Albanese had a dream. The Coalition’s catastrophe is making it come true

As it stands today, Australia has just one party of government. And that is the party that currently holds government. With the splintering of the Coalition, no one else conceivably could come close to the threshold of power – winning a majority of seats in the House of Representatives.

For a majority, you need 76 seats in the House. Until a few days ago, the Coalition held 42. They were in the wilderness, yet with potential to return to power at the next election or, more plausibly, the one following. Rather than figure out a plan to get from 42 to 76, they’ve blown themselves up.

Now that the Nationals have flounced off in a spiteful fit of pique, the Liberals have a mere 28. And the Nationals just 14. Together, they were in the wilderness. Apart, they are all in oblivion.

The Coalition is the Siamese fighting fish of the political aquarium. A notable feature of this colourful species is that while it’s always up for a fight, it’s just as ready to attack itself. On seeing its own reflection in glass, it will strike.

This is just the sort of self-harming aggression displayed by the Coalition, and the Nationals in particular. “I want to give you a counterargument,” says a Liberal frontbencher, of why the Coalition is not as brainless as a pointlessly pugnacious pisces, “but I can’t think of one.”

Australia long operated a two-party system, with Labor and the Coalition vying for power. It’s now a one-party-and-some-bits system. “We are no longer a coalition; we are a collection of minor parties on the right,” says a senior Liberal, encompassing the Liberals, Nationals and One Nation.

The Nationals are now a party of protest, like One Nation, like the Greens. Parties of grievance, not government. The Liberals in recent years have been heading in this direction, too.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has expressed an ambition to entrench Labor in power long enough to make it the “natural party of government”, a title long claimed by the Coalition. He’s excelled beyond his wildest dreams. Thanks to the Nationals’ walkout, Labor is now the only party of government.

Barnaby Joyce, now a member of One Nation, puts it this way: “Anthony Albanese is the only person in the history of Australian politics who’s safe with a primary vote of 32 per cent,” quoting the figure from this week’s Newspoll. “That screams of the seismic change in Australian politics.”

So what is the seismic change? And is Albanese truly so safe? Labor Party headquarters this week sent out to party members a fundraising email with the subject line: “Pauline Hanson as PM?”

“The latest polls show One Nation passing the Liberals on primary vote for the first time,” reads the email. Hanson has said she’s ready to form government, it says. “We don’t share their view, but we also can’t ignore the signs.”

The immediate seismic event was the decision of the Nationals to break from the Liberals, for the second time. The simple fact that they’ve walked out twice in eight months – after nearly four decades of coalition stability – tells you that there is an underlying dysfunction, not simply a couple of points of disagreement.

There are three common factors in the two break-ups. First, David Littleproud, Nationals’ leader, is widely seen to have mismanaged both situations. Some of the Nationals are deeply unimpressed. That’s why one of their backbenchers, Colin Boyce, has promised to challenge Littleproud for the party leadership on Monday.

Without the Liberals, the Nationals face “political oblivion”, he said in a statement of the obvious. Boyce isn’t going to win; he lacks support. Rather, he’s a “bomb-thrower” who is hoping to blow up Littleproud’s leadership by provoking other challengers to take up the contest, one of his colleagues says.

The Liberals are even less impressed.

The Coalition is the Siamese fighting fish of the political aquarium … On seeing its own reflection in glass, it will strike.

Yet Liberal leader Sussan Ley is conciliatory. On Friday, she named an interim opposition front bench, Liberals only. But she said her shadow ministers would be “acting” until formal appointments take place on February 9. In effect, she’s giving the Nationals 10 days to come back to the fold before she cements her new frontbench into place. It’s an opening; it’s also a deadline.

The second factor is that the Liberals have been a less attractive partner. Not only have they suffered their worst loss in eight decades, they’ve also lost their chief credential to hold power – the title of the claim to be the superior economic manager.

Under Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton, they abandoned core Liberal principles of economic management. As one-time Liberal Party strategist Tony Barry wrote in The Guardian this week: “The Liberal Party are now a movement in search of a purpose.” The director of the RedBridge Group said his firm’s polling showed only 19 per cent of voters said the Coalition was the better party to deal with the cost of living and affordability.

Joyce offers his own metaphor for the relevance of the Liberal Party: “It’s like that ornament you’ve had sitting on the shelf gathering dust,” he tells me. “After a while, you say, ‘hey, what’s that doing there?’. And you find yourself answering, ‘I have no idea’.”

The third factor is an underlying panic among many of the Nationals. The cause? For months and years now, they’ve feared that Pauline Hanson is encroaching on their support base. They’re right; she has been. But their response has been counterproductive. One Nation won 6 per cent of the national primary vote at the last election. In recent polls, it has around 20 per cent.

Why the sudden surge? “The push factor is the Coalition imploding,” says the pollster for this masthead, Jim Reed of Resolve Strategic.

“The pull factor is that One Nation has been acting more like the opposition. Its messaging has been very clear – no to immigration, no to net zero, no to laws against free speech. These are positions that a disengaged voter can readily grasp. In some ways, the times suit Pauline Hanson. Suddenly, all the things she’s been saying for decades have extra credibility because she was saying them when they were unpopular.”

Joyce’s defection from the Nationals to One Nation didn’t generate the surge, says Reed. One Nation’s polling went from 6 per cent to 12 well before Joyce had joined.

But it helped. “I’ve given people licence,” says Joyce. “They can go to a dinner party and say they’re voting One Nation without becoming the pariah on the porch. Because, for all of Barnaby’s peculiarities and peccadilloes, he’s from the Coalition.”

Rather than propose solutions to the problems highlighted by One Nation, the Nationals prefer to simply ape their grievances. Which merely makes them look like One Nation-wannabes. The more you become like someone else, the less you are yourself.

It will be hard for One Nation to sustain this level of support. It’s standard for disaffected voters to lodge a protest vote with the minor parties mid-cycle, only to return to the main parties on election day.

But the real onus is on the Coalition to present itself as a credible party of government. To not only express grievance but to also offer compelling solutions. The Liberals did not give Ley a fighting chance. The internal critics sabotaged her chance of being heard.

“In July, August and September, she had a positive approval rating – the voters were at least giving her a chance,” says Reed. “But that started to drop with the internal instability and the loss of votes to One Nation.”

She is vulnerable. Now that Andrew Hastie has withdrawn from the contest to replace her because of lack of support, the way is open to Angus Taylor to unite the right of the party and challenge Ley for the leadership. A Ley supporter says that “most of the colleagues think Sussan is in trouble”. A Hastie advocate says that “there is an emerging majority to replace Sussan”.

Ley has zero intention of resigning. She will fight. But, one way or the other, the Liberals have to settle the leadership decisively. Next, they must reconcile with the Nationals. Third, together they need to responsibly address the red-hot, roiling grievances that are drawing voters to One Nation, especially immigration.

Finally, the Coalition needs to set out a compelling vision of a clear path to greater prosperity, better living standards, and achievable home-ownership for the younger generation. Labor is trying but it is not succeeding; One Nation is not even trying. The starting point for the Coalition now is to coalesce. In the interests of the nation, not One Nation. Only then will the Coalition pose a real risk to Labor. But this will prove Herculean for a political partnership in deep disarray.

Labor national secretary, electoral strategist Paul Erickson, offered British Labour some advice last year at their national conference: “You don’t get bigger by getting smaller.” It’s advice the Coalition should heed.

Peter Hartcher is political editor.