Grattan on Friday: Bitter struggle in Liberals for likely poisoned chalice, as Jacinta Price defects from Nationals

By late last week it was clear Labor would win the election, but it came as more of a surprise when Peter Dutton lost the Queensland seat of Dickson he’d held since 2001.

Nor did many anticipate Greens leader Adam Bandt, member for Melbourne since 2010, would be swept away, in a lower house rout that has seen the minor party stripped of three of its four House of Representative seats.

Both the Liberals and the Greens are in existential moments, in need of new leaders and some painful introspections about their future directions.

Thinking back to the Liberal experience after Kevin Rudd’s 2007 victory, some wonder why anyone would be putting up their hand for the party leadership.

The Liberals churned through three leaders between 2007 and 2009. Brendan Nelson took over the party after Labor’s victory; undermined by Malcolm Turnbull, he lasted less than a year. Turnbull survived just over a year before being ousted by Tony Abbott.

Admittedly the experience of Peter Dutton was different – he was given a full term as opposition leader.

But the chances of Dutton’s successor becoming prime minister will be very low. With the added seats Labor has won, the Liberals are looking at a two-term strategy. The odds are on more than one leader, and generational change, in that time. Tim Wilson, 45, who has won back Goldstein, obviously has his eye on the prize in the longer term.

Despite all the disincentives, Sussan Ley, 63, and Angus Taylor, 58, both want this thankless post that’s up for grabs at Tuesday’s party meeting.

The battle has turned into a fight over negatives as much as positives. Supporters of Ley say Taylor did a dreadful job as shadow treasurer, including not producing a tax policy. The Taylor camp argues Ley, the deputy leader, under-performed generally.

Both contenders hold regional NSW electorates. Taylor’s support base is the conservative wing of the party; Leys’ is the moderate wing. The relative weightings of the factions in the Liberal party room has changed somewhat as a result of the election, in the favour of the moderates.

For those Liberal MPs whose votes are not tightly locked in by factional allegiances, there are multiple questions they need to consider.

Who will be able to keep the party together, while forcing it to face up to what changes it must make, and driving a major overhaul of policy? Who can improve the Liberals’ standing with women, and with younger voters? Who can better handle the relationship with the Nationals?

On the last point, anyone who might think it would be best to break the Coalition is, I believe, misguided. Going it alone didn’t work in the 1970s and the 1980s. Different as they may be, the Liberals and Nationals are, electorally, two parts of a whole.

They need their collective numbers to win and they’re better to stay together in opposition, to make the partnership in government work. But the relationship may be rocky.

At the election, the Nationals retained almost all their seats and will have a relatively bigger voice from now on.

On Thursday, however, their highest profile senator, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, jumped from the Nationals to the Liberals. She said she thought she could be more effective in the Liberals, “especially as the party faces a significant rebuild […] I feel obliged to play a robust part in”.

This was a concerted move from the right, and will play into the leadership contest in an as-yet unclear way. With speculation that she might run as Taylor’s deputy, Price was asked on Sky on Thursday night if she would be willing to be drafted for a position. “I will not put any limitations on myself,” she said.

For the Liberals, there is absolutely no silver lining from this election. The Greens can take some comfort in the fact they’ve retained their numbers (11) in the Senate, with only a small fall in their Senate vote. On the projected results, the Greens are set to be the sole negotiators with the government in the Senate on legislation opposed by the Coalition.

Who will become leader is still an open question, with South Australian veteran Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi, and the party’s Senate leader, Larissa Waters, mentioned. Whoever gets the post, the leadership will return to the Senate, where it always was until Bandt obtained the position in early 2020.

Post election, Anthony Albanese has continued his fierce pre-election attack on the Greens. “What I hope comes out of the new Senate is a bit of a recognition that one of the reasons why the Greens political party have had a bad outcome in the election is the view that they simply combined with the Coalition in what I termed the ‘noalition’, to provide blockages, and that occurred across a range of portfolios, housing, treasury, as well as environment,” he told the ABC.

Albanese was particularly scathing about Greens housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather who lost his seat and criticised parliament as a “sick place”.

“Maybe what he needs is a mirror and a reflection on why he’s no longer in parliament. […] This is a guy who stood before signs at a CFMEU rally in Brisbane describing me as a Nazi.”

Bob Brown, the Greens’ inaugural leader from 2005 to 2012, describes Albanese’s comments as “ungracious” in “his moment of glory”.

While the Greens’ pro-Palestinian position came under much criticism, Brown strongly defends it, declaring it “honorable”.

Brown, speaking to The Conversation, says the Greens will be in an extraordinarily powerful position in the Senate, and their “environmental origins will  come back to the fore”. He urges the Greens to “have deaf ears to calls for the Senate to be a rubber stamp”. The Constitution, he says, has the Senate with equal powers with the house except on money matters.

Brown predicts the Greens will be “resurgent” at the next election.  His strongest message is directed squarely at the government. “The Greens should never direct preferences to Labor again - because Labor takes preferences with one hand and stabs the Greens with the other.”

Like the new Liberal leader, Bandt’s successor will inherit a party at a fork in the road. Does it become more militant or more moderate, more confrontational in its dealing with the government, or as transactional as possible?

Bandt’s hope of the Greens power-sharing with a Labor government in the lower house has evaporated. So how does the party use what power it has in the Senate, while trying to put itself in the best position to avoid going further backwards at the next election?