Coalition’s Iran fail the latest proof of its intellectual malaise
Robert Menzies once said: “A man may be a tough, concentrated, successful money maker and never contribute to his country anything more than a horrible example”. He was talking about managers, but the same could apply to the members of his party in 2025, writes Amy Remeikis.
Source: Sky News
This shouldn’t be new information to anyone who has been paying attention, but it is now undeniable. The Coalition is a fringe party, and should be treated as such.
It is hard to see where it goes from here.
In a 1954 lecture, then prime minister Robert Menzies said: “A man may be a tough, concentrated, successful money maker and never contribute to his country anything more than a horrible example.”
He, of course, was talking about managers, but the same could apply to the members of his party in 2025.
You don’t have to go too far back to trace the origins of the intellectual malaise that afflicts the party. John Howard was unshakeably a conservative and paved the way for what we are seeing now. Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton were the inexorable end point of Howard’s style of leadership, each having further diluted the conservative value beliefs their mentor held dear, while grasping onto Howard’s single-eyed drive for personal power.
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Like Tony Abbott before them, they sought to mould the party into their own personal project, but even Abbott could claim an ideologue’s drive.
Morrison and Dutton were slaves to their own personal instincts, which is why their exit from domestic politics has been so seamless. Both disappeared like they were never there, because they weren’t. Not truly.
When their personal ambitions were thwarted, they simply moved on. In their wake they have left a party barren of any meaning.
If there were any doubts of that, look to this week. Sussan Ley, a leader who has no authority over the state executives or branches, let alone her own party room, was ambushed in the Coalition joint-party room meeting over the net zero emissions target.
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The Western Australian MPs have filled the vacuum left by Dutton’s departure – and with him went the outsized influence of the Queenslanders – filling the space with the same hard right politics that lost the Liberals half of their blue ribbon seats over three elections. That makes sense – Liberals who represent provincial and rural seats, which includes Ley herself, now make up the majority of the Liberal party room.
Seven of the 12 blue ribbon seats (seats held by the Liberals for at least 90 per cent of their existence) are now marginal. But instead of changing course, the leftover leftovers have spent the time since the 2025 election doing all they can to further marginalise the party.
Several Liberal MPs admitted Ley lost control of this week’s joint party room meeting when a group of Liberals began pushing for the party to resolve its position on net zero, bypassing the review Ley has ordered into all policies. Debate began this week on Barnaby Joyce’s bill to scrap net zero, something Labor is allowing for “shit and giggles” as one MP described it to me this week, as the government enjoys the ongoing chaos within the party.
That chaos continued on Wednesday as Ley ceded to the hard right elements of her party room and turned Tuesday’s bipartisanship on the decision to expel the Iranian ambassador and designate the IRGC a terrorist organisation into a war of words on timing. The attack had such little juice in it Ley and her senior shadow cabinet team couldn’t keep it up much beyond the first 20 minutes of Question Time in both chambers, with the government quick to point out previous statements from the Coalition’s own members on why an earlier listing wasn’t recommended.
The sideshow again gave the government a free pass, sucking up oxygen when legitimate questions remain, such as who were the foreign agencies who assisted ASIO’s investigation? And why is the Australian government still so reticent to act against the Israeli ambassador, given Israel killed an Australian aid worker in Gaza, is committing genocide, has been recorded committing war crimes, and has flouted every international law and humanitarian value Australia is supposed to hold dear?
The Coalition’s desperate attempt at political point-scoring, underpinned by its lack of belief in anything other than its own survival, means the government is not pushed into defining what it stands for, outside of not being the Coalition.
And the Coalition, as it stands, is unlikely to survive in this form for much longer. In terms of representation in the house of representatives, it holds less than its predecessor, the UAP, when it crumpled, and can make no claim to unity. It is still allowing itself to be drawn further to the right by the same people who have cost it any political relevancy in the near term, and who threaten its very future existence.
The Coalition does not share values with the modern mainstream Australia. Its fights are with itself, not on behalf of the nation. They hold no political relevancy, beyond what the government gives it in the senate. It’s beyond time it was treated as such.
Amy Remeikis is a contributing editor for The New Daily and chief political analyst for The Australia Institute
