David Littleproud’s ultimatum to the Liberal Party this week may yet go down as the greatest own goal in Australian politics since Peter Dutton ended Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership and accidentally installed Scott Morrison instead.
The drama of the first Coalition split in almost forty years has obscured an instructive point that may yet seal Littleproud’s fate. When the Nationals leader first delivered key demands to new Liberal leader Sussan Ley in talks on a new Coalition agreement last week, his party room had authorised exactly none of them.
The wider Nationals neither drafted nor signed off on the four apparently non-negotiable policy measures before their leader took them into the talks. Furthermore, they hadn’t endorsed his demand that Nationals appointed to Ley’s opposition frontbench would be free to speak out against disagreeable decisions. They only learned he’d sought to jettison the sacrosanct shadow cabinet solidarity principle from media reports after the split was announced.
They also didn’t tick off on Littleproud requiring that whenever Ley was absent from parliament it would be him — and not her deputy Ted O’Brien — who would become acting opposition leader, extending an arrangement that’s only automatic in government. Some past leaders secured that concession but not Littleproud. Since 2022, when Peter Dutton was away, deputy Sussan Ley took his place.
Littleproud made all those demands off his own bat, despite creating the impression it was the party room wot dunnit.
“This is a principled position my party room took,” he said on Tuesday, announcing the Nationals were busting up the Coalition. “It’s not a unilateral decision. It’s one of a collective.”
Curious, then, that multiple Nationals say the full party room wasn’t asked to endorse the four policies until after Littleproud’s talks with Ley broke down. They point out that had the wider group drafted the wish list, ditching support for 2050 net-zero emissions would likely have been on it. That omission from a list of policy demands so crucial as to justify ending an age-old relationship was certainly curious.
Here’s how things unfolded.
The 3 May election left the Nats buoyant. True, they’d failed to reclaim the seat of Calare from National-turned-independent Andrew Gee and they’re losing a NSW senator, former deputy leader Perin Davey, who will leave parliament on 30 June as a joint-ticket victim of the Liberals’ nosedive in support. The Liberal right enticed another, NT Country Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, to defect, with dreams of pursuing her lofty goal to become prime minister one day.
But on the upside, the Nationals held all their existing seats and came close to seizing Bendigo from Labor. They certainly didn’t want to be taken for granted and Littleproud argued they should use their leverage against the depleted and demoralised Liberals to cement the gains of the previous term.
“I get to leave a legacy,” Littleproud would tell the ABC on Tuesday. “I don’t intend to take a step back when I’ve taken some big steps forward in three years.”
On Thursday last week, two days after Ley became leader, Littleproud drove to Albury where Ley was with her dying mother to discuss a new Coalition agreement. His urgency is interesting in itself. He had no written agreement at all with her predecessor, fellow Queenslander Dutton, for the entirety of the last parliamentary term.
“I’d insult Peter Dutton if I asked to put in writing our agreements,” Littleproud declared at the Liberal campaign launch in Sydney on 13 April. “Because Peter and I look each other in the eye, we shake each other’s hand, and we know that I can trust him and that we’re going to deliver.”
Not so with Sussan Ley, apparently. On Friday, the day after the Albury talks, Littleproud called his colleagues together online. After canvassing frontbench numbers and other details, there was a discussion about policy priorities. As ever, the Nationals wanted to protect their interests in forging the famously secret written Coalition agreement that until last term had been a hallmark of the Liberal–National partnership in opposition and in government.
But they didn’t draft any list.
Over the next few days, there was back and forth between Littleproud and Ley. On Saturday, Ley’s mother Angela Braybrooks died.
Refusing to be forced to commit, Ley noted that the Coalition had just been smashed at the election, there was a review underway as to why, she had put all policies on the table pending that, and she’d vowed not to make any captain’s calls. She flatly refused both the acting-leader request and permission for frontbenchers to freelance. On the four policy issues — the only things Littleproud subsequently identified publicly as deal-breakers — she was amenable but asked for time to go to her party room as promised.
Littleproud didn’t want to wait. It almost seems like he was spoiling for a bust-up.
He called his colleagues together again on Tuesday and only then did he put the four measures before them. He said he’d made the collective demands — an ongoing commitment to nuclear power, the break-up of supermarket monopolies, the proposed $20 billion regional fund (an election promise) and universal mobile phone coverage in the bush — the junior Coalition partner’s line in the sand. The nuclear point, which started out as a demand for the whole election policy, shifted during the talks to simply lifting the current moratorium on nuclear power.
