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At the Midwinter Ball in August, Sussan Ley was trying to be funny.
Off the record and among peers, the opposition leader spoke about the quiet grind of her early leadership battles. The Nationals came in for some ribbing.
“The PM has decided he can solve peace in the Middle East. If you need a hand negotiating with fundamentalists, I’m available. After all, I’m in coalition with the National Party,” she joked.
It landed as gallows humour. But it also hinted at a reality Ley now has to manage in full view: a Coalition that demands constant negotiation, and a relationship dominated not by harmony but by defiance.
That defiance arrived Tuesday evening, when three Nationals senators broke with a shadow cabinet decision to support Labor’s antisemitism, hate and extremism laws. Ley responded by accepting their resignations from the shadow cabinet the following day. It was an attempt to assert authority — and one that invites an obvious question.
Did she have to?
The context was extraordinary. The legislation followed the Bondi terror attack and was drafted, negotiated and voted on at speed. Emotions were raw. Processes were imperfect. Positions shifted, amendments failed and key figures abstained. Even Ley would later acknowledge the Nats’ confusion: “They had three different positions across both houses of the parliament.”
The bill passed the Senate 38 votes to 22, with Labor and the Liberals aligned, giving the home affairs minister new powers to outlaw membership of designated hate groups and to cancel visas of people believed to be spreading hate in Australia. The Coalition’s shadow cabinet had agreed on Sunday night to support it, with some changes – although some in the Nationals dispute there was ever an agreement at all.
By Tuesday night, Nationals frontbench senators Susan McDonald, Bridget McKenzie and Ross Cadell – following the will of their party room – voted against it.
In isolation, there was an argument for leniency. Former Nationals leader Michael McCormack articulated it plainly. “Was this decided at a joint party meeting where, as one, we would either vote for or against a bill? No, it wasn’t,” he said, also pointing to Liberal abstentions as a complicating factor. Asked whether that made Ley’s task harder, he replied: “The short answer to that is yes.”
Cadell, for his part, framed the issue as one of convention rather than rebellion. “I understand if you do the crime, you have to take the time, and if it is so requested, I will be stepping down,” he said.
It is worth pondering whether Ley could have waved it through – just this once. She could have cited the extraordinary week, the rushed process and the heightened emotions. She could have issued warnings, drawn a line for the future and kept the shadow cabinet intact.
But that path carried its own, perhaps greater, risk. A Nationals’ threat to walk away looms anyway.
Not enforcing the rule would have meant effectively granting the Nationals a leave pass while expecting discipline from her own Liberal colleagues. That is not a tenable position for any leader, particularly one still lacking authority. Shadow cabinet solidarity either applies across the Coalition or it does not apply at all.
To bend the rule in these circumstances would also have set a precedent that the Nationals – who walked away from the Coalition for eight days after the 2025 election – would almost certainly test again. A waiver would not have closed the issue; it would have reopened it at the next flashpoint.
Ley’s decision, then, was less a flex than a calculation. Accepting the resignations was the cleanest way to reassert a single standard across the Coalition, even if it deepened short-term friction with the Nationals.
Labor was quick to frame the episode as dysfunction. Yet here is the harder truth for the opposition: enforcement does not equal coherence. From the outside, particularly to voters, this still looks like a political rabble arguing about process while bleeding authority. The Coalition’s primary vote is already hovering near record lows. Public confidence in its ability to govern is brittle. Episodes like this do not reassure; they reinforce doubt.
The paradox is that even amid Anthony Albanese’s own bungling – on Bondi, on messaging, on political instinct – he yet again emerges the short-term winner. A divided opposition lowers the bar. It allows a wounded government to carry on by default rather than by performance.
Of more concern for the Coalition, every visible fracture, every display of internecine warfare, creates oxygen for Pauline Hanson, whose political brand thrives on the proposition that the major parties are weak, compromised and incapable of clarity. Chaos is her proof point.
Ley has chosen the rule over the waiver. Whether that strengthens the Coalition or merely delays its next test remains an open question. But in an opposition already struggling to project coherence, pretending this week never happened was never a realistic option.
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Rob Harris is the national correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age based in Canberra. He is a former Europe correspondent.Connect via email.From our partners
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