NSW Liberal leader must stand his ground against junior Coalition partners

These are strange weeks in politics. In the northern hemisphere, incumbent governments and two elderly men face their moments of truth. Meanwhile, in Sydney, the parties to the NSW Coalition are contemplating going their separate ways, after 97 uninterrupted years.

Nationals MP Wes Fang has been dumped from his shadow assistant minister position after he injudiciously attacked NSW Opposition Leader Mark Speakman on Facebook. In a now-deleted post, Fang shared images from the opposition leader’s account featuring Speakman at Wagga Base Hospital with local independent member Joe McGirr. “The leader of the NSW Liberals slinks into Wagga Wagga pretending like the Libs actually care about the Riverina,” Fang wrote. “He didn’t even have the courtesy to let me know he was coming.” Fang, an upper house MP, grew up outside the Riverina city.

Nationals leader Dugald Saunders quickly rebuffed Speakman publicly, issuing a media release claiming the Liberal leader did not have the authority to sack a Nationals MP. He and the party’s leadership team were the only ones who could remove Fang from his assistant shadow ministerial roles, Saunders said. Tired of the pettifogging, Liberal MPs have called an urgent meeting on Tuesday to “draw a line in the sand” and consider the future of their partnership with the Nationals.

Coalitions are fragile arrangements that most often break up when they are out of government. In contrast to many other states, the NSW Coalition has been in continuous existence since 1927, both in government and in opposition. So Tuesday’s Liberal party room meeting is an historic event given that the Coalition partners had only been in opposition for just over 15 months before falling out. That is not to say there haven’t been times when their relationship has been tested in the past. The last was in 2020, when then NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian forced Nationals leader and deputy premier John Barilaro to renege on his threat to stop supporting government legislation over the state’s koala protection policy.

In NSW the end of Coalition, while unprecedented, would present new challenges for both sides. The old agreement not to run against one another would disappear, seeing the pair likely contesting seats now corralled, such as Wagga Wagga and Tweed. And the end of the Coalition agreement setting out how resourcing is split between the parties would disadvantage the Nationals.

In some ways, the Nationals’ chutzpah in refusing to budge is perplexing. They need Coalition far more than the Liberals. Their heartland has come under greater attack from independents and small groups such as the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party and One Nation. And as their vote in the bush has shrivelled, it has been only the Nationals’ ability to enter Coalition that has ensured their policies have been adopted, as well as providing the ministries and spoils of office that legitimise their existence.

For Speakman, this is the first open challenge to his authority since he won the Liberal leadership in April last year. He should tell his junior partners in the Coalition to get stuffed.

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