Source : the age
By David Crowe and Paul Sakkal
The Liberal Party is set for a pivotal clash over nuclear power after a key senator broke ranks to urge her colleagues to dump their plans for atomic energy, shaping the choice over the party’s leadership and direction.
The warning from Liberal senator Maria Kovacic marks the first public rejection of the nuclear plan from a member of the federal party room ahead of a broader debate about how to recover from the catastrophic defeat at the election.
Senator Maria KovacicCredit: Peter Rae
The move comes as deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley and shadow treasurer Angus Taylor contest a tight race to decide the leadership, with each side approaching immigration spokesman Dan Tehan to serve as deputy.
A damaging leak of internal polling, revealed by this masthead on Tuesday, has also fuelled discontent within the party, as MPs criticise the party’s pollster, Freshwater Strategy, for providing data that that gave Liberal leader Peter Dutton a false sense of confidence.
Kovacic said the election campaign showed that younger voters did not support the nuclear policy, based on her experience with Liberal candidates at polling stations, and that the party needed to listen to the verdict from voters last Saturday.
“We know how tough it is out there, and we didn’t offer Australian voters a legitimate alternative – and they sent that message very, very clearly on Saturday,” she said.
“And we can’t deny the fact that our nuclear plan was a part of that because it was one of the keystone policies.
“So it’s my view that the Liberal Party must immediately scrap the nuclear energy plan and back the private market’s investment in renewable energy.”
Liberal leader Peter Dutton embraced nuclear power in August 2022 after calls from Nationals leader David Littleproud to adopt the policy, but the plan set off a political firestorm over the $331 billion forecast to build and own the power stations.
While the Liberals expect to launch an election review to consider their defeat, Kovacic said the nuclear policy needed to be dumped immediately and that
“I think the result on Saturday is a pretty clear election review of what Australians think.
“We will not be electable for Gen Z and millennial voters who thought, you know, we were having them on with this policy.
“If we are going to go to our Liberal roots – and be the party that Robert Menzies founded – then we need to recognise that he would stay this nuclear policy has to go.
“The idea that the party of free markets and small government would nationalise a major portion of the energy system is completely at odds with what we stand for.”
The remarks comes as Liberals see a glimmer of hope in the latest election count, seeing a chance to defeat “teal” candidates in three tight contests in Melbourne and Sydney, but the party is on track to shrink to a small size that could keep it out of power for at least two terms.
The latest count showed that Labor had 86 seats and the Coalition had 39 seats, with at least 14 seats to be decided.
Littleproud has backed the nuclear policy since the election, while Queensland Nationals Colin Boyce and Michelle Landry have also said it should remain opposition policy and Nationals senate leader Bridget McKenzie said Labor had “weaponised” the issue.
“That doesn’t mean you should actually throw out a solution to our energy sovereignty,” McKenzie told Sky News.
Kovacic warned against allowing the Nationals to set the policy when the Liberals faced a major challenge in winning back seats in the cities.
“We have to find a way to deal with that,” she said of the differences with the Nationals.
“The pathway back to government lies in regaining metropolitan and suburban seats. We can never govern again if we only have regional seats.”
Liberal Dan Tehan looms as a potential kingmaker in the race between Angus Taylor and Sussan Ley to take on the leadership of the weakened opposition, as MPs lash the party’s pollster for giving Peter Dutton false confidence about the election result.
The leak of internal documents published in this masthead on Tuesday, which revealed that Dutton’s popularity numbers were dire and that strategists urged him to lighten up, triggered public criticism of the party’s contracted pollster, Mike Turner of Freshwater Strategy.
Frontbenchers Sussan Ley, Angus Taylor and Dan Tehan are all interested in the party leadership. But Tehan could be kingmaker.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“We had bad pollsters giving us bad numbers,” Tasmanian senator Jonathon Duniam said on Sky News. “We were let down by pollsters and strategists which frankly gave us a bum steer of the worst order.”
Two Liberal sources said the party secretariat was threatening legal action against Turner. A spokesman for the Liberal Party federal secretariat decline to comment. Freshwater Strategy was contacted for comment.
As the party comes to terms with its worst loss since its founding in 1944, both Taylor, the shadow treasurer backed by the right faction, and Ley, the deputy leader backed by the moderates, have asked Tehan to run as their deputy, according to several MPs not authorised to speak publicly about the leadership contest.
Tehan secured a convincing victory against Climate 200-backed independent Alex Dyson in his Victorian seat of Wannon and has spent days phoning colleagues to test if he had support to run as leader himself.
But if he were to agree to be the deputy leader, he would be able to pick his preferred portfolio, allowing the Spanish-speaking former diplomat to pick foreign affairs.
Whoever secures Tehan’s support will gain his six allies, who could be decisive in a party room of about 50 with several seats still in doubt.
MPs said Ley’s supporters were positioning her as the centrist candidate who would make history as its first female federal leader. One MP claimed she had been offering MPs frontbench portfolios of their choice, including Melissa McIntosh, Scott Buchholz, Jason Wood, and Alex Hawke.
Victorian senator Jane Hume was initially floated as a deputy to Taylor, but her role in the work-from-home debacle and her unfounded remarks about “Chinese spies” helping Labor may have cost her the job.
