The story of the federal Coalition since last May’s election has been overwhelmingly dreadful – an episode of dysfunction and self-harm that will fascinate political scientists for years to come.
In the wake of a massive defeat, the Liberal and National parties saddled themselves with leaders who were wrong for their jobs and for each other. Sussan Ley was the first to go. She’s gone from politics altogether. And now David Littleproud has gone too, having fallen on his sword. For the Coalition, there are new sheriffs in town. Both parties have gone for the clean sweep, installing new leaders and new deputies. Angus Taylor and Jane Hume have barely settled in as Liberal leader and deputy and now Matt Canavan and Darren Chester hold the corresponding positions with the Nationals.
A double-barrelled question confronts the Coalition: can it rebuild itself or, with One Nation on the march and seemingly swallowing up enormous chunks of their supporter base, is it already too late? In the technical sense at least, bringing in new leadership teams is a start. It’s an acknowledgement that a problem exists. We’re yet to see just how much of an improvement the new leadership players are on their predecessors. Taylor and Hume didn’t begin well. They were rightly laughed off the stage with their opening gambit of a sub-undergraduate condemnation of their opponents as the “worst government in this nation’s history”. That was their initial calling card, which they followed up with bizarre tactics in Question Time that focused on ISIS brides – a niche issue at a time when inflation and interest rates were on the rise.
Things have improved since the US and Israel launched their latest onslaught on Iran. Taylor and his foreign affairs spokesman Ted O’Brien – for those trying to keep score, O’Brien had been Ley’s deputy – have been measured in their responses to the government’s reaction to the conflict as it has spread quickly across the Middle East. They haven’t been bellicose, nor have they sought to politicise matters – not yet anyway.
It’s a counterfactual, but just to get a sense of how things might have gone under Ley, would she, assisted (if that is the right word) by her ever-excitable foreign affairs shadow Michaelia Cash, have held fire in the same way? Ley’s overheated behaviour in the weeks after the Bondi massacre, which ultimately put paid to her political career and harmed the Coalition parties, suggests not. The Coalition’s problem in recent years is that it’s looked impulsive and not serious enough to be trusted with office. The shift under the new leadership on this issue, at least initially, offers some level of encouragement for Coalition supporters, or what’s left of them.
What the move to Canavan will mean for the Coalition rebuild we’re yet to see. An unmediated public performer, he’s an old-school politician in the sense that he’s unlikely to ever turn down an opportunity to appear in the media. Canavan is what is known these days as an “authentic” politician, who “speaks his mind”. That was evident in his first media conference as leader on Wednesday, in which he despaired at the loss of Australia’s “relaxed and larrikin nature”, declaring that “we are losing our country”. His is a hyper-nationalist position, in which we manufacture and farm the things we need while making jokes around the barbecue.
Like Littleproud, he is a Queenslander, but has a much more heightened profile as an advocate for the coal industry, especially as it relates to energy and the widespread role of renewables. Unlike Littleproud, he does not have a scratchy personality. Fulfilling the role of a politician and especially a political leader looks much easier from the outside. Littleproud’s boastful and defensive musings on Tuesday afternoon about his leadership performance as he announced his resignation made for sad listening.
From the outset, Littleproud had an outsized view of the National Party’s role in policymaking and the national discussion and had no qualms about acting unilaterally to the Coalition’s cost. He characterised himself as the servant of the Nationals’ party room and spoke of his pride in showing “courage” and “character” in standing for what the party room wanted him to stand for. The sadness in all this was that he felt he had to say it; his Nationals colleagues weren’t exactly getting in line to praise him in the way that he was praising himself.
That party room should be placed in its proper context. Of the nation’s 226 federal parliamentarians, only 18 identify as National Party MPs. That’s enough to require nothing bigger than a minibus to take them wherever they might want to go. When it comes to policy, the current Nationals party room has shown that it knows how to punch above its weight. Last year, Littleproud, urged on by his colleagues, with Canavan as the lead advocate inside the party room, ditched net zero. In short order the Liberals, under Ley’s leadership, did the same. Not a bad result for the National Party, which at the election a few months earlier had attracted 3.8 per cent of the national vote under its own banner and a minor share of the 7.3 per cent secured by the merged Liberal and National entities in Queensland and the Northern Territory.
Just how that success on ditching net zero helps the Liberals win back their old electoral base in the big cities, which they need to form government, is hard to see. As for the Nationals, Canavan easily and naturally speaks the fundamental language of One Nation, harking back to an Australia of the past while also decrying Pauline Hanson for her divisive “identity politics on the Right”. He is a better communicator than Littleproud. He needs to be because the National Party is now in the fight of its life against One Nation outside metropolitan Australia. Originally named the Country Party, the Nationals formed federally after World War I as a community-driven populist insurgency in rural and regional Australia that harnessed disaffection with the established parties. Sound familiar?
Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, author and former associate editor of The Age.
The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.
Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.