Comment

Chris Wallace
A brief history of Liberal Party collapses

Deep dysfunction on the conservative side of politics has led to the end of the federal Coalition after the Nationals embarrassed the Liberals over the Albanese government’s hate speech bill.

The Nationals betrayed a shadow cabinet commitment on Sunday to support the bill when voted on in parliament on Tuesday.

The failure of Nationals leader David Littleproud to make the shadow cabinet decision stick with his own MPs, and a mass Nationals frontbench walkout after Opposition Leader Sussan Ley accepted the resignation of dissident Nationals shadow ministers, has also put Ley’s leadership into play.

Littleproud’s lack of authority over his own MPs incited the crisis, but Ley may pay the price because of perceptions she failed to keep the unruly Nationals in tow.

It’s reminiscent of the run-up to the last major collapse and reconfiguration of Australia’s main conservative party – when the Country Party’s turbulence helped destroy the United Australia Party, forerunner of today’s Liberal Party, during World War II.

The extraordinary drama of federal parliament’s two-day special session to pass new gun and extremism laws in the wake of the Bondi terrorist attack was, among other things, a stress test of Australia’s political leadership and parties.

There was a telling exchange late in Question Time on Tuesday, between Ley and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Ley asked Albanese whether he had been “making stuff up” when he said, in the days after the Bondi attack, that the security advice to the government was against holding a royal commission.

Albanese did not directly rebut the implication but rather reeled off a list of actions he had taken since. The damaging question of whether he had misrepresented security advice remains out there.

The political capital for the Coalition immediately vanished, however, when the prime minister demanded to know where was the draft legislation Ley had claimed was “ready to go” as soon as Albanese recalled parliament. The likelihood the security advice to the government and the opposition’s draft bill were both locked away in a secret box somewhere marked “non-existent” was hardly reassuring about either leader.

By Wednesday, as the Nationals’ full perfidy rebounded on Ley, Albanese emerged as the clear winner from the week. He could correctly boast the passing of the “strongest hate laws” in Australian history.

Sussan Ley accepted the resignations on Wednesday of the three Nationals frontbenchers who betrayed the shadow cabinet commitment on which the hate speech bill’s passage depended. This triggered a frontbench walkout by Nationals in solidarity with the three sacked shadow ministers who voted against the bill: Bridget McKenzie, Ross Cadell and Susan McDonald.

Ley’s subsequent plea for the Coalition to continue was rebuffed by Littleproud, who declared it “untenable” under Ley’s leadership. He claimed he had warned Ley of the consequences of sacking the three dissident Nationals from the front bench.

Littleproud let Ley absorb the full political impact of the Coalition’s failure to act in concert during the short parliamentary session. It was the act of a man putting his own survival as Nationals leader above his professional obligations to Ley, and ahead of Coalition solidarity.

The implications go beyond questions about the immediate leadership futures of Ley and Littleproud. They go to the continuing decline of the prospects of the main conservative party, the Liberals, as a political force in contemporary Australia.

It is always more difficult to manage the Coalition partnership in opposition, where leaders have little currency to reward collaborative behaviour, but the current difficulties exceed what is normal.

The backdrop of this is in four parts: the stripping out of the Liberals’ formerly blue riband metropolitan seats by independent MPs over the past two elections, the Coalition’s landslide loss at the most recent one, a brief Coalition split after that loss, and the sharp rise of support for One Nation in recent opinion polls.

Former Liberal leader Peter Dutton losing his own seat while leading the Coalition to that landslide 2025 loss – only the third major party leader to do so, along with Stanley Bruce at the 1929 election and John Howard at the 2007 election – was a signal event. Former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce defecting to One Nation seven months later was, too.

The parliamentary optics amplify the story. Eight of the 10 non-aligned and teal independent MPs on the cross bench are women.

A woman may lead the Coalition, but the parliamentary Liberal party room remains a man cave. Most of the leadership aspirants waiting for Ley’s tenuous hold on the job to slip are comfortable in that space.

Angus Taylor’s underperformance is likely to be identified as a factor in the Coalition’s 2025 landslide loss, if the Minchin–Goward review should ever slip free of the legal constraints Dutton has imposed on it and become public.

