It’s just over a month since I concluded my series “Crisis on the right” on the woes of Australia’s right-of-centre parties. (See part 5 here, with links to earlier parts.) Already in that time there’s been a need for updates: firstly with the advent of Angus Taylor to the Liberal leadership, and then just last week on the publication of the Liberal Party’s review of the 2025 election.
Now this week there’s a new instalment. David Littleproud, the National Party leader who had twice broken off the Coalition when Sussan Ley was Liberal leader, survived her by less than four weeks. Having already fought off two leadership challenges in the space of a year, this week he threw in the towel. A party room meeting on Wednesday chose Queensland senator Matt Canavan to succeed him.
Not for the first time the National Party is caught in a sort of pincer movement. On one side, as Littleproud’s contortions on the issue demonstrated, its relationship with the Liberal Party is fundamental to its existence. It lives in constant fear that the Liberals will call its bluff. But on the other side it faces rivals such as One Nation who accuse of it selling out the bush and compromising too much with the Liberals.
The Liberals, as I pointed out last month, have the option of mostly ignoring One Nation and focusing their attention on middle suburbia, where elections are won and lost. But the Nationals cannot do that. Geography demands that they fight One Nation, somehow. It leaves open, though, the question of how they do it: whether by presenting an alternative policy or philosophical vision, or by promising more effective advocacy for substantially the same policies.
Canavan represents the latter choice. Although, to his credit, he has attacked One Nation’s racism, his philosophical outlook is otherwise much the same. He is especially fervent about climate denial, which has won him rave reviews from the Trumpists. He is also a long-time ally of Barnaby Joyce, the former Nationals leader who defected to One Nation last year; yesterday’s Financial Review quotes Joyce saying that “Me, Matt Canavan, Pauline Hanson, will be on the same page.”
That’s a problem for Taylor – one of many. He desperately wants to avoid committing himself either way on Hansonism: his ideal is to return to the era of John Howard, when the distinction between centre-right and far right didn’t matter and the conservatives were one big happy family. But as I’ve remarked before, that is like the patient wanting to return to an earlier stage of the cancer that is now killing them.
Canavan’s strength is his consistency; neither the Liberals nor his more moderate rivals in his own party are actually putting forward a coherent alternative vision. Faced with different options that all seem to amount to Hanson-lite, MPs have tended to opt for the one who seems closest to really believing it: Taylor rather than Ley, Canavan rather than Littleproud, and in due course probably Andrew Hastie (when he makes up his mind to run) rather than Taylor.
The danger for the Coalition is twofold. First, that in the bush the same dynamic will play out in One Nation’s favor, with voters reasoning that it is at least sincere in its crazy policies and therefore to be preferred to more recent imitators. Second, and much more importantly, that in the cities pandering to One Nation will prove to be electorally toxic as it has so many times before, and will drive even more voters into the arms of Labor, the Greens and the Teals.
The voters are yet to take centre stage in the Coalition’s crisis. So far they have influenced it only via the opinion polls, and no-one knows how seriously to take those. But that will change next week, when the South Australian state election will illuminate the related questions of how real is the One Nation surge and how low can the Liberal Party go.
We’ll have a proper look at that this time next week. In the meantime you can get up to speed with previews from Kevin Bonham, William Bowe, Ben Raue, Casey Briggs at the ABC and Dan Jervis-Bardy at the Guardian.
The World is Not Enough 