00:00Well, we're joined now by a political scientist at the Australian National University, Jill
00:06Shepard, for some analysis on this situation.
00:10Jill, thank you so much for your time today.
00:13There's been a bit of a sort of will they, won't they over the last couple of weeks,
00:18but was this coalition reunion inevitable, do you think?
00:23No, I don't think it was inevitable at all.
00:25And I'm actually quite surprised, A, that it's happened so quickly and that it happened
00:30within Susan Lee's arbitrary timeline of tomorrow.
00:35They both seem committed to reforming the coalition.
00:38But having watched that press conference right now, I'm not quite sure of their positive
00:42vision for this joint party room going forward.
00:45David Littleproud just spoke at length about the benefits of having diversity in the joint
00:50party room. And I think he's, you know, that's self-evidently correct.
00:53But the flip side of that is that it's really hard to make policy.
00:56Now, there might be a lot of things that they don't agree on that just never come to the
01:00fore. And so he can point to things like net zero, where I think the Nationals pretty clearly
01:05won that internal policy debate.
01:08You might talk to other issues like the prescription of hate groups that has led to this most recent
01:13coalition split.
01:14But the last election showed us that this joint party room really struggles to come up with
01:19policy that they can put on the table in an election campaign.
01:23And I don't see that they have any mechanism in this reformed coalition for being able to do
01:29better next time around.
01:31There's a couple of things there I want to pick up on, Jill.
01:34But you mentioned there, obviously, there were attempts in that press conference there to sort
01:38of paint a picture of a very happy family.
01:41But over the past few weeks, we've seen some very terse words, some sledges.
01:47David Littleproud was very critical of Susan Lee personally when this initial breakup was
01:54announced.
01:55Will voters trust this picture of positivity and strength, do you think?
02:01Look, I don't think that was a very convincing attempt at unity from either leader there.
02:07David Littleproud is still prosecuting this issue around the prescription of hate groups
02:11that was pushed through that really one day of sitting in January this year.
02:18He's obviously hung up on that and still frustrated by how Susan Lee treated those three members of
02:24his front bench that were asked to resign from their positions.
02:28Now, you know, you can restore those positions after six weeks.
02:32You can say that this wasn't about personalities.
02:36It was about a fundamental value difference in how the two parties approach that one day
02:41of sitting.
02:42Those things, to me, feel like much bigger, more fundamental cleavages between the two parties
02:47than would, you know, a personality rift.
02:50I think if Susan Lee and David Littleproud don't like each other personally, that's something
02:55that you can overcome.
02:55But if you have fundamentally different views on how you should work with Labor, how you
03:01should, you know, go about prescribing hate speech, they're things that really can't
03:06be swept under the carpet.
03:07And I think that sort of taking pains to insist that it's not a personal problem that the
03:13two leaders have probably really undermines their position going forward.
03:17On those three senators, you know, and that issue that, as you say, David Littleproud appears
03:25to still be quite hung up on.
03:29In this statement that we've gotten from the coalition today, they've announced that, you
03:35know, each of those shadow ministers will return to their previously held roles at the beginning
03:42of next month, this will be sort of a six-month period that those senators will have been outside
03:51of their shadow portfolios.
03:55Susan Lee had initially sort of wanted six-month suspensions from those positions.
04:01So take me through what sort of conversations will have been happening behind closed doors
04:06here to come to this now six-week sort of agreement.
04:11Melissa, I have no idea.
04:13And I think that was the first question that was asked in that press conference was, what's
04:17changed?
04:17I can't say that anything fundamental has changed.
04:20These three senators are sitting in the naughty corner for six weeks, and then they'll be back.
04:26And presumably, they'll re-enter the joint party room, and everyone will have to pretend
04:29that none of this has ever happened.
04:31And Labor now knows that they can drive these wedges between the parties.
04:35Probably next time, it won't be around hate speech, but it will be around some kind of values-driven
04:41policy area that, you know, the parties don't necessarily agree on.
04:45And this new coalition agreement that's been signed late last night, evidently, doesn't seem
04:54to have any way of avoiding that issue.
04:56There's nothing to say that the shadow cabinet in that sort of with the mix of coalition members
05:03from both Liberal and Labor, sorry, Liberal and Nationals, won't agree something that
05:08Nationals' backbenchers don't agree to, and they won't cross the floor, and we won't be
05:13in this position on an entirely different manner.
05:15So I'm just a bit worried at this point, I guess, for these members in the coalition who
05:20are serving their time, they're, you know, in suspension at the moment, that nothing fundamental
05:26has changed.
05:27And this will keep happening.
05:29They say that there are stronger processes in place now for the coalition, but the coalition
05:36has been together for 100 years.
05:39Why is it, do you think, that these processes that they had in place beforehand have fractured
05:45so much over the past year?
05:48Is it down to David Littleproud and Susan Lee, do you think?
05:52Yeah, a couple of things are happening here.