Littleproud told his colleagues that without a guarantee before Ley unveiled her shadow ministry, which was due by week’s end, they must walk out of the Coalition.
He called for a vote. Instead of the usual secret ballot, he forced MPs and senators to declare support or opposition on the spot and in the relative open. New deputy leader Kevin Hogan and Senate leader Bridget McKenzie backed him. McKenzie wanted to punish the Liberals for Nampijinpa Price’s defection. That departure and Davey’s defeat would take the Nationals’ Senate numbers down to four, jeopardising its party status — and her position — there.
Only in the break-up’s aftermath was it revealed that McKenzie had written a furious letter to Liberal Senate counterpart Michaelia Cash on 12 May after the defection, threatening to split from the Liberals in the Senate as a result. The Liberals say this suggests premeditation in this week’s events.
A handful of Nationals at Tuesday’s meeting were appalled and alarmed at the implications of a split. Protesters included former deputy prime ministers and leadership rivals Michael McCormack and Barnaby Joyce. Dissenters asked if Littleproud and McKenzie had really thought this through. McCormack spoke most forcefully. In the end, though, a majority supported the move.
But when the split was announced, the response was disastrous. Each in their own way, no fewer than three former Liberal prime ministers — John Howard, Tony Abbott and Turnbull — called it idiotic.
Littleproud’s actions have left him dangerously exposed. Some Nationals have long murmured that he is a far more ruthless player than his public persona suggests. Tales of his lack of personal fondness for Sussan Ley have also spilled into the open, fuelled by his insistence on forcing her hand while her mother was dying.
Even the language he used raised a few eyebrows. Mentioning the word “respect” over and over, Littleproud said he had taken account of Ley’s personal circumstances. But a (male) junior partner saying that he had gone to Albury, where a (female) senior partner was keeping vigil at her mother’s bedside, rather than “making her come to Canberra” hinted at something else, as did his subsequent suggestion that she was prepared to put politics before family.
“In fact, Sussan Ley wanted to come to Canberra to leave her dying mother,” he said later. “I wouldn’t allow that. I drove to Albury.” Ley’s office says that simply isn’t true.
Littleproud’s conduct has left some Nationals — and more than a few Liberals — somewhere between dismayed and apoplectic. The real-world political implications of ending the Coalition — not least that neither party can defeat Labor alone — were enough to prompt long-time competitors McCormack and Joyce to team up and go around Littleproud, approaching Ley to broker a solution. Liberals engaged with other Nationals and a path to rapprochement was forged.
On Thursday morning, Littleproud publicly dropped his freelancing-frontbenchers demand — which, according to the Liberals, was always the only real sticking point. Ley contacted him to say she was prepared to call her colleagues together to discuss the four policy demands, as she’d said all along.
Having gone ahead and designed a shadow shadow ministry — notably excluding both Joyce and McCormack — and called its proposed members to Canberra on Thursday, Littleproud then had to send them home, announcing he would await the Liberals’ verdict.
By week’s end, David Littleproud was looking like a bloke who’d overplayed his hand.
The Liberals met online on Friday afternoon and gave in-principle support to the four policy positions, adopting the end-the-moratorium compromise option on nuclear power. Ley foreshadowed more talks with Littleproud, whose colleagues had effectively rolled him. Some Nationals are now talking about dumping him in favour of McCormack. Even McCormack’s old nemesis, Joyce, is willing to back the former leader.
The Riverina MP known for his Elvis impersonations is doing little to dispel the prospect. In a Friday morning interview on Canberra ABC radio, McCormack was asked if Littleproud had his full support.
“I’m ambitious for him,” he said, echoing the phrase Morrison famously used about Turnbull in 2018, two days before replacing him. Pressed to explain his choice of words, the good-humoured MP left no doubt they weren’t an accident.
“I’ve just given you my answer,” he said, with an audible smile.
Late on Friday afternoon, McCormack appeared on TV, insisting he had just been having a bit of fun. And then he had a bit more.
“I’m not planning on rolling David anytime soon,” he said.
Settle in. This particular political soap opera may be having an extended run. •
