The smouldering wreckage on Capital Hill – part 2 |
The Liberal Party faces a structural dilemma – it cannot govern without the Nationals, yet governing with them pushes it further from the voters it needs. As support for the major parties erodes, Australia is edging towards a more fragmented political future.
The political aphorism for the start of the 2026 year is that the Liberals cannot form government without the Nationals, and that they can cannot form government with them.
The first part seems to be right – the only time in recent history when the Liberals had a House of Representatives majority – 68 seats in the 127-seat chamber – was after the 1975 election. The prospect that the Albanese government would do anything that verged on the incautious daring of the Whitlam government is too hard to imagine, as is the prospect that Government-General Sam Mostyn would conspire with a foreign monarch to unseat an elected Australian government.
How about the other possibility – getting back together with the Nationals, and doing some preference deals with One Nation, to pursue a Farage/Trump populist right-wing agenda? Consider those poll averages: Coalition plus One Nation = 46 per cent. That’s better than Labor Green = 42 per cent.
But it doesn’t work like that, and the numbers people in the Liberal Party know it. For a start, apart from a few Coalition seats held on the outer urban fringes, neither the Coalition nor One Nation have a strong urban base, in a country where two-thirds of the population live in big cities – cities with large immigrant populations and where people have increasingly turned away from established political parties.
On Radio National Linda Botterill put the issue in the way that a detached Liberal Parry strategist might. Perhaps it’s the way Menzies saw it in 1944 when he built the Liberal Party out of the smouldering ruins of the United Australia Party. Botterill captures the same spirit:
“Maybe the Coalition has run its course as a marriage, and needs to be something much more flexible. If they are two independent parties they do need to be acting like independent parties. In international terms the Australian Coalition is an absolute anomaly. Everywhere else in the world when minor parties go into coalition they do so after an election in order to form government and they negotiate around points of policy, the composition of their ministries and so on.
“Looking at One Nation as a threat suggests a move to the right politically by the Coalition. That’s not going to do the Liberals any favours in those seats that it needs to win in the inner cities.
“The Liberals really copped a walloping at last year’s election. Being in coalition with the Nationals, particularly as the Nationals are showing every inclination of moving to the........