Rip it up and start again: the Coalition’s four days of chaos

In the two decades Barnaby Joyce has been in parliament, he’s just about seen it all.

The only person ever to serve in the Senate for one state and in the House of Representatives for another state, he’s been everything from deputy prime minister to humbled backbencher, a thorn in the side of John Howard, disqualified from parliament for being a dual citizen through to being the man that kindled the climate change rebellion in Coalition ranks back in 2009.

But until this week, he had never played the role of relationship counsellor.

Looking back on a crazed few days, Joyce chooses his words carefully about a “business relationship” that temporarily ran off the rails.

“It was a tumultuous week that would have been better having never been experienced. I can’t talk to the reasons why, but I can say that a more sage approach would have produced a different outcome,” he says.

“I hope, like most business relationships – I never call it a marriage – there is maturity to both sides to say that was a bad day at the office, but we move on.”

Joyce, along with former Nationals leader Michael McCormack and Darren Chester, a former cabinet minister, was instrumental in keeping the lines of communication open between the two Coalition parties during a split that now looks likely to be repaired.

As party elders including a pair of former prime ministers – John Howard and Tony Abbott – spoke out against the split and cautioned that the longer it took to effect a reformation, the harder it would be to achieve one, Ley spoke to the three Nationals who, along with Susan McDonald and Sam Birrell, spoke in the Nationals party room meeting against the split.

Joyce says he will not benefit personally from helping to stop the divorce – he and Littleproud are not close and he is unlikely to return to the frontbench this term – but he spoke to Ley for the good of both parties.

“Sussan and I were discussing how to keep the Coalition together. I won’t go into the intricacies. So much has been reported about extraneous issues, it was purely around how do you keep the Coalition together and resolve this issue,” he says.

It worked.

Just two days after the death of Ley’s mother – Angela Braybrooks will not be laid to rest until next Friday – the new opposition leader looked to have been dealt a fatal blow on Tuesday when, with much haste, Nationals leader David Littleproud, his deputy Kevin Hogan and the influential Senate leader, Bridget McKenzie, announced the Coalition parties were getting a divorce.

Two more days later, they changed their minds.

The week ends with Ley’s judgment call to stare down the Nationals’ demands proving to be the right one, and with her leadership enhanced.

Littleproud, on the other hand, looks like a man who overplayed his hand in a grab for power, with his judgment and the future of his leadership now in question.

The speed with which the two parties split and then began to reconcile has been remarkable, so brief that the ink hadn’t dried on the Liberal-National party divorce papers before the two parties were headed back to counselling.

Littleproud’s predecessor in the seat of Maranoa, Bruce Scott, was in parliament for 26 years and served as a minister in the Howard government for five years before retiring in 2016.

A staunch coalitionist and one of the architects of the merger of the Liberal and National parties in Queensland in 2008, he says the two parties should “absolutely get back together” as soon as possible.

“For years, the Coalition has been the great strength of the conservative side of politics in Canberra. You only have to look at the LNP merger in Queensland. Working as one has delivered government, and the LNP members in Canberra, in the House, they have been the largest group of MPs and yet we [Queensland] are not the largest state population-wise,” he says.

“From election to election, policies are modified, added to or whatever. We have just had an election and the electorate has spoken comprehensively against the policies of the Coalition. So we have to revisit strategy, policies and our campaign. I think it’s important to go back to them, and I think that’s what Sussan has been suggesting.”

As the dust settled at the end of the week, Littleproud’s decision to split the Coalition looked like an attempt to seize extra power and influence for the Nationals just as the Liberals were at their weakest.

The Nationals’ stated reason for the split was Ley’s unwillingness to immediately sign up to retaining four key policies – support for nuclear power, laws that could force supermarket divestiture, improved regional mobile phone coverage and a $20 billion regional fund.

So serious was Littleproud about the split that by Thursday, he had chosen a “shadow shadow cabinet” and was preparing to unveil his team of frontbenchers in Canberra.

But then the two parties agreed to restart talks.

It was not unreasonable for Ley to ask for more time, given she had just announced a lengthy policy review and her party room had not met.

Littleproud said that the “four policy areas are important to the lives and livelihoods of the people that I represent. And the fact that the Liberal Party room is now prepared to have that conversation, I think speaks volumes about the fact that we should allow that to happen, and that gives every chance [of reconciliation]”.

Asked why he had not waited for the Liberals to meet and discuss the policies – the party room subsequently met on Thursday and then Friday – Littleproud effectively blamed Ley.

“I didn’t dictate … this is a matter for the Liberal Party, I don’t have control over the Liberal Party,” he said, adding that “the timeline that they were talking about was months away, it was a review of all policies”.

By the end of the week, although they were grumbling about it, it seemed likely the Liberals would hold their nose and at least give in-principle agreement to making supportive noises about the Nationals’ policy demands.

As one senior Liberal, who asked not to be named, puts it: “It now looks like a tantrum, like the junior Coalition partner not feeling respected enough. As in, ‘you stole Jacinta, you’re forcing us to recognise net zero’.

“We are generally comfortable with the four policies, but we have some reservations. Divestiture is the biggest sticking point, but it’s not worth blowing the Coalition up over it.”

Ley welcomed Littleproud’s backdown on shadow cabinet solidarity “as a foundation to resolve other matters”.

“It has always been the Liberal Party’s objective to form a coalition, and we welcome the Nationals’ decision to re-enter negotiations,” she said.

And although the Nationals’ leader barely mentioned them, there were three other reasons for the Coalition’s quickie divorce.

First was the defection of Country Liberal Party senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to the Liberal Party, which has cost the Nationals’ party status in the Senate and which means the junior Coalition party loses staff, resources and salary, and the party’s remaining senators move to smaller and less salubrious offices in the outer corridors of Parliament House.

Price’s extraordinary defection to stand as deputy leader to Angus Taylor – which she then squibbed after Ley won the leadership vote – particularly infuriated Bridget McKenzie, whom many within the Coalition see as Littleproud’s puppet master and the person who truly drove the split.

A leaked letter from McKenzie to Liberal Senate leader Michaelia Cash about Price’s decision to leave the Nationals and join the Liberals underscored that anger.

Price, a frequent guest on Sky’s evening program, has been conspicuously quiet this week.

The second reason, which Littleproud conveniently failed to mention until Ley’s office made it public, was his extraordinary demand that the Nationals be able to ditch shadow cabinet solidarity, which binds frontbenchers to joint party positions. This was an impossible demand, and Littleproud dropped it when even his own party would not back it.

Third was the Coalition’s commitment to Australia reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, as the senior Liberal suggested.

Littleproud and his leadership team repeatedly denied this had been a factor in the decision, but the issue has roiled the Coalition junior partner, in particular, for years.

In that fateful Nationals party room meeting that pushed for the split, Joyce says, it was not brought forward as a reason. But for some in the party room, it remains a massive issue.

“Net zero is to me a huge issue, the people of New England have been absolutely done over by the cost of wind power and solar panels, communities are divided against themselves, properties are divided at the behest of multinationals and billionaires under the guise of virtue, for the benefit of others, hundreds of kilometres away,” he says.

So even as the Coalition moves towards reconciliation, the debate over net zero, which Liberals mostly support but which many Nationals question, will likely resurface in the 48th parliament.

Ley ends the week with her leadership enhanced, her judgment vindicated and her authority increased, while Littleproud looks a diminished figure who tried to pull a fast one and failed, badly.

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