All hell broke loose on Friday afternoon as the frustrated Liberal and National parties announced separate leadership challenges that will be settled early next week. Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s defection appears to have been the catalyst for the leadership implosion.
With Dan Tehan ruling himself out of the leadership race, Sussan Ley and Angus Taylor will go head-to-head at a party meeting on Tuesday next week. Taylor announced his tilt at the leadership on Friday afternoon. Price is expected to run as Taylor’s deputy.
Senator Price’s move to the Liberal party room throws an interesting lifeline to the Liberals. Whether it is too little or too late depends on how things progress from here. However, it has strained the relationship between the Coalition partners.
Following Price’s defection, Senators Matt Canavan rebuked Senator Price for an act of disloyalty. The claim is a little far-fetched in my view as the Coalition has an arrangement in the Country Liberal Party (CLP) that is not hard and fast.
I asked Dr Zachary Gorman, Historian and Research Manager at the Robert Menzies Institute, about the Country Liberal Party’s non-binding convention within the Coalition:
‘The Country Liberal Party, as the name suggests, is a merger of both the Country (now National) and the Liberal Parties. So, both sides of the divide decided mutually to work as one, like a forerunner of the LNP in Queensland. Given the small polity it wasn’t economical to double-up on resources, so they joined forces. Shane Stone’s chapter in our book Unity in Autonomy cites the convention.’
Under the convention, CLP members of the House of Representatives sit with the Liberals and Senators sit with the Nationals.
Dr Gorman pointed out that if Senator Price had won the Northern Territory’s Lower House seat of Lingiari in 2019, she would have been a Liberal under the convention.
The division of Lingiari was created in 2001 and has been held by Labor ever since. The last Lower House member of the CLP was Natasha Griggs who lost the division of Solomon to Labor’s Luke Gosling in 2016.
Price is expected to run as deputy to Angus Taylor on a conservative ticket. This will be good news for conservative Liberal supporters.
According to Dr Gorman, the Liberals have only ever succeeded when they clearly believed in their philosophy. He suggested that the defeats of leaders like Peacock as opposed to Howard (who was able to rebuild the Liberal Party) indicate that attempts to appeal to an amorphous centre have not been successful election strategies for the Liberals.
Dr Gorman cited examples where the Liberals were expected to ‘win handsomely’ in 1969 with Gorton and in 2016 with Turnbull. Gorton won the election but lost the two-party preferred vote while Turnbull was re-elected with a bare majority. The results for such deliberate centralists who attempted to move away from the Liberal Party’s traditions suggest the strategy is far from a guarantee of electoral success.
In my opinion, the wets’ desire to move to the ‘sensible centre’ will be counterproductive. There is a chance that a reinvigorated Liberal Party with a Taylor-Price combo will stay true to Liberal traditions. Whether the Nationals will fit in with the new Liberals’ leadership team is another story.
The Nationals are gearing up for a greater role in the Coalition partnership given the Liberals’ devasting loss.
Senator Matt Canavan hit out at Senator Price on X.
Soon after, Canavan announced he will challenge Nationals’ leader, David Littleproud, at a party room meeting on Monday.
Canavan is a popular conservative senator, and his announcement will be good news for the many conservatives who saw Littleproud as too ‘wet’. Canavan wants to cancel Australia’s commitment to Net Zero. This will put him at odds with Sussan Ley if she wins the Liberals’ leadership on Tuesday next week.
Deputy Nationals’ Leader, Senator Perin Davey lost her senate seat after she was relegated to an unwinnable ticket position behind two Liberal candidates. Wholesale change is set to occur for the Coalition partners in a matter of days.
Both parties have now cleared the decks. The outcome is likely to determine whether we have a conservative opposition or more Labor-lite. Of course, that’s if the Coalition survives the fallout from last week’s loss and this week’s debacle.
Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is The Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. All opinions in this article are the author’s own.