Labor heavyweights meet as coalition brawling continues
Dominic Giannini and Tess Ikonomou |
Anthony Albanese has placed a premium on unity as he prepares to lock down his new cabinet, as the losing coalition parties continue their bloodletting.
The Labor caucus will meet in Canberra on Friday as factional heavyweights consider their cabinet picks, with the final makeup to reflect a delicate balance between the left and right groupings.
The current top-line leadership members are expected to remain in their portfolios.
“Our processes are under way, so we have a lot of meetings,” Finance Minister Katy Gallagher told ABC TV.
“The fortunate thing for us is we’ve got a huge amount of talent on our frontbench and we’ve got a lot of talented people coming up through our ranks.”
But there’s a storm brewing within the coalition, after outspoken Nationals senator Matt Canavan suggested his party should run in more seats after outperforming the Liberals in Saturday’s federal election.
“Why don’t we run in outer suburban, peri-urban sort of areas where we look after people who are on the frontiers, who feel ignored by the major cities?” he told Nine’s Today show on Wednesday.
“We run very good local campaigns. We champion local issues and we don’t care if people criticise us or think we’re hicks and terrible, we just fight for people.
“If that leads to us breaking up, great, fine. But let’s do what’s best for the country.”
Later, Senator Canavan said the coalition was “a business relationship, not a marriage” before noting a Liberal-Nationals divorce wasn’t the ultimate goal.
“I don’t want that to happen … the goal is to develop, deliver a choice and a fight for the Australian people, so I’d let the Liberal Party join us on that fight,” he told Sky News.
Former Nationals leader Michael McCormack has backed the coalition arrangement with the Liberals, saying the parties were much stronger together.
Meanwhile, the Liberal party is calling for a nuclear policy rethink, as the coalition considers the way forward after losing more than a dozen seats at the election, taking it to its worst result in decades.
“This is a policy that went to an election, the election result was devastating,” Liberal senator Maria Kovacic told ABC radio.
“The message from the community is very, very clear and that’s why I believe that this nuclear policy has to go.”
Australians don’t view nuclear power stations as a serious climate policy because the transition to net-zero emissions needed to be done expeditiously, given nuclear couldn’t be part of the energy mix for decades, she said.
Labor minister Murray Watt noted that Nationals had led the energy policy debate on nuclear power within the coalition, saying leader David Littleproud was “crowing about how he’d managed to convince the Liberals to take that policy on”.
“Whoever ends up as the Liberal Party leader after this needs to make a decision about whether they’re going to continue being dictated to by the National Party, who only represent a very small number of seats around the country,” he said.
“Or whether they’re going to take back control of the coalition and have it actually led by the Liberal Party so they can win back some of those seats in the cities.”
The Liberals also had a problem encouraging female candidates and appealing to women voters, which would intensify if not addressed, University of Sydney political scientist Peter Chen said.
The ABC forecasts women will hold at least 63 seats in the new parliament – including 46 with Labor and four with the Liberals.
“Without quotas, they’re not going to get anywhere near gender parity,” he told AAP.
“They’re moving themselves into a permanent opposition.”
Retired senator Linda Reynolds is amongst the senior Liberals urging the party to learn from previous reviews, after a post mortem of the 2022 election defeat found the party was failing to adequately represent the values and priorities of women.
AAP
