It’s no small thing when a freshly elected leader of one of the big parties quickly becomes toast, as the well-browned Sussan Ley has. Remarkably, though, that’s not the biggest political event of the moment, which is the federal Coalition’s wilful self-destruction. The Coalition as we’ve come to know it going back to the late 1980s is done. The agreement between the Liberal and National parties to operate jointly in government and opposition clearly has stopped working.

It might formally remain in place for the remainder of this term, but it is destined to be a dead weight, hampered by infighting and a misreading of Australia’s evolving political environment. The Liberal and National parties are locking themselves in the past.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

Since the election six months ago, the nation has watched the Coalition break down in real time. Just to recap, in the wake of the election loss, Nationals’ leader David Littleproud took his party out of the Coalition before being wooed back by Ley a few days later. In one of her earliest acts as Coalition leader, Ley appointed energy spokesman Dan Tehan to fashion a comprehensive energy and climate change policy for the Coalition by early next year.

Meanwhile, Littleproud ordered up his own National Party energy policy. The Nats have now finalised and endorsed that policy, which essentially rejects existing commitments on emissions reduction and favours choking off the move to renewables. Did it occur to anybody in the upper reaches of either party how much potential this unilateral action had to blow up the Coalition?

A properly functioning coalition would have its partners working in........

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