From Sports Media. I'm Daniel James. This is seven am. Yesterday the coalition was dead. Today it's back on life support after a dramatic split. The Liberals and Nationals are suddenly back at the table trying to patch things up after a breakup neither side seemed to plan for now. All eyes are on Susan Lee. The decision she makes in the next few days will not just shape her
leadership but the future of the party itself. Today chief political correspondent for the Saturday Paper Karen Barlow, and while the Coalition are back talking again and whether they can really trust each other moving forward. It's Friday May twenty three, Karen. After the standoff earlier this week, we've now seen both leaders head back to the table. What shifted in the last twenty four hours to make reconciliation suddenly plausible?
Yeah, there's a sense of will politics slow down here at Parliament House? What shifted is there's been a very important concession from David Little Proud. There was much tooing and throwing over whether he demanded cabinet solidarity being broken up by the Nationals and that there would be the possibility of a free vote for the Nationals if they were still in the coalition, so they could speak freely on issues important to them which would be separate to the Liberals.
Now.
Initially Susan Lee said that that had been discussed, David Little Proud said it hadn't been, and then there was this tooing and throwing on live TV on seven point thirty ABC, where Lee's office interjected by a text message and said, well, it actually had been. So that sounds messy, but really cabinet solidarity is an absolute essential point for the coalition. They have to be together. I've been told that no other leader had that asked of them before.
Tony Abbott, John Howard, Malcolm Turnbulls, Scott Morris and nobody had been asked that but Susan Lee. Susan Lee said no because it's not done, and Little Proud. It took another day for Little Proud to come out in a doorstop interview at Parliament House to say actually, yes I did ask for it. I do understand it was an impossible ask for Susan Lee and I immediately back down.
She made it very clear the cabinet solidarity that we've had and the processes around that will remain that's why it wasn't up for debate. I think I thought it was fair and reasonable what Susan Lee put back in writing.
So that's where we're at. They basically had a disagreement over something really important to the coalition and now we're free to potentially talk about whether the coalition should still exist, and.
So both leaders met yesterday to talk through it a little bit more. How much do we know about the path ahead for Susan Lee and Little Proud.
Well, for David Little Proud, the four sticking points that he has demanded on behalf of the party room still exists and is still firm on that, and that is for nuclear power, the twenty billion dollar Regional Future Fund, universal phone service, and divestiture powers to break up the big supermarkets. That's still important to Dave Little Proud. He's standing firm.
But these four policy areas are important to the lives and the livelihoods of people that I represent. And the fact that the Liberal Party Room is now prepared to have that conversation I think speaks volumes about the fact that we should allow that to happen.
The issue for Susan Lee is she has now agreed to take those four positions to her party room and see if they're acceptable or not. So that will be a process. We don't know how long it will take. It could be days, it could be weeks, but certainly you would understand that it would be before Parliament returns, which has just been announced as being July twenty two.
So Susan Lee has addressed those for fours sticking points and agreed to take them to her party room. Does that concession signal real.
Movement considering we were talking about the end of the coalition and it being a historic moment. Yes, it is real movement, but it doesn't mean that the party room will take them on. It's entirely likely that many of them will. So the Universal Phone service agreement highly likely, the twenty billion dollar Regional Future Fund highly likely as well. I think the real sticking point will be nuclear power.
There is a thought inside the Liberal Party that it was a drag on its particular vote and a big explainer for the May three election loss and how devastating it was, so they really do want to have a good hard think about that. So we're not sure really how it's going to go forward, but that's what the Nationals want and the Liberal Party at this point has said, well, we'll have a chat about it before Parliament resumes.
That's the fact that talks regimes so quickly tell you that both parts this must have been worried about how destructive a breakup would be.
Oh, certainly there was a lot of talk inside and outside the two parties about how destructive this riffed, this absolute fissure of the coalition would be going forward. There were individuals quite senior people such as Darren Chester, Barnaby Joyce and the former Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack. They were urging inside the party and talking to journalists at the same time saying we want this ending sooner rather
than later. There was some talk that you know, for the Liberals there was a silver lining and perhaps being unshackled from the National Party would help them reach out to the people that had felt abandoned by the Liberal Party. But I spoke to a senior Liberal and he told me that this was an act of mutually assured destruction and would harm both the Nationals and the Liberal Party.
He was talking about, you know, as you lead up to the next selection due in twenty twenty eight, if there were three cornered contests with both the Nationals and Liberal Party running candidates up against say till type climate two hundred candidates, there would be problems on both sides because they would be drags on the votes for each other. It would also be a problem he said, for the
likes of Bridget Mackenzie and Senator Ross Keddell. Their Senate careers, I was told would be over because there would be no joint Senate tickets, so they would actually then be further down and likely lose their positions. And then you've got the case of the Nationals where they would be with the decision of coming out of the coalition, foregoing extra staffing, extra pay, the prominence of being the official opposition.
