Former Prime Minister John Howard urging Liberal and Nationals to reconcile

ABC NEWS (Australia)

The Nationals have admitted that the decision to split from the Liberals wasn't unanimous. The party made the move yesterday, breaking up the Coalition for the first time in nearly 40 years.

Transcript

00:00The Nationals are saying that they wanted a solid agreement from the Liberals on four

00:06key policies, saying we took them to the Australian electorate just a few weeks ago so we want

00:11to maintain them to keep representing those in regional Australia.

00:16The key policies they're talking about are nuclear power, divestiture power to be able

00:20to break up the supermarkets, a big regional fund to help support infrastructure in the

00:25regions and things like that and also having universal phone communication access in the

00:31bush.

00:32Now the Liberals are saying because of the size of the defeat on May 3 that they want

00:37to put all of their policies up for review and have this sort of big review process to

00:43try and learn the lessons from the election.

00:46So what's really gone on here according to the Liberals is sort of a disagreement about

00:51the process to reach these policies rather than the policies themselves because they're

00:56actually arguing.

00:57We hadn't said no to any of them, we just wanted to go through our process.

01:01But look there's people on both sides of the party that do want to eventually get back together.

01:07And former Prime Minister John Howard Evelyn has been scathing.

01:10Why is he so concerned?

01:12John Howard says he's very concerned about this split.

01:16He's gone as far as calling it stupid.

01:18He says the longer the two parties spend apart, the harder it will be to get back together

01:23on the same page.

01:26Policy differences are best resolved within the framework of a coalition.

01:31If the two parties remain separate for too long, away from a coalition, then the differences

01:38on policy will harden and it will be more difficult to resolve them.

01:45He says the glory days are when the two parties are working together.

01:49There are some on the Liberal side though that are trying to look for those silver linings

01:53and saying that now that they've got some space away from the Nationals, they've got

01:58that space to really reflect on what they need to do to move forward.

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