Nationals leave themselves exposed in fight that amounts to chicken feed

The split of the Nationals and Liberals looks a lot like two turkeys voting for Christmas. Neither can win power without the other. If they continue in this state, they will have delivered an unimagined bonus for Anthony Albanese’s Labor government: an opposition without a plausible pathway to power.

The Nationals have stormed off in a state of righteous indignation. By surrendering their right to seats on the opposition frontbench, they have sacrificed not only relevance but also salary allowances for their more senior members.

“I’m genuinely blown away that we are prepared to do this for the right reasons,” the Nationals Senate leader Bridget McKenzie, tells me. “That’s what makes our party room unique.”

Uniquely rash.

The junior coalition party is especially vulnerable now. Nationals leader David Littleproud said the walkout was because the party is committed to improving the lives of people in the regions.

Perhaps.

But the Nationals, without the Liberals, will be powerless to improve anyone’s lives.

Littleproud’s ultimatum to the Liberals? That the Coalition retains four of the policies they took to this month’s federal election.

The four: A promise to build seven taxpayer-funded nuclear reactors; a policy to force dominant retailers to divest parts of their businesses if found to be in breach of competition law; a plan for a $20 billion fund for services for the regions; and a policy to require phone companies to provide minimum service standards in the bush.

The Nationals’ chances of getting any of this by themselves? Zero. Their access to the national Treasury is courtesy of their alliance with the Liberals. It wasn’t that the Liberals’ new leader, Sussan Ley, said no. She merely said, reasonably enough, that the Liberals had to conduct a review of all policies after their crushing election loss. They’d talk later. The Nats refused to wait.

The Nationals’ share of the primary vote at the federal election was 3.8 per cent. Their Queensland cousins, the LNP, won 7 per cent.

Without the Liberals’ cooperation, the Nationals are close to nothing. If they go to the next election as a standalone party, Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer will prey on their weakness to compete for every one of their voters.

And the Liberals? They’ve made two smart decisions since their electoral haemorrhage.

First, they elected a female leader. This was the bare minimum necessary to show that they were interested in representing Australia circa the 21st century.

Second, they resisted the Nationals’ demands this week and allowed the break-up to proceed.

The Liberals’ problem was not that they’d failed to give enough concessions to the Nationals. It was that, in recent years, they’d given too many. The Nationals were leading the Liberals into becoming a populist right-wing rump.

Exhibit A: Littleproud boasted that he’d convinced Peter Dutton to adopt the policy for nationalised nuclear reactors. It seems to have worked for the Nationals. But it was a key reason for the Liberals’ smashing losses.

“It was,” says Liberal former campaign director Tony Barry of Redbridge, “the policy that dared not speak its name.”

The Liberals need to recover their purpose. And find a constituency. The policy review is, once again, a bare minimum for the viability of the Liberals.

True, the Nationals’ walkout is a blow to the Liberals. By taking their 15 House of Representatives members out of the Coalition party room, they leave the Liberals with a mere 28 seats in a chamber of 151. That’s a startling 48 seats short of the magic number required for a majority – 76.

The Liberals have an opportunity that the Nationals do not – the opportunity to recover as a mass party, not merely a sectional one. Able to form a government in its own right once more, as it has in decades past, provided it can manage the Herculean work of thoroughly reconstructing itself.

But because the separation has weakened both, the most likely outcome is reunification. As the Nationals are saying already.

“I have no doubt that, in future, there’ll be a rapprochement, even though there’ll be complications,” says the Nationals’ Barnaby Joyce.

McKenzie sees scope for a reunion “at some point in the future, when together we hold 76 seats as a bare minimum”.

In other words, power trumps posing when there is the prospect of access to the Treasury. Everything else is chicken feed.

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