The fallout from the 2025 Australian election continues, with the ructions of the landslide loss splitting the coalition. In a not-exactly-shock announcement, the Nationals have announced that they’re exiting the coalition agreement with the Liberals. The trigger for the split is policy difference and the Nationals supposedly growing convinced that the agreement is more a millstone than a benefit for the rural-based conservative party.
The decision represents the end of nearly 80 years of coalition agreements.
“We have got to a position that the National Party will sit alone on a principle basis,” [leader David Littleproud] said.
The big policy difference is nuclear power. The Nationals are correctly pragmatic that, without steady, reliable, power, the Australian energy grid is screwed. If that won’t be coal or gas, which Labor are fanatically opposed to, then it must be nuclear. The Liberals under new leader Sussan Ley haven’t made clear whether they’ll keep their nuclear policy.
But does it go even deeper than that? By electing a wet like Ley as leader, have the Liberals signalled that they’ve learned nothing from the election result. Instead of going back to their core centre-right principles, they’re doubling down on what’s failed so dreadfully: weak, wet, wannabe-Green ‘moderates’.
Ms Ley, who will hold a virtual Liberal party room at 2pm, could not agree to the Nationals’ leaders demands that his shadow cabinet ministers be granted the right to a free vote and oppose the Liberals on contentious issues including net zero emissions by 2050.
But is it all really about policy? Or about Littleproud’s wounded ego? The defection of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price from the Nationals to the Liberals, which effectively reduced the Nationals’ representation in the shadow cabinet, was closely followed by a leadership challenge from conservative Matt Canavan. Littleproud survived the challenge, but the simmering discontent with his leadership was clear. Seen in that light, is breaking the coalition agreement all so much chest-thumping from Littleproud?
It is understood that senior figures inside Mr Littleproud’s party room were not in agreement that the coalition agreement should be temporarily shredded. Liberal and Nationals sources said Mr Littleproud’s move is linked to his lack of confidence in holding his party together on the contentious policy of net zero emissions by 2050.
Indeed, Littleproud’s deputy was straight out of the gate, holding out the prospect of renewing the agreement.
Deputy Nationals Leader Kevin Hogan has left the door open to rejoining the coalition, saying that many breakups result in getting back together with more “clarity and focus”.
Mr Hogan said the decision was a “principled stand” on issues that were important to the Nationals […]
“We are always best as a country with a strong coalition.
“My wish in the future is that it is going to happen again sooner rather than later, but we need to make, for us, a principled stand on things today that we could not move on.”
Not to mention that the Nationals only chance of keeping major party status is as part of the coalition. With just nine seats left in the lower house, the Nationals’ major party status is already under review by the Australian Electoral Commission.
If, as is not unlikely, Labor’s standing collapses under the weight of their own hubris (as happened to John Howard between the landslide win of 2004 and the landslide loss of 2007), and the Liberals look like contenders again, you can bet the Nationals will come scurrying back. After all, under the coalition agreement, the Nationals not only get a guaranteed quota of cabinet representation, but their leader is automatically parachuted into the deputy prime minister job.
One thing is for sure: the Nationals will have to drag the Liberals, kicking and screaming, from their ‘us, too!’ chasing after Labor on so-called ‘renewables’.
Representing the regions that are being blighted by the scabrous sores of wind and solar farms, the Nationals’ position is clear.
Nationals Leader David Littleproud has declared that nuclear must be part of the energy mix and regional communities carry the burden of the renewable transition.
Mr Littleproud said families and the landscape were being “torn apart” by renewable infrastructure, criticising the rollout of green energy across regional Australia.
He said the nation needed to be “pragmatic” about energy policy, which has long divided the Liberal and Nationals party rooms.
“They have lost their social licence renewables, tearing up our landscape, tearing up our landscape, tearing up your food security and tearing families apart,” he said.
“Some get turbines, or transmission lines and I have seen families torn apart from that.
“We live with the consequence of that.”
The Teal voters the Liberals are so keen to win back, don’t. This is the foolishness of the Liberals’ choice to pour so much effort and resources into winning back the Teal seats. They might have won back Goldstein, in Melbourne, but they paid a mighty price, losing dozens of seats everywhere that isn’t a wealthy inner-city full of silly rich women who can afford to fret over boutique nonsense like ‘climate change’.
If the Nationals can knock some sense into the Liberals, then so much the better.