Andrew Hastie has gone from being perceived as the coming person to a right-wing fringe dweller with limited mainstream appeal.

Dark horse Alex Hawke has attempted to “moderate-wash” himself through his support for Ley’s leadership, but those with longer memories know this ex-Morrison lieutenant’s true form.

Julian Leeser will not be forgiven by right-wing colleagues for his principled stand on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

Josh Frydenberg lacks a seat, although HarperCollins’ planned publication of his memoir later this year suggests a comeback attempt ahead.

Ley herself has a career-long practice of going along to get along in the male-dominated work environments of aviation, farming and Liberal politics. Superficial observers may see her splitting from the Liberals with like-minded colleagues in the future as an option, trying to join independent crossbenchers to form a new centrist party.

However, Ley’s willingness to be Dutton’s attack dog in the Coalition’s previous term in opposition, and the ease with which she has repeatedly caved in to right-wing colleagues as leader, may raise doubts about her true values.

Still, recent trends suggest a fundamental reconfiguration of the main conservative party is ahead, and sooner rather than later.

While Labor has existed as a party continuously since before Federation, today’s Liberal Party is the fifth iteration since the Australian parliament first met in 1901, so a reconfiguration is nothing new.

The “three elevens” dominated the parliament’s early years: the Protectionists of Alfred Deakin, the Free Traders of George Reid and the Chris Watson-led Labor Party.

In 1909 the Protectionists and Free Traders combined to become the Commonwealth Liberal Party, also known as the “Fusion”.

In 1917 the Commonwealth Liberals merged with former Labor prime minister Billy Hughes’s breakaway National Labor Party and formed the Nationalist Party – with Hughes and subsequently Stanley Bruce as prime minister. When Bruce lost the 1929 election to Labor’s James Scullin, the Nationalists languished. In 1931 the party merged with Labor defector Joseph Lyons’ small Labor breakaway group to form the United Australia Party.

After Lyons died in office in 1939, Robert Menzies succeeded him as prime minister. This was despite major reservations about Menzies in the mind of Country Party leader Arthur Fadden.

Fadden briefly led the Country Party out of its coalition with the UAP, but returned under a new coalition agreement 11 months later.

The 1940 election saw a hung parliament, with Menzies continuing as prime minister, supported by two conservative independents. Within a year, Menzies lost the confidence of cabinet and resigned, to be succeeded by Fadden.

Fadden lasted 40 days as prime minister before losing the confidence of parliament. The government fell and John Curtin’s Labor government took office.

The 1943 election, where the UAP’s primary vote fell to 21.9 per cent and Labor won in a landslide, finished the UAP politically.

Menzies took over its leadership and glued together its remnants with various other fractions of the non-Labor side of politics, forging the Liberal Party, which launched in 1944.

The successive configurations of the separate Protectionist and Free Trade parties in 1901, then the combined Commonwealth Liberal Party in 1909, the Nationalist Party in 1917, the United Australia Party in 1931 and finally the Liberal Party in 1944 is glossed over by keepers of the Liberal flame – not least because of the key role of Labor defectors in their 1917 and 1931 reconfigurations.

One lesson of this repeated phoenixing of the main conservative party in Australian politics is that narrow representation doesn’t deliver election wins.

With so much attention focused on dissatisfied Liberal voters decamping to One Nation, it is easy to forget federal elections are not won by the extremes of Australian politics, right or left.

The big parties’ primary vote has shrunk drastically in recent decades – Liberal and Labor alike. It would likely be more profitable to concentrate on delivering better government in office, and more effective government accountability in opposition, to rebuild their primary vote positions, rather than worrying about moving left or right.

Liberals in their various iterations since Federation have always resented the unreliability and occasional outright disloyalty of their rural partners – the Country Party and, since 1982, the National Party.

A new chapter in that usually hidden century-long rancour between them was on show this week, ending in a split.

The bigger point is that a new iteration of the Liberals could come sooner rather than later, hastened by the collateral damage of this latest inglorious episode.

Paul Bongiorno is on leave.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 23, 2026 as "A brief history of Liberal Party collapses".

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