Once the schadenfreude settles (and we all need a little bit of a giggle right now) there are some very serious questions to be asked about the Coalition’s split.

And they all involve the actual elephant in the room – the Labor government. Will Labor rehabilitate the Liberal Party? Or will it actually take the path voters mapped out for it at the last election to actually create change for the better.

The split between the Liberals and the Nationals was obvious to anyone paying attention. We raised it as early as election night, with the Nationals getting increasingly bolshie about their election result compared to the Liberal Party.

It’s not true to say the Nationals didn’t go backwards – they did. They lost a seat in the Senate and didn’t win back Calare, which before the election was considered as sure as flies on a dag – an absolute sure thing. There were also the independent challenges in seats like Cowper, but that isn’t part of the Nationals’ fairytale, so we’ll ignore it here too.

It is true that the Nationals now hold more seats than they did during the Howard years, and the Liberals hold fewer.

But the split in the 102-year-old Coalition (if you count the precursor parties to the Nats and the Libs) is more about saving certain personalities than actually saving the parties themselves.

The Nationals wanted to be able to freelance on policy, even........

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