David Littleproud to meet with Sussan Ley about future of Coalition after surviving leadership challenge | Australian politics
David Littleproud has survived a leadership battle and is ready to meet face to face with Sussan Ley about reuniting with the Liberals less than two weeks after the country party spectacularly blew up the Coalition.
The two leaders are scheduled to meet on Monday night after Colin Boyce’s attempt to dissolve the Nationals leadership failed as expected at a 2pm meeting in Canberra.
Senior Nationals MP Darren Chester tabled a separate motion to urgently reform the Coalition, just 11 days after the same party chamber voted to quit Ley’s shadow ministry and split with the Liberals.
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Littleproud declared the Coalition “untenable” under Ley’s leadership the next day, sparking a political crisis that jeopardized the future of both leaders.
Coalition sources confirmed Ley and Littleproud were scheduled to meet on Monday.
The National Team leader last week turned down Ley’s offer to meet before the return of parliament but insisted he was ready to talk if Boyce survived the leadership challenge.
Ley’s leadership remains under threat, but Liberal MPs do not expect Conservative challenger Angus Taylor to challenge him at the caucus meeting on Tuesday morning.
The opposition leader last week gave the National Party a 10-day deadline to reassemble the Coalition before the Liberals move forward as the sole opposition party.
Ley has only been appointed to the Liberal front bench on an interim basis, where current shadow ministers will temporarily fill the National Representatives’ portfolios, but plans to make it permanent unless the parties meet again before the start of the parliamentary session next week on February 9.
Coalition division formed the basis of Boyce’s challenge; The Flynn MP accused Littleproud of dragging the Nationals into the “political abyss” after overseeing the second Coalition split in eight months.
The split occurred after Ley accepted the resignations of three citizens who took to the floor over Labor’s hate speech laws, prompting the entire front line of the country’s party to resign in solidarity.
Senior Liberals are divided on whether the Coalition will regroup quickly; Some MPs are still angry about Littleproud and the Nationals’ handling of the recent split.
While some MPs are eager to repair the decades-old alliance, others, including many moderate Liberals, are content with a long standoff.
Shadow industry minister and close Ley ally Alex Hawke said Littleproud would have scored “the biggest own goal” in the history of Australian centre-right politics if he refused to compromise with the Liberals.
Hawke told Sky News: “But what I can say is that if David Littleproud does this, he will be on the verge of scoring the biggest own goal in our history in centre-right Australian politics. We are calling on him not to break the Coalition.”
Shadow Energy Secretary Dan Tehan said senior figures from both parties should meet “quietly” in the coming days to draw up a plan to bring the parties together.
“We need to have a meeting on both sides to say, ‘Let’s put what happened aside and focus on what we need to do to reform the Coalition.’ That will require both sides to come in and say, let’s focus on making sure this doesn’t happen again,” Tehan told the ABC’s RN Breakfast.
Shadow housing minister and leading moderate Andrew Bragg said the Liberals were not “desperate” to re-enter a union with the National Party.
“We’ve tried to make it work with the Nats, we’ve tried heroically for the last six to eight months, and sometimes it doesn’t work out. We hope it will in the future, but we’re not helpless. And if we go into the election as the Liberal party, so be it,” he said.
Speaking at a Labor meeting on Monday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese compared the relationship between the Liberals and the National Party to an episode of reality television show Married at First Sight.
“You know it’s going to end badly,” he said.
More details coming soon…
