One of the unique elements of Australian politics has been the permanent coalition agreement between the Liberal Party and the National Party, known simply as the Coalition. This agreement saw the two parties cooperate with each other even when they were not in government. The arrangement was first created in 1946, a year after the Liberal Party was formed, and when the National Party was then known as the Country Party.
This week the long-running arrangement fell apart, following Australia’s recent election. The National Party has decided not to renew the agreement.
However, given the federal nature of Australia, the arrangement was far more complex than an agreement. It is worth going over the details, as this development has a great many practical as well as strategic implications.
Technically the Coalition was composed of four parties, with the Liberal National Party of Queensland (LNP) and the Country Liberal Party of the Northern Territory also being members, but inside the federal parliament the bloc functions as two parties. The two parties merged in Queensland in 2008, and MPs elected from that state could choose whether to sit with either the Liberals or the Nationals in the federal parliament. Usually MPs from Brisbane and the Gold Coast would sit with the Liberals, and those from the rest of the state with the Nationals.
Officially, the LNP is a division of the Liberal Party of Australia, and an affiliate of the National Party. Of the 16 LNP MPs elected at the recent election, 10 would sit with the Liberal Party, with six for the National Party. The affiliate status of the LNP with the National Party should allow this arrangement to continue, yet any ambitious LNP MP who may wish to gain a shadow portfolio now that the Liberal Party is the sole opposition could be tempted to switch who they sit with.
Traditionally, Country Liberals have sat with the National Party; however, following the election the party’s sole senator, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, decided to sit with the Liberal Party instead. When the results in the Senate are finally calculated this could prove consequential to the National Party’s influence, given that Labor won’t hold a majority in the chamber.
Added to this complex web is the status of the National parties in Western Australia and South Australia, which have never been part of the Coalition agreement, although the option was open for them to join should they win any seats in the federal parliament. That hasn’t happened since the 2010-2013 parliamentary term.
How the Coalition agreement worked during elections therefore was mostly centered on Victoria and New South Wales. In these two states the Liberal and National parties had a non-compete clause in the seats that one or the other won at the previous election. However, if the Labor Party or someone else won the seat, both the Liberals and the Nationals would contest against each other for that seat at the subsequent election.
This is where the ending of the Coalition agreement could be disastrous for either the Liberals or the Nationals come next election. The key lesson from this month’s federal election was the rejection of the Liberal Party by urban Australia – with the party only holding a small number of seats in the country’s five largest cities. This means in order to find more seats, the Liberal Party needs to start encroaching further on traditional National Party territory in the country’s regional areas. Without a no-compete clause this will create further tensions between the two parties, and the potential for one of them to lose significantly in the competition.
The loser here could very well be the Liberal Party. While it performed terribly at the recent election, the Nationals did well – holding all but one of the seats they won in 2022. The seat they lost was to a former Nationals MP who quit the party to become an independent. The National Party commands much of rural Victoria and New South Wales, and when they choose to expand into major regional cities, they also do quite well.
The party came very close to winning the seat of Bendigo in the recent election, a seat they don’t usually contest – despite it being held by Labor for a decade and therefore not off-limits due to the Coalition agreement. There is the potential for the party to now see a range of other similar seats available to them, which could prove highly disruptive to the Liberal Party.
While this might prove advantageous to the National Party in terms of seats, what is less clear is how they will continue to be influential without an arrangement with the Liberal Party. The best they can hope for is a future hung parliament where they hold the balance of power, but this is very different from holding a significant number of ministries in a government. With it being impossible for the Liberal and National parties to form government without each other, the real winner will overwhelmingly be the Labor Party.