05:54First of all, they have these new processes, but they seem to be all on the output side.
05:58And what I mean by that is that once we've made a decision as a joint shadow cabinet, you
06:03all have to agree to that, that that's not really a process, it's just a binding rule.
06:08There's no new processes for how they actually agree on policy in the first place.
06:12And that's where this coalition party room keeps getting stuck, that there are too many
06:17different positions, there's too many different sort of basic worldviews inside that party
06:24room.
06:24And with the joint party room of the nationals and liberals together, you just have more
06:28numbers.
06:29So mathematically, it becomes harder to achieve consensus on any area, let alone tricky policy
06:34areas.
06:35And those tricky policy areas are what are coming to the fore more increasingly, particularly
06:42when you're in opposition.
06:43It gets harder to drive policy through the party room without the help of public servants
06:47and a larger staffer workforce that can help to sort of iron out a lot of those differences.
06:53But you've got climate change, you've got fundamental things like globalization, free trade, where
06:58the Liberal Party and nationals, I think, are increasingly on different pages.
07:03And as I said, binding the party room to decisions that the joint shadow cabinet is making doesn't
07:09really do anything to resolve those problems, it's simply papers over them.
07:14You said earlier that this is something that Labor now is aware that it can drive a wedge
07:21between the Liberals and the National Party.
07:25How do you think that this will be used by Labor over the next few weeks, months and years even to sort
07:37of, I guess, draw that conflict between the two parties?
07:43Look, I don't think it's, this isn't new.
07:47You know, this isn't something that has only just occurred to Labor.
07:51It's something that they've, you know, enjoyed doing in the past.
07:53They've done it quite successfully over the last 12 months, not even 12 months, we're at about
07:57eight months of this government, feels like, much longer.
08:02So that's already been on the table.
08:03But what's a little bit different now is that it is codified.
08:06So there was this expectation that if the coalition shadow ministry came up with a policy
08:12position or came up with, you know, a position that they were going to take on a specific
08:17bit of legislation, that the whole party room would get in behind that.
08:21And it was a norm.
08:22It wasn't a rule.
08:23Now that it's a rule, I think, you know, it is easier for Labor to exploit.
08:27And so climate change is an obvious one.
08:29It's going to keep coming up.
08:30But there are going to be things that we haven't even thought of, you know, tax rules around
08:34capital gains on farms.
08:38There'll be issues that just, you know, are much more important to Nationals voters and
08:45to Nationals party room members than they are to Liberals.
08:47The Nationals, on the other hand, I think, probably worried about leaving the coalition
08:51because they don't have the same fundraising capacity.
08:54They don't have the same resourcing that the Liberal Party does.
08:57So for a lot of reasons, you know, it makes sense for them to be together in the short term.
09:01But these policy differences are going to keep coming up.
09:05And I think, yeah, codifying this sort of fake sense of solidarity doesn't really do
09:10anything to stop them arising in the future.
09:13There have, of course, as well, been conversations over the last couple of weeks about One Nation
09:19and the rise in support for One Nation, threats of coalition members defecting to One Nation.
09:30A bit of a sort of a two-pronged question here, I suppose.
09:32How do you think that One Nation will respond to this reunification of the coalition here?
09:40And do you think that there is still that risk of both splitting the conservative vote
09:46and the risk of defection as well?
09:52Look, I think One Nation will do what it's continued to do lately, which is put its head down
09:58and not have to say too much.
10:00And the less we see of Pauline Hanson lately, the higher their poll numbers seem to go.
10:05And I think they've learned from that.
10:07And they are acting a lot more calmly, I think a lot more professionally in how they respond
10:12to these sorts of political, not challenges, but opportunities, I guess, than they have
10:18in the past.
10:18And that seems to be kind of inversely correlated with their popularity with the electorate.
10:24This, you know, reformation of the coalition, I don't think addresses the threat from One
10:29Nation at all.
10:30But that seems to be the prevailing view in both the Liberal and National Party organizations.
10:35So maybe they know something that I don't, but certainly from a political science perspective,
10:39we would expect that the smaller party rooms, had they stayed separated, would be better
10:44able to come up with policy that is coherent, that is talking about things that voters want
10:50to hear, and particularly for the nationals, can let them carve out space that being in Liberal
10:57coalition doesn't really allow them to.
10:59So they can have more nuanced positions on things like free trade.
11:02They can talk a little bit more about protectionism, they can talk about propping up domestic
11:07industries in a way that coalition doesn't allow them to, because the kinds of people
11:12and industries donating to the Liberal Party, you know, aren't going to stand for those
11:16positions.
11:17So I don't think this helps the coalition really confront that challenge from the right at
11:23all.
11:24And I think it probably helps One Nation.
11:27Jill Shepard, thank you so much for your time.
11:28And analysis this afternoon on what is a big day in Canberra.
11:33Thank you very much.
11:34Really appreciate your time.
11:36Cheers.
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