable information from advocacy groups outside parliament, including false screenshots of sections of the bill that claimed the laws were far more powerful than they actually were.

In this context, Ley held several conversations with senior Nationals in which she made firm arguments that the Coalition needed to be on the right side of history in supporting reforms to protect Jews after the Bondi massacre. Sources familiar with the talks described them as “tense and charged”. Ley and Littleproud’s relationship has long been fraught, leading in part to a short-lived Coalition break-up earlier this term.

The opposition leader separately told colleagues that some of the proposed changes from the Nationals would water down the laws to such an extent that neo-Nazis and extremist Islamists would not be captured, and that the Nationals would be voting with the Greens, frequently accused of antisemitism, if they voted against the bill in the Senate.

The Nationals’ positioning on the bill ultimately did not matter because the Liberals’ support in the Senate was sufficient for the bills to pass. But the internal drama puts a spotlight on the pressure facing the junior Coalition party, which held several party room meetings on Tuesday in a tortuous internal process to debate the bill.

In a statement released to the media less than 20 minutes before the vote, Littleproud said his party’s differing stance from the Liberals “does not reflect on the relationship within the Coalition”, arguing that “more time is required to fully examine and test the bill before it is finalised”.

One Nation is surging in the polls and former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce is aiming to steal votes off the party in the bush, creating a risk for the Nationals’ leadership in voting for the laws if Joyce and Canavan were to campaign against the policies.

Right-wing Liberal backbenchers Andrew Hastie and Tony Pasin voted for the amended hate crimes legislation earlier on Tuesday.

Ley said in a statement: “In the national interest, the Liberal party has today stepped up to fix legislation that the Albanese government badly mishandled.”

While Albanese ultimately shored up the hate crimes bill by working with the opposition, he worked with the Greens in the Senate to pass stricter gun laws, which were the second component of his legislative response to Bondi. The prime minister was forced to split the laws into two bills when it became clear there was no broad support across the parliament for both.

The gun laws tighten firearm controls with greater co-operation among security agencies for background checks of licensed gun owners, beef up restrictions on firearm imports and create the powers for the federal government to enact a national buyback scheme.

Albanese said the scheme was similar to the buyback enacted by the Howard government after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 and contained import measures to prevent dangerous individuals from owning guns. He rejected arguments from Nationals MPs that the laws unfairly focused on rural residents.

“This [legislation] is not about targeting farmers, it’s not about competitive shooters, it’s not about law-abiding firearm owners,” Albanese said.

Littleproud had argued the restrictions were an unnecessary distraction from tackling antisemitism.

He told parliament on Tuesday that the gun bill was a “cheap political diversion.

“We do not have a gun problem, we have a radical Islam problem,” the Nationals leader said.

Littleproud had campaigned against tighter controls soon after the Bondi massacre and pre-empted his senior Coalition partners in the Liberal Party, as he did on the Voice to parliament referendum and Australia’s legislation of a net zero emissions target.

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