There was a lot at stake in this, and we still haven't had it resolved, but I was told that, you know, as you get closer to the election, this is really something for the Liberal Party to consider, because it's not just good for them because they would be seen forever as being tied to the coalition. They can't
government without the National Party in that coalition. Drawing their numbers towards what they need as a majority in the House of representatives and that people would be forever thinking what is the National Party going to do to affect what the Liberal Party will stand for in Parliament.
Coming up after the break the choice Susan Lee has to make. Susan Lee has been praised for showing leadership and not being held to ransom by the Nationals. But now she's suddenly willing to negotiate. So what does that say about her first test as leader.
Well, certainly she had two options. She could have given into the Nationals or she could have stood up for the Liberal Party, and she chose to stand up for a party. So certainly she's getting kudos from Liberal MPs
for being that sort of leader. There is a question over whether the National Party would have pulled this on Angus Taylor should he have been elected by the Liberal Party room as leader, and David Little Proud assured everyone that certainly that would have been the case, that they, as the Nationals, had this principal position and they were going to stand up for the people that voted them in. But you know, we are seeing this muscled up National Party.
They're doing something that they haven't done before after an election. They've actually decided to break free and ask for more. So certainly they're emboldened by how they held their ground electorally and didn't really lose seats except for a Senate position in the loss of the Deputy Leader, Peren Davy.
So you could argue whether they've actually misread the moods. Regardless, because there's that question over they were a drag on the Liberal Party and therefore a drag on the entire coalition.
So I was looking at one point as other Liberals would be alone as the opposition, meaning they get the plumb jobs, the better money, and more questions in Parliament. If they do get back together, well, let's still be the case.
Yeah, I guess if they sort it out and they are a coalition again and they've agreed to cabinet solidarity and they'll speak as one voice on policies, then they go back to as normal normal as it can be, as the coalition is vastly reduced in numbers in the House of Representatives and we've got the Labor Party which is going to return to Parliament with this super majority likely to be ninety four. Certainly as we hear the
parliamentary return day is July twenty two. Certainly, all eyes will be on how they will perform in Parliament against an emboldened Anthony Albanezi.
So, as you just said, Karen, Parliament does return on July the twenty second, So stepping it out, what's the windy here for Lee a little proud to strike a fresh coalition deal.
Well, we don't know. It could be days, it could be weeks. Certainly they would have to do it before Parliament returns. They do want their front bench, that's all on pause. And I think the advice they've had from party elders, including John Howard, is that the longer you put this off, the harder it is to return to a combined United front bench for the coalition. So all eyes will be on them to sort this out pretty soon.
It seasonally is choice ultimately between having a coalition and the strength of that, or having the freedom to modernize a wing back urben voters.
I think she does need to do both. I think she needs to modernize the Liberal Party. I wouldn't be surprised to see new branding as the New Liberals, as the New Labor emerged in the United Kingdom not so long ago. There is also this need to be the coalition they just cannot form government. They cannot be this bigger force without combining with the Nationals, and it will be interesting to see who she does put on her
front bench. Certainly there's talk that Ted O'Brien, the Deputy leader of the Liberal Party, will probably take Shadow Treasurer and leave an open question as to where she'll put the likes of Angus Taylor and just intera Napagin proprice' got to remember that the defection of just Inter Napage Proprice really upset the Nationals and may have had something to do with how they've behaved over the past week in actually pulling this extraordinary act of causing this rift to the coalition.
And do you think there's going to be trust issues moving forward?
I think in the background there's always trust issues, but there are paying to tell us it's a trusted relationship. Up until this point, it had survived apart from a couple of circumstances, the last in nineteen eighty seven, for eighty years. This is something that they know they need each other. But never forget that within political parties, within things like the Coalition, there are probably more enemies than those on the other side. So yeah, You'll never know.
But trust is an issue in politics, isn't it.
It certainly is, Karen, Thank you so much for being on top of all of this, no worries.
Thank you.
Also in the news, two people have been found dead and there are grave fears about three people missing in floodwaters in New South Wales. The New South Wales Premier Chris means that the state is bracing for more bad news over the next twenty four hours. There are floodwaters
in several parts of the state. The federal government has activated disaster recovery allowances for some of the most effective communities, including Kempsey, Port, Macquarie and Dungog and to Israeli ambusy staff have been shot dead outside the Capitol Jewish Museum in Washington, d C. Police have arrested a suspect who reportedly shattered pro Palestinian slogans while in custody. Authorities are
treating the shooting as a possible hate crime. Seven Am is a daily show from Schwartz Media and the Saturday Paper is made by Atticus Bastow, Shane Anderson, Chris dan Gate, Eric Jensen, Ruby Jones, Sarah McFee, Travis Evans, Zoltanfetio and Met Daniel James. Our theme music is by Ned Beckley and Josh Hogan of Envelope Bordio. Thanks for listening, See you next week.