William Prescott is a researcher at Bright Blue.
Last week, the National Party Leader, David Littleproud, announced he was withdrawing his Party from its longstanding coalition with Australia’s main centre-right party, the Liberals, for the second time since last year’s disastrous election loss. With the Australian centre-right parties now divided and losing ground and under siege from both their left and right, the only winner is Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party.
Since its unexpectedly large defeat at last May’s federal election, the Coalition has struggled to overcome the centre-right’s deep structural problems. Reduced to just 43 seats in the 150-member House of Representatives, the Coalition parties were all but wiped out in the major cities that most Australians call home. However, it held on more strongly in rural areas, with the more conservative, country-based National Party holding onto all of its 15 lower-house seats.
The increased relative strength of the National Party, which suddenly found itself holding more than a third of the Coalition’s total 43 seats, compared to just over a quarter after the 2022 election, immediately made itself felt. Amidst fears that the Liberals would shift to the left to win back former heartland inner-city seats, the Nationals announced in late May 2025 that they would not renew the Coalition agreement.
While the blowback was considerable, and the Nationals returned to the Coalition just over a week later, the underlying tensions remained. Ultimately, at least on the climate issue, the Nationals got their way in November last year, when Liberal Leader Sussan Ley officially ditched her Party’s 2050 net zero target.
More recently, the Nationals’ intransigence arises from a fear that their vote share is being increasingly cannibalised by Pauline Hanson’s right-populist One Nation party. An on-and-off-again feature of the Australian political landscape, Hanson’s core platform, which has barely changed since her political emergence in the mid-1990s, centres around drastically reducing immigration and a hostility to multiculturalism.
Concerningly, from a centre-right perspective, One Nation has surpassed the now-dissolved Coalition in opinion polls. According to a January 2026 Newspoll — generally considered the most trustworthy Australian pollster — One Nation’s vote share stood at 22 per cent, just ahead of the Coalition’s lamentable 21 per cent. This is up from just 6.4 per cent of the vote at last year’s election.
Especially worryingly for the Nationals, the evidence suggests that One Nation’s support is most concentrated in the same regional and rural areas that are home to many of the Coalition’s surviving MPs and Senators. Reflecting Hanson’s potential appeal to disaffected rural voters, the maverick former Nationals Leader, Barnaby Joyce — deposed by Littleproud in May 2022 — defected to One Nation in December last year out of frustration at not being reappointed to the frontbench.
Matters came to a head on Thursday last week, when, following a row over post-Bondi hate speech laws, Littleproud declared the Coalition was “untenable” so long as Ley, who has been in post since replacing Peter Dutton after last year’s election loss, remains Liberal Leader. Although the immediate crisis is not of her making, it looks set prove the final straw for Ley, who now faces an imminent leadership challenge amid poll ratings that have been dismal for some time.
Unfortunately, there is no easy road back for the embattled former Coalition parties. While pivoting to the right on immigration, cultural, and climate issues may, in the short term, help to reunite the Coalition and reclaim ground from One Nation, it will do nothing to help regain the more socially liberal urban seats it needs to unseat Labor, and which it has been losing for some time.
Between the 2019 and 2022 elections, for example, the Liberals lost seven of their former heartland seats to the socially and economically liberal ‘teal’ independents. Among the seats lost were those held by former Prime Ministers Sir Robert Menzies and Tony Abbott, as well as former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. The only Liberal who managed to recover a teal seat at the last election was the moderate and openly gay Tim Wilson.
Amidst this centre-right infighting, the only true victor is Albanese. Despite a modest legislative record since taking office in 2022, a humiliating constitutional referendum defeat, an ongoing cost-of-living crisis and, most recently, a bungled response to the Bondi beach shootings, the absence of a viable opponent means he continues to enjoy a dominant electoral position. While, according to the latest Newspoll, Labor’s primary vote sits at a lacklustre 32 per cent, it now leads the two-party preferred vote 55 per cent to 45 per cent — Australia’s compulsory preferential voting system means this is the more significant gauge of political fortunes. Indeed, at the last election, it secured a landslide election victory with just 34.6 per cent of the primary vote.
While Ley’s likely imminent overthrow may well pave the way for the Coalition’s restoration, it won’t solve the centre-right’s identity crisis. Pivoting to the right may put Liberal-National tensions on ice, but it will make it virtually impossible to win back the cities and, by extension, government. Pivoting to the centre, however, may help to regain the cities but risks entrenching the Liberal-National divide. Until the centre-right can unite around a compelling vision that appeals to both town and country, The Lodge will remain Albanese’s for the keeping.
